I had the opportunity to be the final speaker at the 2010 Indianapolis Startup Weekend event on Sunday afternoon. For the uninitiated, I've included a bit of background from the Startup Weekend website below.
Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.
I'll admit it – I'm a recovering design process deliverables junkie. Historically, the generation of process maps, usability audits, wireframes, site diagrams, application flows, mental models, task-level scenarios, user stories, standards documentation, conceptual frameworks, content audits, navigation maps, and countless other examples of design ephemera, were so central to the work that we created for clients that we began to view them as the work we were creating for our clients. In reality, as important as many of those deliverables may be, they are just means to an end. The end – is a finished product that customers want to purchase and use and a solution that meets or exceeds…
Todd Henry, the founder of Accidental Creative, interviewed Kristian for his regular podcast. The interview covered everything from staying inspired and dealing with clients to getting moving on what’s important. You can listen to it here
One of the most frequent questions I'm asked is "What have you been reading lately." With increasing frequency, folks are beginning to inquire about what Podcasts I listen to as well. So I thought I'd share a list of my favorite podcasts with our readers. These picks run the gamut from design, to technology, to entrepreneurialism. Some of them are not updated as regularly as I'd like, but they are all thought provoking, interesting, and inspiring. You can find them all on iTunes.
The Accidental CreativeThe Accidental Creative podcast addresses how to thrive in the create-on-demand world by instilling practical, everyday practices that help you stay prolific, brilliant and healthy in your life
This year, I took particular interest in a panel that focused on news & media, and the "Future of Context". At the 2009 SXSWi, much of the conversation was centered around the demise of journalism and whether or not the news industry would survive. I enjoyed the progression into this 2010 conversation about the news and identifying that by providing better context, the news industry may indeed survive. I look forward to the upcoming years of SXSWi and discovering what solutions have been developed to make the news a richer and more informative experience.
Overview Conventional wisdom calls us attention-deprived, constantly seeking the next scrap of info. But Google reveals our true desire: Context. (Wikipedia entries, This American Life's financial crisis explainer, Gizmodo's definitive guide to smartphones, etc.) An exploration of how…
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In all likelihood you probably read the first five (or perhaps only two) words of the first paragraph before skipping down to here. Many of you can probably recite the first line off by heart, but most likely all of you know what the text's name and primary usage is. Used as placeholder…
In the last few months here at Kristian Andersen + Associates, we have become increasingly more involved in iPhone application user experience/user interface design. Our existing experience with UX/UI design for the web was a great jumping-off point, plus we're all day-one iPhone users and are virtually tethered to them right throughout the day.
Our most recent app engagement began in the usual way, collaborating with the client on multiple rounds of wireframes and process maps, dialing in the inner workings and structure of the app itself. When we started to move forward into the initial visual prototypes the ideas for the navigation and overall aesthetic came fast, but we quickly realized something just didn't 'feel' right. It didn't take long before we realized why and just…
Recently I was fortunate enough to become certified in Landing Page Optimization (LPO) after attending a one-day course presented by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of MarketingExperiments, an internet-based research lab that conducts experiments in optimizing sales and marketing processes. The primary goal of LPO is to optimize the content and appearance of landing pages to make them more appealing to a target audience, in order improve the conversion rate of website visitors that become sales leads or customers.
Having been a designer for nearly 12 years I’ve designed my fair share of websites and landing pages, and I was skeptical about how much I could really learn from this course. However, as we dug deeper into the science of LPO I…
Below is a presentation on Personal Branding that I presented at the Notre Dame Campus Communicators Summit on January 7, 2010, in South Bend, Indiana.
Let me come right out and say that I think the term "personal branding" is pretty lame, but there does seem to be some common understanding as to what the term means. So in the interest of fostering continuity and establishing a shared vocabulary, that's what I'm running with. I hope that in 10 years, I will still be using…
Lately we've been talking a lot about the elements of a successful design project. We thought it would be interesting, and helpful to other readers, to hear a bit more about other folk's successes and how they were achieved. Tell us about the client, the challenge, and the solution.
