Well the wait is over….sort of. We are at least close. Nintendo just announced that the new DS will include a third dimension without the the use of 3-d glasses. Everyone at Robot Salmon seriously can not wait to get their  hands on one of these bad boys. Whats even more awesome is this technology is not going to be limited to just games. For those of you who are like me and find video games boring as all hell, you will be delighted to know that you will be  able to take advantage of this technology on your phone in the near future. Hitachi already has a working prototype.

Our Challenge

To create a Blog (or a website) that would be able to draw interested users to it and send them on through to the Interactive Design programs website to learn more about what the program has to offer, the teachers, the facilities etc. We had just under 2 months to create our web presence, build a following of interested viewers, generate content that would keep our new readers coming back and make Robot Salmon a know name in the web design community of Vancouver.

Our Process

Step 1: Coming up with a name

The very first step that our team at Robot Salmon took was to decide on a name for our Blog. We knew that since we were under such a strict time crunch the name that we gave our Blog was going to play an important role in our success. We wanted to choose a name that represented us as west coasters, as tech nerds, and as designers that were launching ourselves into the digital stream of the future.

We wanted a name that you could hear once and remember – being memorable on the web is often a big hurdle as there are so many other people out there generating the same content and starting the same conversations with their users. We landed on the name Robot Salmon as a group, the robot representing the tech side, the future, and the geek (geek is a good thing here!) inside each of us, the salmon representing the west coast and the will to drive on and swim upstream to reach our goals.

Step 2: Identifying our target audience

Since the challenge of this project was to use our skills with search engine optimization to drive traffic towards the Interactive Design labs website the Robot Salmon team decided hone in on select sections of our potential audience and speak directly to them as a solution to our time limitations. We decided that we would target:

Potential students: doing research on web design schools in Vancouver, or just generally interested in hearing about other web design student experiences

Local businesses: wanting to hire web designers

Local agencies: scouting new talent

Teachers and professors: from other schools (but still within the industry)

Users interested in current trends: in the web design industry as well as the tech gadget market

We decided that these sectors of our audience would be receptive to our efforts and join in on the conversation that we were striving to strike up with our readers. We wanted them to engage with the site and we hoped to generate interest in the program that had helped us along our journey to become Vancouver’s newest and brightest web designers.

Step 3: Approach

Social Media:

As our Robot Salmon team had a limited timeline to roll out all of our grand plans to reach our target audience we identified the need to streamline our efforts into one focused approach. With all of the buzz around Social Media these days we decided to put it to the test for our project. Social media offered us the ability to reach out to a large section of our target audience quickly. We choose a mulit faceted approach that would utilize  several of the social media communities to get Robot Salmon and all of our newly generated content out to our audience.

Facebook: Before we even had full access to our Robot Salmon wordpress account we jumped right onto Facebook and created a fan page. We did this for several reasons. Google: Unique Facebook URL’s rank highly with Google. To ensure that we could get a unique URL from Facebook we first had to get 45 fans. We reached out to our personal networks of friends and family, as well as past and present students of the Capilano Interactive Design program to gather up fans.

This enabled us to get the unique URL of www.facebook.com/InteractiveWebDesign.CapilanoUniversity. Another reason to use Facebook to drive traffic through Robot Salmon and onto the INTE labs site was the fact that we could post links to our latest articles that would encourage any interested fans to click through to Robot Salmon to continue reading.

Twitter: We created a Twitter account for Robot Salmon. We kept the branding consistent using the logo designed by State Side so that Robot Salmon could continue with our effort to become a recognized name in the Vancouver web design community. Duder spent many focused hours working on the Robot Salmon Twitter account to ensure that we were following as many influential tweeters from the industry as was possible. Each new post that was written for Robot Salmon was sent out through our Robot Salmon Twitter feed as well as each of the teams personal Twitter feeds.

Dig: Each article that we wrote for the blog was submitted to Digg in another effort to reach out to our online community and get our content out there to as many viewers as possible.

You Tube: A You Tube account was created for Robot Salmon and again branded with our Robot Salmon logos and color scheme. We took the time to create some short video clips of our process behind creating the Blog. We wanted to give our viewers another chance to see in behind the scenes of our Blog and offer them the opportunity to learn from our process.

Shout Space: One of the comments that we received on Robot Salmon from a viewer was that we should also be putting our articles out there on Shout Space – another social media community on the web much like Digg but mainly posting American content – so we did.

Design and Branding: The design of a Blog is crucial, after you have done all of the leg work to bring your targeted users in to your Blog you want to entice them with the design, impress them and keep them coming back for more! To nail the “cool” factor with your design seems like an essential factor when considering the longevity of your Blog.

We were very lucky with our team, as we had 2 skilled designers onboard.We decided to have a Robot Salmon layout design slam – where both Stateside and D.O.G. developed a concept for the design of Robot Salmon. Duder, Big Red and myself then voted on the design that we liked the best.

This plan slightly backfired on us (as it was a challenge to force the designers to meld their two design concepts) – but in the end everything came together as a successful collaboration and we agreed to use Statesides branding (logo and icons) and D. O.G.’s layout design. We wanted the design to offer a unique experience to our users, giving them a few different options for viewing content and sorting through all of our various posts.

Step 4: Research

Research is the secret to a good SEO plan.  You can sit around and brainstorm tactics, targets and ideas with your team until IE  is finally laid to rest (and who knows when that day will finally arrive!) – but unless you back your ideas with cold hard research and numbers you will be working blind.

We decided to take our top 5 target user categories and focus in on the keyword and key phrase search results that we wanted Robot Salmon to try and rank for over the two months of the project. Each team member took a targeted audience area and spent time working through each word and phrase using the Google Adwords tool.

All of the search results were then listed on a Google spreadsheet so that the entire team had access to the research and the document could continue to grow as the project moved along. This tactic helped us zone in on the keywords and phrases that should be used and highlighted in each article, it also helped to steer us away from writing on topics that were not currently of interest amongst our target audience on the web.

Step 5: Delivery of Content

Choosing our blog categories was also a major decision in the development of Robot Salmon. The categories that are listed today have been slightly adjusted to better suit our target audience. We decided to Blog under the categories of: School, Media, Tech News, Tutorials and Top 5. We chose these categories as we thought that they would offer our target audience a fast and efficient means of navigating to information that they were particularly interested in or looking for.

School: articles that would be targeted at both future students and interested educators.

Media: articles that muse about new media, interactive media, media design etc. This category was created to list our articles that local agencies may be interested in reading.

Tech News: no web design industry Blog would be complete without a section to talk about the newest product launches – hello iPad fan boys!

Tutorials: this category was created to generate useful content that would keep the users coming back each time a new tutorial was posted. We were also hoping that the tutorial content would get picked up on the web and reposted by some of our users.

Top 5: we wanted our top 5 category to speak to several sectors of our target market audience: our audience that was interested in current trends, potential students that were tech nerds already, as well as employees at local agencies that may have need a bit of a distraction from a tedious contract.

Results and Successes

Facebook

Facebook was very successful in generating traffic for us but we did notice a few interesting factors that arose with the Facebook account. Through our Google Analytics we could see that a huge portion of our traffic was coming through Facebook, but not much of our traffic was engaging with the Face book page itself.

When launching a social media initiative to generate users a large focus is to try and  create a conversation with your audience. Facebook was useful for directing traffic but missed the mark on conversations. Not many of our fans actually commented on any of the posts on our page, though we could see that many of them were reading them.

Twitter

The results from our efforts to utilize the Twitter community were almost instantaneously apparent. Robot Salmons Twitter account was useful as we saw a direct increase in traffic resulting from users clicking on our post links that we tweeted.

Twitter proved to be more successful tool in our effort to create conversations with our users and viewers, as many of them clicked through to Robot Salmon from our Tweets and then went as far as posting comments on the individual articles on the actual Blog itself.

Dig, Shout Space & You Tube
We did use all of these platforms as well to launch Robot Salmons content onto the web but we saw a much lower success rate when trying to drive traffic through to our Blog and then onto the INTE labs site.

Feature Articles

We had some great successes with several of our articles over the two months.

Kris Krug – D.O.G. interviewed a local social media guru and the article resulted in the highest daily traffic that we logged during the whole 2 months of the project.

An article by No Code featuring Interactive Media at the 2010 Olympics and highlighted some of the work done by a local Vancouver agency, Switch Interactive. Duder subsequently ended up at Switch for a practicum interview. When he mentioned Robot Salmon as one of his current projects his interviewers knew about the Blog and had seen the article – the Robot Salmon team was satisfied to learn that their work was making it out into the local Interactive Design community.

Design

A local Blogger found Duder on Twitter and discovered Robot Salmon through Duders tweets. He was so impressed by the Blog and the overall design that he has hired the Robot Salmon team to help him launch a redesign of his Blog Shuck the Oyster.

Traffic Results

We used Google analytics to monitor the success of Robot Salmon closely throughout the whole project.

From January 18th to March 15th these are our stats:

936 people visited this site

• 1,969 Visits
• 936 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 5,965 Pageviews
• 3.03 Average Pageviews
• 00:03:36 Time on Site
• 57.59% Bounce Rate
• 47.28% New Visits
• 17.57% Direct Traffic
• 67.09% Referring Sites
• 15.34% Search Engines

The Conclusion

The team behind Robot Salmon set out just over 2 months ago to create a Blog that would interest viewers both within and outside of the web design community in Vancouver. We wanted to make a statement with our design, choose a name for the Blog that would stick in peoples minds and generate content that was useful, interesting and creative. We wanted to spark our users interest in the Interactive Design program that we were all attending at Capilano University. It seems that we have done just that!
The Robot Salmon team is thrilled with the results of our efforts to create this Blog. The content is original and was generated entirely by our team. Our users were engaged in the conversations that we were fostering every step along the way. Even though our SEO challenge has ended, the Blog will continue, so stay tuned and check back often!

The little plane that landed me in Taveuni

As a student of the Interactive Design program at Capilano University in my last term of the program, I have the exciting opportunity to participate in a 6 week practicum. I decided to do things a little bit differently. I hose the No Code Nicole way…

My number one motivating factor in my decision to  leave the hospitality industry and jump headlong into the world of web design was my love of travel. I had visions of sitting on the beach somewhere far away from Vancouver and the ominous rain, my trusty laptop in front of me as I worked away on web design contracts. When the practicum opportunity came up I decided to test my theory.

I searched my network of contacts and landed on the opportunity to go and do some work with Mobimap, an international company based in Victoria that designs customized tourist maps. I had contacts with the creative director and the head of IT and I knew that they were in the process of working on an iPhone app as well as several other interactive media initiatives. I got in touch with them and was accepted for the practicum position.

As an interactive designer, I have honed my skills in several areas. For my practicum I will be taking a multi faceted approach to my work for Mobimaps. I will be doing some information architecture and general R&D for interactive features that the company is interested in developing as well as working towards effectively applying usability research to marketing solutions for their targeted users.

These are all rather regular tasks for an intern to undertake, but with one exciting twist, I will be doing all of this from Taveuni, an island in Fiji!

Rather than taking a bus to Gas Town to work everyday, I embarked on an exciting journey to Fiji. As a traveling web designer, I of course had to lug all my nerd gear along with me in my carry on. It was epic. I had to bring my lap top, external hard drives, all my cords and external accessories like a mouse, keyboard, camera, iPod touch etc. I wanted to ensure that I was all set up to work as soon as I arrived.

Working in an office set up by the head of IT has many perks.  He has worked long and hard to get Internet service here on the Island that can support online workers that need to upload and download large files, as well as spend all day online corresponding with people in the US, Mexico and Canada. Within 3 hours of landing on the island I had my own desk and was wired into the Internet. We run on a wired system here for a few reasons – speed being the number one consideration – as well as networking between our team - file sharing is simplified and sped up this way – but an ethernet cable is one thing that I did not pack… living in the wireless world at home in Vancouver it’s been a while since I needed one!

My office beside the sea in Fiji

I have learned a few valuable lessons already that anyone should consider when thinking about becoming a traveling web designer.

We all know that tech gear should really be carried on in your carry on luggage – as you never know what may happen to your stowed luggage as it goes through varying customs adventures. I decided to pack my external keyboard in with my checked luggage as it was a bit large for my carry on. Big mistake! My luggage was dug through by customs somewhere along the way and they ripped keys off my key board! Next time it goes in the carry on…

The second lesson to consider is the power situation in whatever country you will be working in. I have all of the correct adapters on my power cords and they are plugged into surge protected power bars, but my poor keyboard has continued to suffer on this adventure. The entire center line of keys no longer works. This according to out IT manager could be the result of the generator that we are drawing all out power from not being grounded… I am out of my element when it comes to understanding power and all it’s mysterious ways, all I can do is hope that my Macbook Pro will be safe!

I will now have to take my laptop down off of my handy elevator stand and do all of my designing with only my mouse and my laptop keyboard as I somehow also made the decision to leave my tablet behind…

That is all for now folks. Keep posted for more musings from this traveling web designer

If you dream of traveling the world and working along the way check out the program that I have been attending

Interactive Design Program at Capilano University

Despite the good nature of the crowds there were many police!

The first video is of the crowds of celebrating Canadians as I walked down Robson Street in Vancouver. They were filled with people celebrating and feeling great about Canada winning Olympic Gold in ice hockey.

As I searched for a bus on Howe and Robson I the street corner suddenly erupted into melody as a random percussion group began playing music. Check out the video. The band is called Kunakamarimba. They were really good. It is a bit hard to see but all of the music is coming from large percussion instruments played by “7 talented young artists ages 13 to 16″.

Finally, as I walked South down Howe, a street normally bustling with traffic at all hours of night and day I came upon a vigorous game of Street Hockey, shirts optional.

I have some more videos of street performers and things that I will post in the next couple of days, so be sure to check back. I hope you enjoy.

-Tayber

This is where I work right now and it is crazy!!!

Another short one:

Make this soup for a web designer and you will have a friend for life!

As a chef turned web designer (I am still a food lover first and foremost – that will never change) I know that the promise of a tasty lunch or dinner can make a day in front of the computer pass much easier.

I wanted to interview a friend and fellow Vancouver blog writer, Malgosia Krol. She has many talents, but for Robot Salmon I wanted to pick her mind about her skills as a Landscape Architect, a photographer, a chef and a blogger for Like Mama Said.

Robot Salmon: What motivates you to blog about food?
Like Mama Said: Cooking is my first love. Amidst all the things I’ve pursued in my life, all the interests I’ve chased down, I have never tired of the kitchen, learning about nutrition and feeding my gluttony for cookbooks. It also satisfies a deep appreciation I have for creativity, sharing and bringing people together, whether in our home or via the blog. I learned all my culinary tricks from my Mom who was very health conscious and had a talent for whipping up an amazing meal out of what looked to be an empty fridge. I liken that a lot too being limited to certain constrains, desires or dislikes of a client who you’re designing for and then just working with it and coming up with something “delicious.”

Robot Salmon: If you were to make lunch for a web designer what would you make?
Like Mama Said: I would definitely go with my Carrot Apple & Celery soup a.k.a “Sunshine Soup.” It’s incredibly refreshing and gives you that zing of energy when you need it most. As we all know, carrots improve the health of our eyes and skin and working long hours in front of the computer can certainly take it’s toll on our sight and naturally, how well we look to others. Celery has properties that soothe our digestive system and apples are a great source of fiber. This soup is also surprisingly satisfying, so it will do the trick if you’re putting in long hours at the office. For dessert (let’s be honest, what’s a meal without it?), I would make Raw Walnut Truffles. There’s no sugar and it’s made with raw cacao powder. It won’t leave you hanging after your blood glucose takes a nosedive, as it would with any other dessert riddled with ingredients that agitate your body and often cannot be digested efficiently, or at all.

Robot Salmon: You just recently launched a new website for your garden design business – was there any special foods that you bribed your web designer with?
Like Mama Said: Definitely! My husband is the graphic designer of my website and my guinea pig for new recipes, so he was on board to be wine and dined in return for his hard work. He’s a big lover of my vegan gluten and sugar-free muffins, his favorite being the “Huggybear Pumpkin Pear Muffins.” It took me a few tries to perfect the texture, but I finally managed to find that certain mix of ingredients for a tender and moist muffin. Sometimes tricky when using alternatives to regular wheat flours.

Robot Salmon: Are there any of your design skills and esthetics that you draw on and carry over when you are creating a new recipe?
Like Mama Said: I’m a very visual person so getting creative with recipes makes me feel like a kid in a candy store. I get so excited and inspired and feel that the possibilities are endless. Presentation is very important to me. Often, without even realizing it, I think I draw from my studies in Landscape Architecture to make it happen, from choosing colour, quality and texture to the pairing of ingredients and the assembly. I never follow a recipe, I think it’s part rebellion and that my creativity just takes over and I have at it in a way that just feels right intuitively and is satisfactory to my senses, which I think designers and creative people definitely rely a lot on naturally.

Robot Salmon: Do you find that your talents as a photographer help with Like Mama Said?
Like Mama Said: Oh yes, that’s a biggie. I’m absolutely ecstatic that I get to use all my creative loves to bring the blog together. It takes me no time to eat what I’ve made, but I think that I enjoy photographing it just as much as I do eating it. The first things I look for when I’m riffling through new cookbooks are images. A cookbook doesn’t come home with me if there’s no eye-candy of the recipe. I picked-up a lot of photography skills from Journalism School, so to get to write about my time in the kitchen and satisfy that too is just the icing on the cake for me. It really comes full circle.

Robot Salmon: Do you use other social media to get the awesome recipes from Like Mama Said out there to more readers (like Digg, Twitter, Stumble upon etc)
Like Mama Said: I use Facebook to get the word out about Like Mama Said and created a group that is available for anyone to join. And of course I
tag the hell out of the new recipes I post so that the blog appears on search engines like Google etc. I’ll definitely expand my horizons to more social networks in the near future, but I’m a little gun-shy to spread myself to thin at the moment and not be able to catch up. It does take maintaining to keep the social momentum going, so I want to make sure I have time for that.

Check out more from Malgosia likemamasaid.wordpress.com

Join the Like Mama Said Facebook Fan page so that you can start cooking for all the web designers in your life!

A Web Designer special recipe from likemamasaid.wordpress.com
Carrot Apple & Celery Soup

Living in Vancouver has its pros and cons, like any city of course (I’m referring to the rain in this case). So when I feel I need a bit of zing added to my gumboot step, I make myself a little bowl of sunshine soup.
3 tblsp. agave
2 tsp.cinnamon
pinch of salt and pepper to taste
juice of 1 lime
2 tblsp. tomato paste
3 celery stalks, 10 medium carrots, both chopped
1 small onion, 1 garlic clove, both chopped
3 apples (2 peeled, cored and chopped & 1 cored, thinly sliced, skin on)

In a large pot cover the chopped carrot, celery, onion and garlic with water and bring to a boil, let simmer for 10 minutes on low heat. In a saucepan, sautee the 2 chopped apples with the agave and tomato paste, add a splash of water, stir and let simmer until the apples are slightly soft. Add this to the pot with the carrot and celery, stir in the cinnamon, lime juice, salt and pepper and transfer to a large mixing bowl for cooling before blending in a blender or food processor. Core and thinly slice the last apple and let the pieces brown in a frying pan with a splash of water on high heat. The pureed soup may be slightly thick, so stir in some water to your liking, garnish with the sliced apples, pepper and a drizzle of limejuice.

First Expo 86, now the 2010 Olympics, Science World is the place to be!

But one of the things that has stood out to me the most is the fact that with the mass influx of people into this city has also come a mass influx of iPhones, Blackberries, digital cameras, HD Flip video recorders etc. Everywhere you look someone is pressing the shutter on a digital camera, or shooting a video that will be up on You Tube in a matter of minutes.

Citizen Journalists pack the stairs at the Vancouver Art Gallery

We all know that only certain officials are allowed to broadcast about the games, but the citizens and visitors in this city have all become “citizen journalists” in their own right (at least it seems like we can give everyone that title according to wikipedia). I am sure that each Olympic event that happens in the new millennium will experience this to a higher extent as technology advances and mobile devices, personal cameras and video recorders become more and more sophisticated. The Internet is flooded with photos being posted on Flicker and Facebook accounts. You Tube is full of little videos and snap shots of the city, the events (both entertainment and sports events) probably get equal coverage from the citizens. Duder is not alone with his posts on the Olympic streets of Vancouver, he is just one of many citizens talking about his experiences, providing others with a window into the 2010 Olympics.

Everyone has a camera and they are prepared to use it @ the 2010 Olympics

All of this is made easier by the fact that we have iPhones that take videos and applications that can post those videos to Twitter and You Tube as soon as you shoot them. Amazing how mobile devices, the Internet, and social media make the world such an accessible place for everyone to share each others experiences.

Everywhere I look, I see our local and visiting citizen journalists documenting everything… and even though I live here – I am still curious to see all the pictures and videos every time I log onto Facebook or surf videos on You Tube.

2010 Olympic Banners

In the Interactive Design program at Capilano University that I have been a part of for the past 2 years, we have done some video editing and then loaded our stuff up onto You Tube. I do quick and dirty edits with iMovie and get projects up online with relatively little hassle. Now all I need is an iPhone, then I will be well on the road to becoming a Citizen Journalist!

Go Canada!

Either way, I am doing some research about it and plan to share some of the cool pins I’ve gotten here at the Olympics. One of the most interesting ones is the official Facebook “I’m a fan” pin.

I find it incredible that in the interactive age we live in that people are still sooooooo excited about pins!?

Check it out:

Vancouver 2010 Olympic Official I'm a fan pin

Wacom is the main offender in the tablet world, all they do is tablets and tablet accessories. Wacom offers a full range of tablets with a wide range of prices starting with the Bamboo (less than $100 for the base model) series which is for casual use and ending with the monstrous Cintiq 21UX ($2000+ for the top model) which is a full backlit LCD monitor that you can draw directly on to. The Intous 4 series falls right in the middle of Cintiq and Bamboo and for me, it is perfect.

I got my Intous 4 Medium for around $450 CND, and so far I think it was well worth the investment. Before I purchased mine I asked around to see what other tablet users thought about tablet size. I found a wide range of answers, everything from “ get a small one because you have to move your wrist less” to “get the large one because it feels like a real canvas”. I bought the medium one because it was exactly the same size as my 17” Mac Book Pro so the tablet just slides into my laptop case for easy transport. I am stoked on the size of the tablet. I find that I have enough room to not feel cramped while designing and not so much room that my arm tires out from moving around to much.

The Good:

The pen (or stylus) that comes with the Intous 4 is really comfortable to use, and a number of extra tips are included to give the pen multiple different feelings. My favourite tip is the felt tip – makes it feel just like a skinny sharpie! Of course at the professional level of tablets multiple levels of sensitivity are expected this model offers 2048. The multiple levels allow you to pick a brush size say 50px and stroke from soft to firm and have the stroke start at 5px and end at 50px – much the same as stroking a felt pen on a sheet of paper. I’d say for my standards this pen functions as intutively as a real pen right down to if I make a mistake my first reaction is to flip the pen over and start erasing, which is exactly what happens. The pen automatically swaps your tools from pen or pencil tool to the eraser tool. Again the levels of sensitivity work great, except instead of going from skinny to fat, the erasers opacity levels change – press softly and it barely erases press hard and it will erase with a sharp edge.

The mouse is exactly what you’d expect from Wacom. It feels good, and is always reliable. I really enjoy not having to worry about batteries with this mouse – as long as it is on the tablet pad with in the working area, the mouse works.  I often use the mouse more than I use the pen because I feel like I have better control with it.

The OLED screen is amazing. It was one of the reasons I went for the medium over the small size Intous 4. You can program the 8 buttons and 4 scroll wheel functions on the side of the tablet to do almost whatever you want. You have the ability in the settings panel to specify what each button does depending on what program you are using. Based on the program selected the windows on the tablet will display the function, for example I can set the button to be “Command S” for Photoshop and have the OLED screen display “SAVE”. It might not seem like a huge deal at first but you can get pretty creative if you are always making use of different hot keys all the time.

The Bad:

I have to say that over all I have been extremely satisfied with my purchase. However, that being said, there are a few glitchy things that happen from time to time that I feel obligated to mention.

My first complaint is if you close your laptop and open it again the OLED doesn’t come back on. Really its not a huge deal the tablet still works, but you can’t make use of the OLED screen. It only becomes annoying if you have a bunch of different settings for a bunch of programs. Which brings me to my second complaint about the Intous 4.

Remember the OLED screen I was talking about… the one that I paid the extra cash for? Well I have found that it rarely works as advertised. I don’t think it has anything to do with the screen its self, but is more of a software issue with the settings. When the tablet was brand new I spent the better part of a day opening each application I regularly use, identifying all the hot keys and common features I use and then setting up the buttons on the tablet to match. About a week later, for whatever reason, the settings were all deleted. At first I was pretty annoyed, I went through and re-set all my settings and continued to work with the tablet. Again, my setting files were deleted. This time I just went and re-set the hot keys for Photoshop. Next time I used the tablet… Deleted. I am tired of re-setting my settings every time I use the tablet. Those 8 keys are supposed to improve my workflow not cause me to waste what I am sure must be 8 hours at this point setting up the dang tablet. I am confident that this issue I am having is not a user error, but if anyone has advice for this I’d love to hear it.

The Verdict:

Over all this tablet for me is totally worth it. Despite having a few issues, this tablet improves my work flow (granted not as much as it could) and it allows me the use of a pen which for certain applications can not be beat. I would feel comfortable recommending it to anyone who is serious about design, at $450 CND it’s really probably overkill for casual users.

If you like the sounds of using a fancy tablet but lack the skills to necessitate a tablet, get the skills in the
Interactive Design program @ Capilano University in North Vancouver

A web designers favorite tool: free usability testing software

Usabilla is a usability design application that us web design students up here at Capilano University often use in the early stages of development. You can use the software for free, or you can pay which will unlock some extra features.

Usabilla allows you to sign up for an account and then take up to 5 screen shots for one free usability test. You upload the screen shots, and then specify the questions you want to ask your user group. There are standard usability questions provided or you have the option to create custom questions. Once you have created your test,  you simply send it off to a maximum of 25 users (free account), and wait for the feed back.

Usabilla offers clearly outlined usability test results

As the users complete the usability test the results filter back to you in real time. As a web design student and a usability enthusiast I must admit that for me, this was the most exciting part of the process.

I am currently working on an unofficial Craigslist redesign. I was interested to see how the users would answer my questions, and if my original assumptions were correct. The information I got back was extremely valuable because I was able to get direct feedback from 14 people within 1 day of posting the test. Under normal circumstances that would have cost me 14 conversations and a ton of time in carrying out each survey individually.

The results of the test show hotspot areas where the users clicked – highest amount of clicks are indicated in red and the lowest are blue. This gives you a direct idea of what the users found important or unimportant on the webpage. In the context of this craigslist re-deign it allowed me to see which items should receive more attention and which items should be completely removed from the main page.

Highlighted hotspots help web designers understand their users flow around the page

This software is simple and easy to use. I found it to be the perfect solution to my minor usability re-design questions. I recommend you give it a try the next time you are interested in testing some designs before coding, or before conducting a full re-design on an existing site… the results may surprise you!

Check out http://www.usabilla.com for more information. Don’t forget to check out the INTE Labs website http://www.capilanou.ca/programs/interactive-design.html for more information on Vancouver’s best Interactive Design program at Capilano University in North Vancouver.