Category : Experience Design

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.

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

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…

Over the past few years Indianapolis has quietly been growing into a bonafide  startup hub – boasting an impressive array of tech startups, service providers, funding sources, and industry events and organizations. It's gotten so robust in fact, that it's becoming difficult to keep track of everything thats going on. As many of you all know, the gang at KA+A has been working on a really cool project for the past couple of weeks that we're calling the "Indy Startup Genome Project". In short, we're attempting to map the entire Indianapolis startup ecosystem.

We've started by pulling together a list of all the tech-oriented startup in Indy. Currently it's an incomplete list. If you are a founder of an Indianapolis-based startup or you are aware of one that is not our list…

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 Creative The 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

With the upcoming release of Apple’s iPad (April 3rd, 2010), there has been an increasing amount of buzz recently around the change in the way we will consume media. With an estimated 40-50 tablet devices set for release by early 2011, Wired Magazine, in partnership with Adobe, has seen this as an opportunity to rethink the way we connect with magazine brands, leading to a fundamental shift in the way Wired is produced with it’s new digital app. At the SXSW panel After Magazines: Wired’s Digital Rebirth, panelists Scott Dadich (Creative Director, Wired Magazine) and Jeremy Clark (Senior Experience Design Manager, Adobe) explained the production methods of the app using Adobe Air, and showcased…

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…

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…