Posts by Nathan Sinsabaugh

Luke W's post on the They Make Apps approach to CAPTCHA got me thinking, so I spent 30 minutes brainstorming other techniques that might work. Check out my sketches below.

I was recently introduced to The Underwater Project, a photographic series depicting people, as you might guess, underwater. Most of the shots show people in the middle of, or directly underneath, a wave. As you can see above, the results are stunning, often times otherworldly. This image series isn't just beautiful, it's representative of how changing your perspective and truly immersing yourself in something reveals that, often, things and situations aren't as you imagined. There's a lesson for designers and UX folks somewhere in there…

For those of you who don't know, KA+A, in partnership with Gravity Labs, recently rolled out an early beta version of our first product, TinderBox. TinderBox is a web-based application that lets individuals and teams create, manage, deliver, and track interactive proposals and other kinds of business communications. Like all good web-based software, TinderBox will be regularly undergoing upgrades and enhancements, and I thought it would be fun to share some our design and development experiences on the KA+A blog. I'm going to kick off the series today, by explaining a bit about how assets, like proposals, content, and media, are organized in TinderBox. One of the most important benefits TinderBox provides is the centralization of the content and assets used…

It amazes me that more organizations don't show pictures of their team/staff/employees on their website. In a world where we've come to loath giant, faceless corporations, proving that there are living, breathing, caring, people behind your organization would be a good thing. A great thing. What's there to be afraid? Stalkers? Is the team really so ugly that their mugs can't appear on the site? Or is the team so transient that upkeep would be too much of a challenge? If you really want to create two-way dialogue and meaningful relationships with your customers (i.e. join the conversation on the social web), then give your customers access to your people. We don't have relationships with abstract entities in the same way that we do with flesh and blood people. Not even if…

You'd think this wouldn't be the case, but it's an awkward truth about SXSWi that darn near all of the interactive materials designed for it are pretty bad. They don't look good, and they usually don't work very well.

Case in point: The SXSW iPhone app. I guess it's supposed to serve as my SXSW HQ while I'm in Austin. It's a modest little app, comprised of a scheduler, GPS map, newsreader, electronic business card, and micro-messaging app rolled up into one neat little cluster of a package. Oh, and it's really slow. And I'm in Indy right now. I can't imagine how it's going to perform when the geek-horde invades Austin.

But don't worry, there's a web app to save you from that app! It's called…

Rapportive is a new Gmail plug-in that replaces ads in messages with information about the sender, or anyone else who was copied on the message. Rapportive pulls information from RapLeaf, a company that scours the social web for open information and builds products and analytics on the data it finds. Sources include Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, and more. The Twitter piece will even show you a list of recent Tweets. Very cool. If you're a Gmail user, check it out.

"Customers, although they might be able to articulate the problems with an interaction, are not often capable of visualizing the solutions to those problems. Design is a specialized skill, just like programming. Programmers would never ask users to help them code; design problems should be treated no differently." Alan Cooper About Face 3, The Essentials of Interaction Design

Longtime KA+A client ExactTarget announced in December that they had been named a leader in email marketing in Forrester's 2009 Email Marketing Service Providers Wave report. They were called a "leader of the pack," and received perfect scores in six categories, including: Strength of Management Team, Executive Vision, Product Roadmap, Total Employees, Vertical Strategy, and Customers Most notably, ExactTarget was the only ESP to achieve a perfect score in the Customers category. According to the report, "with high satisfaction scores and online community, ExactTarget can successfully meet marketers' complex business needs." That's particularly exciting for the KA+A team, since we had the opportunity to work with ExactTarget on the creation of their user community, 3Sixty. With over 16,000 members, 3Sixty has become a model of what an…

thesixtyone, a Y-Combinator funded music exploration community, launched in early 2008. The service began life as a pretty typical web-based social networking site. Over the last couple of years, it has gone through some interface updates and improvements, but for the most part it seemed to toe the social network line with its user interface.

The image below shows the service immediately before the latest redesign. It was definitely clean, well organized, and functional. There are even some sweet keyboard shortcuts to make controlling the music easier!

Last week thesixtyone distinguished itself from the web's pile of music recommendation sites by completely redesigning their service. The new design is bold and immersive. While a song plays, the…

A few months back I revisited a favorite game of mine — Portal. Portal is an extension of Valve's Half-Life series. In it, the player controls the protagonist from a first person perspective (you know, a first person shooter…). You begin your adventure locked in a cell in some kind of testing environment/laboratory. After being released from the cell, you're directed through a series of increasingly complex puzzle situations in which your goal is to progress through one test chamber and move to the next. Here's where the "portal" comes in. The solutions to these puzzles require the use of a portal gun, which creates two interconnected portal ends. Here's Wikipedia's description of…