We got a mysterious and lovely package in the mail the other day, sent by the frequently-css-showcased Mr Diggles. Turns out he likes our work so much, he wanted to send us some pocket art.
The Lab Rat Approves
The wallets are from a Portland company called db clay, and came in a variety of designs including one featuring the backside of a horse. Guess which one we all fought over?
The whole Viget team is now rocking some sweet photo-real wallets. Thanks, Mr. Diggles!
I spent the past week in Boulder, Colorado reconnecting with the web / tech / VC community here and spending time at TechStars, the local startup incubator. The highlight of the week had to be Micah's presentation at the Boulder/Denver New Tech Meetup on Tuesday, where he showed off Lijit and got some real-time feedback from the near 300 folks in attendance about some of their revenue generation plans. 
His reassurance of the types of ads they'll be displaying -- and, more specifically, an example of what they won't be -- brought the house down.
On Thursday, I teamed up with Kevin and Jeff from Slice of Lime, and talked with the startup companies about user experience. We covered our respective processes and the Slice guys went through some client examples. I kicked around 7 points that seemed relevant to the small, fast-moving teams:
Continue reading "User Experience Talk at TechStars"
Almost exactly one year ago, we opened Viget’s first remote office in Durham, North Carolina. At the time, we didn’t really know what to expect. We knew we had two great people heading down from HQ to blaze the trail, and a familiar face already there, but there were lots of questions. Could we grow the team in Durham? Could we connect with the local web community? Could we find a cool space to work in? A year later it’s clear: yes, yes, yes.
Emily tracked down a very cool little space next to Brightleaf Square, we’ve had some amazing people join the team, and we did our part to support the community through successful Refresh events—which has led to lots of friends in town. In fact, we’re now to the point that we’ve outgrown our little space, and are in the process of expanding.
Our new address (not yet, we’ll let you know when) will be 202 Rigsbee Ave, on the corner of Rigsbee and E. Chapel Hill St. We’ll be taking the 2nd floor, directly above Rue Cler, a sweet little restaurant and bakery.
While it’s not far from our current office, we’re exciting to be directly taking part in the resurgence of downtown Durham, which has really picked up in the year we’ve been in town. Unlike our brand-new building at HQ, 202 Rigsbee is an urban classic: all brick, slightly-sagging floor, huge old windows, and lots of character.
We’ll do our best to post updates over the next month or two as the build-out continues, and we look forward to inviting everyone over to check it out once it’s done.
I just moved three weeks ago from the Central New York snowbelt. The opportunity to work with the talented Viget team coupled with promises of a winter that did not involve shoveling and longjohns was too good to pass up. Since I’m the new girl in town, last night’s Refresh the Triangle event was a great way for me to get out and meet some interesting people.
We watched a virtual seminar by Jared M. Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering. The seminar, “Strike Up the Brand: How Smart Design Can Strengthen Your Brand,” had a lot of suggestions for reinforcing and strengthening a company’s brand through the online experiences we create. His team’s usability research produced plenty of data showing that when designing sites, brand experience is what we should be focusing on rather than brand elements such as the logo, typeface, or big glossy photos. Brand experience is about the emotional and intellectual associations people make with a company, and it goes well beyond marketing messages. It helps businesses create a loyal, committed following. Companies I consider to have a brand experience include Apple, Starbucks and Target. As a customer I am willing to pay more for things or to tolerate problems (like three broken iPods in four years) because of the many positive experiences I have had with them.
To make a company’s online brand experience enjoyable, we need to strive for a few key things. Namely:
- Remove frustrations. Make it easy for users to reach their goals. Don’t let marketing messages or internal jargon confuse the site or make it harder to move through. Don’t add extra bells and whistles if they’re taking away from the overall usability of the site.
- Add delight. Make hard jobs easier by thinking of new and innovative (maybe even fun?) ways to solve old problems.
- Conduct user testing. Even if it’s a small project and you can’t afford formal usability studies, you can always round up a few of your less tech-savvy friends and family members willing to help out. What we as designers and developers think is intuitive might not be to some people. What the client thinks customers want or need might not be what they’re actually looking for. Look at analytics data to help pinpoint problem areas, and then simplify them as much as possible.
In short, we need to help our clients think of their web sites as more than just online brochures or kitchen-sink repositories for information.
I found Jared’s seminar very worthwhile, and the conversation that it sparked within the group was great; it made me feel lucky to be a part of the web community here in Durham. I’m looking forward to settling in at Viget and exploring the Triangle in the weeks to come. I hope to meet more of you at the next Refresh event!
If you follow my Twitter stream (or pretty much anyone from Viget) you’ll know that we have been having some problems with our hosted Exchange provider. For close to 24 hours now we have been unable to send or receive email. In fact, anything sent to us since about 10:00am on Thursday is sitting in a pile somewhere on our provider’s servers (hopefully).
We have been working with the provider, and Microsoft engineers, to get us back online as quickly as possible - but so far it has been a little like putting Humpty Dumpty together again. The current strategy is to get us back online with blank mailboxes, which will allow us to send and receive new messages, and then restore our older mail over the course of the day. With this approach we hope to get our email back online soon - but it could still take us a while before we have access to some of the messages sent to us during the day yesterday.
In the meantime, if you need to get in touch with us your best bet is to just give us a call: 703-891-0670.
We’re really sorry about this situation. For many of us, this has been our longest email outage since 1994 and we’re going a bit crazy over it.
[UPDATE: 06/20/08 2:28pm] We are slowly getting email back online. We are now able to send outbound messages. As DNS changes propagate around the Internet we will begin to receive inbound email again (in fact, most incoming mail is already being delivered). We don’t yet have access to messages sent to us since about 10am on Thursday. We’re still working on tracking those down. Feel free to resend anything that you have sent to us in the past day - we should get it this time around.
When we launched our new blogs, we figured people might struggle to know which blogs to visit regularly at first. We decided to write a weekly recap of the posts from each blog, so those who wanted to stick with just this Four Labs blog could still get a taste of the specialty blogs as well.
It’s been a few months, though, and we’ve decided to phase out the weekly recaps for several reasons:
Continue reading "Phasing Out VigeWeekly"
When Sean told me he was working on a plan to bring a business incubator to DC, I told him right away that I wanted to help. Working with start-ups is one of our passions herer at Viget, and our efforts to support a more vibrant entrepreneurial community reflects that passion.
Throughout the summer, we’ll be hosting a couple of 1/2 day sessions with each LaunchBox start-up team, offering advice or services for whatever aspect of their business they feel needs help. Maybe we’ll help shape a better user experience, design a more intuitive interface, or review the technical architecture of a Rails app. They get to decide who they work with—UX strategists, designers, developers, marketers—so they can shape how the sessions work.
A few of us went down to the very cool LaunchBox space in DC a couple weeks ago. We gave them some ideas for how to work with us, and we got to hear more about their business ideas. As expected, there was a lot of energy, but there was also a lot of progress. Some of the businesses are pretty far along already—an encouraging sign.
The sessions have only just begun. As the start-ups emerge, we’ll do our best to post updates on Viget’s blogs. In the meantime, follow the LaunchBox blog for recaps of the great mentors they have coming through.
Anyone who has been blogging for more than a few months knows that WordPress is one of the dominant blogging platforms, with millions of blogs using it as a content management system. This makes it an attractive target for bloggers, who look to it for its abundant repository of plugins and addons, as well as to attackers, who only need to find a single security hole to unlock the entire install base (again, millions of blogs and other sites) to serve whatever purpose they like. This is a list of ten ways to help prevent this from happening to you.
Continue reading "Ten Ways to Avoid WordPress Crackery"
When Frank told me that the goal of the Tech Cocktail Conference was to:
"... assist attendees by bringing them essential business startup tips, advice and knowledge from a super-cast of successful founders, developers and entrepreneurs..."
I thought that a closer look at Squidoo could be of value to those attendees. He agreed, so I'll be joining Squidoo's COO Corey Brown at the conference to give a talk, 9 Tips to Profitability: How Squidoo Did It.
It took about two years for Squidoo to go from an idea in Seth's very recognizable head to a profitable Internet company. They did it without raising venture capital and by adhering to some of the principles that I expect will be a theme with others at the conference: stay small, be nimble, spend less, make money.
We'll spice it up a bit, too, though, and we'll be touching on some of the actual lessons Squidoo learned along the way. We hope to answer some good questions during Q&A as well.
Conference details:
TECH cocktail CONFERENCE
May 29, 2008
9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m CST
Chicago, Illinois
Other speakers include Gary, Jason, Brad, and even Micah -- I'm looking forward to checking out their talks, as well.
Viget is truly inspired by the positive responses we’ve received from so many friends and colleagues about the new site and blog designs. Nick La, shortly after posting the new Viget blog designs to Best Web Gallery, was kind enough to engage us in a dialog/interview that resulted in this featured post on Web Designer Wall. It was a great opportunity for us voice on our inspiration, reflect on the hard work, and share a behind-the-scenes look into our design process.
Thanks again to Nick and all of those who have been so complimentary and supportive of our efforts.
