Fresh

We’ve been hard at work lately (as demonstrated here by our lack of posting), so its good to know sometimes that all that hard work gets recognized out there in the wide world of webs. Now, this is not the place we would normally indulge in shameless self promotion, but we thought you all might see this worthy.

Just yesterday a link came through to the group here that eROI has a few nods in the category of email newsletters over on the site BEN (Beautiful Email Newsletters). The content here is user-generated, so its rad to see our stuff show up multiple times. There’s really some great work here to get the ideas a flowin’. Check it out!

There’s a lot of information out there on the interweb – information about you, your business, your competitors, your favorite products, your friends, your cat, your cat’s friends, etc. etc. RSS feeds allow us to subscribe to streams of information from certain sources or on certain topics, but oftentimes our feed readers fill up with irrelevant information that we have to parse through to get to the good stuff.

Using Yahoo Pipes you can get practically any kind of information on the web, strip out the stuff you don’t want, reformat it in a way that’s easier for you to digest, and spit it out in a shiny new RSS feed suitable for your reader or maybe even your info aggregation website!  Sounds super awesome and easy right?

AHH! What the hell is all THAT?  Save me! Take me back to my regular feeds and never show me that mess of blue boxes and squiggly lines again!

OK, yea, I know it looks intimidating and confusing, but really, it’s not that bad.  If you start fresh and take things one step at a time you’ll be Piping up a storm in no time.

Meet Dawn Foster (fastwonderblog.com, Twitter: @geekygirldawn), RSS wrangler extraordinaire (among other things).  She has a full library of example Pipes and tutorial videos to get you started.  And if that’s not enough, she has just announced her first Introduction to Yahoo Pipes training course.  Here’s all the info you need:

What: Introduction to Yahoo Pipes

When: Thursday, May 7th, 3PM – 5PM

Where: Webtrends Classroom (851 SW 6th Ave, Suite 1600 | Portland, OR 97204)

How Much: Students/Freelancers/Unemployed: $100.  Early bird (before April 23): $150.  Late registration (after April 23): $250.

Prerequisites: You just need to set up your Yahoo Pipes account prior to the class (don’t worry, it’s free!).  If you have a Yahoo account already (and you do if you use Flickr), just go to pipes.yahoo.com and log in using your Yahoo credentials.  If you don’t already have a Yahoo account, go ahead and get one here.

Even if you already know a bit of Pipes, I have a feeling this would be a great class to get to know some of the more advanced features.  I know that I could personally use some tips and tricks from a power user.

One of the reasons I love web design is because there is so much opportunity to pull knowledge and inspiration from other disciplines. The SXSW panel “Playing on! Interface Lessons from Games” let me do that, and it dealt with video games, which are just fun. The general idea of the panel was:

“We know we will have succeeded when non-game interactions provide the same level of emotion, feedback, progress indication, innovative controls and social involvement that games supply.”

The points that really resonated with me the most were their discussion of “progress indication” and “social involvement” and how those apply to the work we do in web design.

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While at SXSW, I was bombarded with concepts, names, and countless tidbits of knowledge throughout the panels, presentations and keynotes I attended. Christina Wodtke gave an informative presentation on Information Architecture. UX Team of One presented by Leah Buley of Adaptive Path and Design for the Wisdom of Crowds with Derek Powazek were terrific presentations covered on Fresh here and here respectively. The topics that I enjoyed the most involved user experience design concepts, human computer interaction and how cognitive sciences influence it all.

Some of the most popular web applications exist to satisfy basic human needs. Organizing and sharing information. Symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships within groups. These are well researched patterns of human behavior. Technology is a chaotic, constantly evolving mess but behind all the innovation is our own innate desires that bring it all about. Where technology is fleeting, trendy, and a futile struggle with obsolescence, designing for human interaction with technology can be timeless. Interaction designers and developers are conduits for translating human behavior into effective uses of communications technology. In order to craft experiences that influence behavior we can employ aspects of psychology, anthropology, computer science, graphic design, industrial design and cognitive science.

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