Insights from Planet Argon -- Planet Argon Blog

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People are the web

29 May 2012

Beyond the baseline demographic data of age, race, sex, location etc, we should ponder some questions: Who are they? How are they? How well do they sleep? Are they anxious? Are they extroverts displaying their digital peacock feathers? Are they introverts who can socialize but head home early because their feet hurt and they’d rather read a book? Are 52% of them introverts who live voyeuristically through the safety of glowing screens? What is it that they want? Can we provide for them? Do we have to?

Dave Allen, director, interactive strategy for NORTH from Memorial Day musings: Facebook, Bob Dylan, Paul Krugman and introverts

It sounds like Dave had a lovely weekend down in Palm Springs and busted out this thought-provoking post about Facebook's recent IPO and what they are likely going to need to focus on as a business... while raising a lot of good questions for us all to ponder.

Article | Strategy

White Paper - Responsive Design vs Mobile Site

29 May 2012

Our team is currently working on a series of white papers and have just finished our first one, which introduces businesses to two strategies for designing and developing a site that targets mobile traffic.

Responsive vs. Mobile

Given that we've approached several projects from both angles, we felt that it would be worthwhile to share our experiences of each with you.

You can now get our white paper, "Responsive Design vs Mobile Site" on "our new white papers page":http://planetargon.com/white-papers/responsive-design-vs-mobile-site.

Link | Development

Google+ Fuss

24 May 2012

What the Plus

Guy Kawasaki releases What the Plus!, in which he explains what “makes Google+ as special as Macintosh”.

I was a little surprised when I first read about this, as my experience of Google+ so far has been like walking down a deserted street, complete with tumbleweed and whistling wind. In all honesty, I’ve probably not been fair with it and wrote it off quite quickly. However, when somebody as well-respected as Guy Kawasaki makes such a bold comparison it did make me want to go take another look at it.

One of the points he makes is the clean interface, with plenty of white space. Google’s interfaces are not for everybody – often being described as utilitarian, but my feeble brain tends to prefer this style. The most important aspect though is whether or not there is any activity, and several months on (with admittedly small circles) I’m still seeing barely any activity. Going there makes you feel like you chose the wrong party. The few people there are standing at the edge of the room, and its all disturbingly quiet.

My prediction? The next Wave.

Article | Work

Creating Contiki's Mobile Site, Part 3: Visual Design

24 May 2012

At this point, we’ve gone through the early stages of our design strategy by researching, sketching ideas, and making a paper prototype. We then extended that strategy phase into a development of a mobile prototype to help explain how each page would function on the site. It was now time to complete the user’s experience by adding visuals to complement that functionality. Thanks to the extra work we did in the beginning, we knew what we wanted to see, so the transition from our quick and dirty prototype to a finished user experience adding visual design elements was practically seamless.

Article | UX

14 Things I Learned at WebVisions - Day 2

24 May 2012

Welcome back! I hope you enjoyed 14 Things I learned at WebVisions – Day 1. How was dinner? Did you sleep well? OK, enough chit chat- it’s time for the epic conclusion of this 2-part series. Without further ado, I present the remaining 7 things I learned while attending WebVisions Portland 2012:

WebVisions keynote

Article | UX

14 Things I Learned at WebVisions - Day 1

23 May 2012

I visited sunny Portland, Oregon (I’ve lived here for 7 years but let’s pretend, shall we) to attend this year’s WebVisions conference. Did you know that Portland has over 400 days of sunshine per year? Don’t attempt to do the math- it’s complicated. To extrapolate from my WebVisions experience, I’ve determined that Portlandites predominantly use MacBooks, are all men, wear ill-fitting trousers, and smell kinda funny. Besides that, I’ve compiled a list of 14 THINGS I LEARNED AT WEBVISIONS, the first half of which are presented here in no particular order. Enjoy!

Convention Center hall

Quote | Misc

Where are the women?

23 May 2012

A survey of 11 recent Portland tech startups, ranging from companies with four employees to 80, reveals that their total workforces were typically 70 percent to 80 percent male, while their development and engineering teams—i.e., the people who write the actual code—have even fewer women. In many cases, none.

Ruth Brown from Willamette Week: Where the Tech is She?

Photo | Studio

Clients visiting

18 May 2012

Clients visiting

We had Andy Sanders from Contiki visit with us for a few days this week. This morning, Gary and I took him for a hike in the Columbia Gorge and stopped by Multnomah Falls.

Thanks for visiting Andy, we look forward to seeing you again soon!

Quote | Strategy

Conversion Rates as the wrong metric

18 May 2012

For any e-commerce site, I have the perfect advice on how to raise their conversion rate significantly. All they have to do is stop marketing. Once they stop marketing, the number of visitors will drop to only those who are already loyal customers.

Because those visitors are loyal, they are probably only coming to buy something. The ratio of purchasers to visitors will skyrocket. Sales will likely drop, but conversion will go sky-high.

Sounds great, right? That’s the other problem with the conversion rate ratio: it’s not at all related to the other business operations.

Jared Spool from Avoid Ratios For Metrics – Moving Beyond Conversion Rates, Part 1

Let's avoid getting too focused on conversion rates.

Article | Work

Creating Contiki's Mobile Site, Part 2: Making the Mobile Prototype

17 May 2012

In developing the Contiki mobile website, we thought it would be a good idea to provide them with a working prototype that they could actually click through on their mobile devices. Luckily, jQuery mobile was there to help make this a painless and useful process.

Contiki mobile prototype screens.