One of the great things about working at Blenderbox is being surrounded by people that are constantly trying to better themselves in one way or another.  Blenderboxers are a curious bunch, always looking to do more, learn more, and create more, and in no instance is this more apparent than during the semi-annual celebration of knowledge known fondly as the Blendercise.

Blendercises are our own particular brand of continuing education; an opportunity for designers to teach us some of the finer points of Photoshop, for developers and information architects to teach us the best SEO techniques, or for project managers to provide tips on organization that might help us in our constant struggle to keep our time sheets up to date.  They’re a way for each department to learn more about the day-to-day work of others and to take away valuable information that makes us stronger individually and as a team.

Anyone can suggest a topic for a Blendercise, and with the constant stream of innovations in web technology, we’re never at a loss for new material.  Previous Blendercises have covered a diverse range of subjects, from SEO and Google Analytics to Photoshop and Web Form Design, and many more are yet to come.

Currently scheduled Blendercises include sessions on InDesign and Sitecore, but with an increased interest in projects requiring open-source development and a variety of opportunities for professional development outside of the Blenderbox office, 2009 may be our biggest year yet for tech-centric Blendercises.

I think a lot of IAs & interaction designers have gone looking for this “holy grail” deliverable at one point or another—the deliverable that’s more than just your standard, garden-variety deliverable, the deliverable that is the shell of a site that everyone else builds upon. As far as I can tell, it never really works like that.

I forgot all about it until today, when I came across the Fluid 960 Grid System, a set of interactive page layout templates written with HTML, CSS, and Mootools.

I’m tempted to try wireframing with this framework, but I think it works best in the following situation:

• Rapid development environment (or just the old fashioned compressed timeline)
• Buy-in on using a 12 or 16 column grid from visual designers
• Buy-in from developers that they can work with this framework with few modifications

Even if 960 Grids doesn’t work as a wireframing tool, I can see a lot of potential just for getting a quick idea across, or developing a clickable prototype for user testing.

The desktop has been the primary GUI metaphor of operating systems for the last thirty years. Over that time, newer operating systems have stretched the desktop metaphor pretty thin, in the interests of better usability and faster task completion.

For example, remember when Apple’s System 7 would open each folder in a new Finder window, creating a cascade of windows that quickly became unmanageable? That was a literal interpretation of folders on your actual desktop. Fortunately, we now browse the contents of multiple folders within a single Finder window, an activity that doesn’t transfer to the stack of folders sitting next to me.

I found the wallpaper above really interesting: someone created a solution for organizing desktop icons which makes your computer screen look more like a desk, even though the design trend has been to move away from such literal interpretations. It’s not right or wrong—lots of people find it useful, judging by the comments—it’s a creative solution to a desktop organization problem.

In summary, here’s how to optimize a poorly performing page on your website:

1. Find your high value landing pages
   What pages on your site have high entrances and high bounce rates? These are the “high value” pages that are begging to be optimized.
2. What’s the desired goal (or conversion) for the site?
   In other words, what is the ideal outcome of a visit to your site? Some common online conversions include account signup, new lead generation, joining a mailing list, or purchasing a product.
3. Set up a goal in Google Analytics to track how well your landing page is funneling people toward your desired conversion
4. Create a new design for the landing page you want to test
5. Test it!
   We were told at the LunaMetrics training session that you can expect actionable results within about a month, depending on the traffic to the page being tested. You could see statistically significant results in as little as two weeks in some circumstances.

Talk to Caleb or me if you want to know more about website optimization or if you have questions about the jargon. We’ve been scouting a few pages on our sites in need of optimization and could always use more practice.

Finally, the Website Optimizer team has a blog that’s worth a look. I recommend starting with this case study, in which conventional wisdom about the use of imagery on the homepage is tested.

My off-the-cuff prediction is that casual Facebook users will see this as just one more piece of clutter and heavy Facebook users will embrace the flexibility. But just because it makes things messier or less consistent visually doesn’t necessarily mean its a bad design idea. It seems like a clever way to allow users to experience the page layout freedom they had on MySpace, but within the constraints of a rigid Facebook UI. Whether that’s what Facebook users want remains to be seen—Facebook has had more than its share of problems pushing unwanted features out to its user base.

A bunch of others look really interesting too, and relevant to others outside of the IA/UX practice:

• Do Real People Really Use Tag Clouds?
• Search Patterns
• Designing Your Reputation System

Users don’t much care “where they are” in the website. So-called “breadcrumb links,” which show the user the exact hierarchy of the website as they click further down, are a nice but mostly irrelevant technology. It’s not that users don’t understand the links; it’s that they don’t care.

Let me say it again, Max Bialystock-style:

USERS DON’T CARE WHERE THEY ARE IN THE WEBSITE.

I emphasize this because Web developers often waste time worring about “where content should live.” Should it be in section B? If so, we need to put big links from Section A to Section B. And then the secondary navigation will list Sections A through C, which are part of category D, because users might need to see the relationship between C, B, and the sub-tertiary wormhole that just opened in the site map!

Meanhwile, the user is on the site thinking, “Do they have it in size three?” and ignoring every element on the page that doesn’t appear to take them toward that goal. All the site-organization links, so carefully consistent with their display in other areas of the site… totally ignored by the user.

Account Sign-in: 8 Design Mistakes to Avoid

1. Having a Sign-in In The First Place
2. Requiring Sign-in Too Soon
3. Not Stating the Benefits to Registering
4. Hiding the Sign-In Button
5. Not Making “Create New Account” or “Forgot Your Password” a Button or Link
6. Not Providing Sign-in Opportunities at Key Locations
7. Asking for Too Much Information When Registering
8. Not Telling Users How You’ll Use Their Information

8 More Design Mistakes with Account Sign-in

9. Not Telling Users the Requirements for Username and Password Up Front
10. Requiring Stricter Password Requirements Than The NSA
11. Using Challenge Questions They Won’t Remember In A Year
12. Not Returning Users to Their Desired Objective
13. Not Explaining If It’s The Username or Password They Got Wrong
14. Not Putting A Register Link When The Sign-In Is An Error
15. Not Giving the User A Non-email Solution To Recover Their Password
16. Requiring More Than One Element When Recovering Password

The author lists seven keys to good pagination:

1. Provide large clickable areas
2. Don’t use underlines
3. Identify the current page
4. Space out page links
5. Provide Previous and Next links
6. Use First and Last links (where applicable)
7. Put First and Last links on the outside

There are tons of screenshots of both good and bad pagination, which makes this a great reference.