Kate Robinson Interactive Design

I’m a big fan of the band Devo and when I heard their first album in close to 10 years was coming out I was quite excited. True to form though, there is nothing standard about this album. Devo has partnered with their record label, Warner Brothers and agency Mother LA to focus group the hell out of this record. Every decision about this album will be decided by us, the consumers; from costumes and brand colors to the musically stylings of the songs themselves. I’m hoping this is sarcasm to the nth degree, but I guess only time will tell.

This leads me to the Devo Color Study, one of the ways we the consumers can influence the band’s look. I personally thought the site was pretty fantastic. It starts off with a nice little welcome note from the COO of Devo Inc. and then jumps right in to the most unusual questions about color you’ll probably ever answer. Here are a few of my favorites.

My Devo color is red.

It will be interesting to see how they continue to make this interesting leading up to the album launch. Hopefully this type of humor will be prevalent throughout all aspects of the experiment, but with Devo you just never know.

My husband and I recently purchased our first home and realized we could use a couple of new pieces of furniture. We decided a trip to Ikea was in order since we like what they have and we don’t like to pay that much.

Since the closest Ikea to us is several hours away and we were going to try to cram a lot of stuff into a little car, I headed over to Ikea’s website to do a bit of research. I was happy with what I found and on a whole, the site was really helpful, providing almost every piece of info I needed.

A few pros:

Easy search: When you search for a specific item, like a sofa table, it pulls up a page with thumbnails, price and relevant links for all items matching that search. I found it to be a super easy way to quickly find what I want.

Stock availability: I LOVE this feature. Simply find an item you want, select your store and away you go. This tool is crucial when you’re traveling to the store from long distances.

Shopping list: If you sign up for an Ikea account you can save you’re favorite items in a handy shopping list to print out when you come to the store. The list tallies prices and tells you where in the store you can find the item, which my husband and I found to be immensely helpful.

Few things in life are perfect and that goes for this site too. While it has a lot going for it, the site does have a few quirks that I found irritating, especially as I continued using the site.

The cons:

Hidden content: I spent some time randomly looking at the site just to see what else they offered. As I went through sections I kept seeing products in the photos that I couldn’t find anywhere else on the site. Turns out that the product thumbnails are shown below the Flash areas and on a laptop there is no way to easily see that they are there without scrolling. Now, I support the idea that people will scroll, but you do have to at least visually indicate that there is content worth scrolling for. I was to the point of almost abandoning ship before I finally scrolled down.

How to shop: I had been to Ikea before, but it had been several years and I wanted to see if they had made any changes to check out and bagging. After much searching I finally found a how to shop at ikea page. It told me a lot of things, but didn’t answer my biggest question—do they provide bags or not. I never did find that info and subsequently forgot to bring bags to the store. Thankfully you can buy some there, but since I have a ton of reusable bags at home I didn’t really need more.

If you’re going to Ikea I recommend checking out their site first. It’s helpful, easy to use and with just a bit more tweaking I’m sure it can achieve excellence.

I know it’s been a while, but here, finally, is the list of sites for the week.

Project Cartoon

I’m sure you’ve all seen this cartoon before, but now you have the chance to make your own version. Move around the pictures and add your own captions. Fun. www.projectcartoon.com

Daily Drop Cap

Every day typographer and illustrator Jessica Hische creates a new drop cap. There are some really beautiful designs here. dailydropcap.com

Bit Rebels

A blog about all things design and geek. www.bitrebels.com

Check My Colour

Check the color contrast of your website to make sure it’s accessible for users with color deficiencies. www.checkmycolours.com

EctoMachine

Yet another quality design blog. www.ectomachine.com/blog

The Dieline

A fabulous site dedicated to package design of all kinds. www.thedieline.com/blog

The Design Cubicle

A nice web design related blog. www.thedesigncubicle.com

My Parents Were Awesome

Great pictures of parents when they were young. myparentswereawesome.tumblr.com

Awkward Family Photos

Some of the worst family photos ever. awkwardfamilyphotos.com

Clear Type Press

The blog from Clear Type Media, a group that specializes in making government websites better. cleartypemedia.com/press/

I know the posts have been a bit sporadic as of late, but this week’s list has some worth while sites.

The Customer is Not Always Right

I am addicted to this site. It is so funny and yet so terrifying at the same time. If you have ever worked in any sort of service related capacity you will enjoy this. Notalwaysright.com

A View Askiew

In all honesty, I put this site up only for the SModcasts, which you can listen to free on iTunes. They are so funny, but VERY crude and not for the easily offended. Worth a listen though. Viewaskew.com

Business Guys on Business Trips

Spot on, simple comic. Businessguysonbusinesstrips.com

101 Things I Learned in Interaction Design School

Interesting takes on a wide variety of interaction design topics, written in way that actually keeps you engaged. Ixd101.com

Learn Something Everyday

Such a simple but fantastic concept. Everyday a random factoid is illustrated an posted. The visual presentation is a great way for me to quickly learn them too. They’re also super cute. Learnsomethingeveryday.co.uk

Ribbons of Red

I like the nice clean layout of this site. It’s easy to get around and pleasant to look at. Ribbonsofred.com

Color Suckr

This is cool site that gives you the color scheme of any you want. Just enter an image url or pick a photo from flickr and there you go. Pretty nifty I think. Colorsuckr.com

Slick Plan

A simple online sitemap tool. It’s pretty handy for making small sitemaps quickly, but I would be hesitant to use it for anything too complex. Slickplan.com

CSS Typset

I wish I would have found this site earlier. You enter your text, use the controls to style it the way you want and it generates the CSS for you. Yeah! Csstypeset.com

HBO Imagine

Can you find the overarching theme? Explore the site and watch the videos to figure it out. Really interesting interface too. hboimagine.com

I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. It’s just amazing how quickly time flies when you’re really really busy. So, without further adieu, I give you this week’s top ten sites.

Work Awesome

A nice blog that helps you be awesome at work or find another awesome job. Either way, it’s got everything from helpful tips to funny cartoons to help you make your job more awesome.

Web Trend Map

You choose from a variety of trending maps, and they show you the who has been saying what. Plus, the interface is really cool and simple.

Texture Lovers

If you love and need textures this is your site. Tons of free, good textures to choose from, plus the site design is quite nice too.

Even better than it sounds. Makes our Walmart look good some how.

Web Resources Depot–AIR Applications

A nice collection of AIR applications for designers. I haven’t had a chance to try these yet myself, so if any of you have I’d love to hear what you think.

Three Frames

Very similar to the gif site from a while back. Three frames from a movie, endlessly repeated.

PeachPit

PeachPit publishes books on a variety of interactive topics and the few I’ve read have been pretty good. I’m linking to the excerpt from Content Strategy for the Web: Why You Must Do a Content Audit by Kristina Halvorson. It looks like a great book and I can’t wait read it.

BUI Gallery

A blog that showcases bad user interfaces. It doesn’t get updated that often, but there are some nice examples up there.

HoboTrashcan

Well written blog featuring interviews, podcasts and humorous posts about a variety of topics. How’s that for a generic description.

People Clock

Not much to this website but a cute clock made out of images of people.

It’s been a while since I’ve made the list, but I must say this week has some pretty good entries.

Snacks and Shit

A collection of the most ridiculous rap lyrics around.

Ode Magazine

The online magazine full of positive and intelligent news. Perfect for those of us trying to have a more positive outlook on life.

This Recording

A website about all things in culture that are cool.

And I Am Not Lying

A funny blog full of random craziness.

Contrast, The Blog

A web design/UI/UX blog that gives clear, sensible and interesting information.

STFU, Parents

Mostly a listing of the annoying facebook updates from parents. There is also a version for married people, STFU Marrieds

Indexed

A funny way to look at data/information.

Creative Depart

A collection of creative articles in a nicely fluid layout.

The 50 Greatest Trailers of all Time

A collection of the top 50 movie trailers of all time. I haven’t made it through the whole list yet, but so far so good.

Inspire Me, Now!

A simple blog full of all things inspirational.

I  came across this HP printer music video today and thought it was good enough to share. Now I want to go out and make a video.

HP - invent from Tom and Matt on Vimeo.

I was going to write this week’s post about how awful the new Transformers 2 movie is, but it’s so bad it’s almost beyond description. Long story short—avoid it like the plague.

**Note: I expected the movie to be bad, but this was beyond bad, insulting really.

Anyway, it’s time once again for my top sites of the week. Enjoy.

Flashlight Worthy Books

A nice site with all sorts of book recommendations divided by category.

Readability

This site lets you set settings to make any webpage more readable. Simply pick your settings, drag readability.com to your browsers bookmark toolbar, and when you come to a page you want to read, click on that link in your toolbar. Styles the content in your settings for easy reading.

9 Great UX Presentations

This is more of a specific post than a site, but it has 9 interesting UX presentations. Really interesting and helpful content on most of them.

ZooBorns

If you don’t enjoy this site you have a heart of stone. It’s a blog of baby animals from zoos. It doesn’t get much cuter than this.

UgLeah

This is the personal blog for a UX designer who works at Adaptive Path. It doesn’t get updated too frequently, but when it does, it’s usually worth it.

Tremendous News

This is a funny/snarky blog that covers a variety of topics. Almost every post at least makes me chuckle, if not laugh out loud.

Line 25

This is a great site for web designers, but I enjoyed this post specifically, as my CSS skills (or lack thereof) needed a refresher.

For a Beautiful Web

Again, another specific post, but this one presents an interesting workflow for web design. I’m excited to try this out with my next project.

Pleasure & Pain

This is the website for Whitney Hess, a user experience designer. The over all site is great, but I found this specific post to be very helpful.

Fab 404

This is a nice collection of well designed 404 pages. I definitely need to update mine.

I’d been hearing people talk about the opening movie for the new Beatles Rockband for a few days now so I thought I would check it out. It’s very well done and quite entertaining. If you’ve got some time to spare I’d give a once through.

1. Five Second Test–A quick way to check the immediate usability of your site. Either upload your own image or test others. Quite addicting.
   
2. 90% of Everything–A nice usability blog. I love their dilbert cartoon collection.
   
3. Wolfram Alpha–Need an answer to a mathmatical or scientific question, here’s your source.
   

4. FactCheck.org–Want to check the facts behind a politicians statement. Here’s your resource.
   
5. RunPee.com–For those of you who go to the bathroom during movies, now you’ll know when to go.
   
6. Skimbaco Lifestyle--I’m not usually big on blogs for women by women, but this one is really interesting, funny and full of great resources.
   
7. Tweeting Too Hard–A collection of tweets that are just trying too hard. Quite funny.
   
8. Web Designer Notebook–A nice blog with great resources for web designers.
   
9. Hoo Card–Free online business cards that can be customized on the fly and sent to anyone. Clever and handy.
   

10. Steal Our Ideas–They come up with ideas, you turn them into something.