April 15, 2009 at 11:01 · Filed under Design, LinkedIn
Every online company should always try to continuously improve their product. As head of development of norwegian classifieds website zett.no I’ve been looking at our competitors’ websites (finn.no and tinde.no) comparing our booking solutions.
Booking solution of finn, tinde and zett
Booking system is a heart of these applications since this is where the money comes from (at least from the private persons). And being such an important part of the system the way booking solutions work today did not impress me much (on either of the three websites).
I have documented the booking process on all three websites just the way they looked 8th of April 2009 (I’ll publish own posts on this later for: finn, tinde and zett).
So here comes the challenge:
In 6 months from now 15th of October 2009 I’ll compare them again looking at how the process have been improved. Every detail count, I’ll evaluate the changes then, but I can announce the winner already now.
The winner is our users! And a nice side effect of improved booking solution is our revenue!
I hope that finn and tinde accept this challenge, and that we will see great improvements very soon. I also hope that when the improvements are made, we will steal the best ideas from each other and do a follow up release taking our booking solutions to the top of usability, ease of use and performance.
April 14, 2009 at 23:28 · Filed under LinkedIn, Private
Here is the list of books and resources that I read recently that has influenced me in one way or another (in no particular order):
- Zen Habits - blog of Leo Babauta covering: achieving goals, productivity, being organized, GTD, motivation, eliminating debt, saving, getting a flat stomach, eating healthy, simplifying, living frugal, parenting, happiness, and successfully implementing good habits.
- Get rich slowly - blog of J.D>. Roth sharing stories about debt elimination, saving money, and practical investing.
- Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds
- The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams
- Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm
- DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model by Jeremy Keith
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
- Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
- Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg
- The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing by Jason Kelly
- Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle
- Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design by Robert Hoekman Jr.
- Getting real by 37signals
- Winning by Jack and Suzy Welch
- The big book of key performance indicators by Eric T. Petterson
The list is never complete, so I’ll update the post once in a while…
April 14, 2009 at 13:42 · Filed under Agile & Scrum, LinkedIn
Just wanted to share with you all this sprint burndown chart:
Sprint burndown chart (click to enlarge)
How do you feel about it?
How do you think the team felt about it?
Do you think this was a good or a bad sprint?
Say what you think in the comments, I’ll update this post one week later with real answers :-)
March 13, 2009 at 22:15 · Filed under LinkedIn, SEM & SEO, Search
I was speaking today at SEO howlers session at International Search Summit Oslo together with Andy Atkins-Krüger and Kristjan Mar Hauksson. We were trying to wake up the audience after lunch and I hope we done this well. It was quite fun (at least for me) and at the same time quite rewarding.
Following things were mentioned as SEO SEM howlers:
- URL rewrites (just take a look at elkjop.no product pages)
- Missing 404 pages
- Non existing pages returning 200 status
- Defending your brand reputation
- Supporting your offline campaigns online
- Doing the basics (titles, h1s, flash, etc)
- Use of negative keywords in ppc campaigns
I hope the audience enjoyed the session as much as I did :-).
March 2, 2009 at 9:56 · Filed under Agile & Scrum, LinkedIn, Web-sites
I launched http://kanosurvey.com a small project for the Agile community. If you use kano model for prioritizing your features, this site would be helpful. You can set up a survey and get your users/customers answer it in order to find out more about your features.
February 26, 2009 at 14:06 · Filed under Agile & Scrum, LinkedIn
Yesterday, I’ve been participating in a Debate about agile and usability.
Three Scrum Masters (I was one of them) and three UX people was sitting at the same table. Everyone of us should come with one suggestion about how to fit UX people into the scrum teams better.
Here is what’s been said.
Scrum Masters:
* Geir Amsjø: Use Feature Times (and sprint 0)
* Sergey Dmitriev: UX people can swallow their pride and contribute to the backlog
* Johannes Brodwall: UX people should become more versatile, so that they can contribute more
UX people:
* Jon Gunnar Wold: Developers should know their responsibilities
* Fredrik Matheson: Product Owner should be a pro
* Anders Fagerhus: UX people should stay one sprint ahead of developers
We had a really great talk and I want to thank all the participants. I also enjoyed talking to the audience in the free minutes: Miguel Calix (nice chat about combining PO and SM roles) and Marit Søholt Stokes about the importance of making the contracts better by having a paragraph or two about the customer responsibilities as a Product Owner (I really wanted to do a followup on this one).
August 27, 2007 at 17:00 · Filed under Private
Let’s take a look at the elections with the eyes of the web-developer.
We’ll take a look at following parties: RV, SV, DNA, SP, KrF, V, H, Frp
I choose to focus on 4 areas, each of those will get a score -2(awfull), -1(bad), 0(neutral), 1(good), 2(excellent). The areas are:
1. Visual design
2. W3C conformation and source code
3. Ease of finding the “electoral promise”
4. Ease of finding of party’s vision and long term plan
Let’s start.
RV
1. -1: Boring visual
2. 0: No doc type, but they “play” HTML :-), just look at this 
The guys have sense of humor though
who disagrees :-)?
3. 0: Located in section “Useful”, one click away from the front page leading to a pdf document :-(
4. 1: Second link from top to the right, one click away from the front page, not bad at all.
RV Total: 0;
SV
1. 1: Actually not that bad, could give them 2 if it were not those red boxes at the end of the page and sesam search field at the top :-)
2. 0: they are on the way to writing better code, if they check it for missing closing tags, remove some inline css, etc
3. 2: In the middle of the front page, you hardly find better place
4. 2: In the middle of the front page, you hardly find better place
Total SV: 5.
DNA
1. 2: Very good visual
2. 0: Suffers from divitis, missing closing tags, but is on the way to good code
3. 0: Top banner is actually the thing, but I thought it was a top banner :-)
4. 0: Two clicks away from the front page, starting with first link in the left menu.
Total DNA: 2
SP
1. 1: Three pictures of Aslaug Haga on the front page is too much of a good thing :-)
2. -1: it looked to be 0 for inline css, nonlimited use of br tags, etc, but then I spotted font tags and tables :-( grrr and it functions bad in firefox
3. 1: One click from the front page, though the link is not very descriptive
4. 0: There are two-three links that talks about the same and could be counted as “the thing”, why not say that in plain text and have only one?
Total SP: 1
KrF
1. 0: white text on white stripes does not work very well
2. -2: Tables, deprecated tags… Looks like web-designers at KrF just stumbled upon FrontPage :-) Wake up, it’s 2007 out there.
3. -2: Didn’t find one. At all… Seriously…
4. 1: One click away from the front page
I’ve seen this too much during my surfing
P.S. And it’s god damn sloooow.
P.P.S. Have you seen your fonts in FireFox? Neither did I, had no microscope.
Venstre
1. 0: You have to do something about fonts.
2. 1: Wow. It actually validates!!! MediaFront has sold their ability to make flash where the client needed web-design. Let’s see what google sees on front page:
I think Venstre will have problems getting new votes: they are not even on the first page for search “venstre politisk parti” on google. But the main site is good.
3. 0: you are actually coming to the election version of website, and have to click to come to the normal one
4. 0: three to ten clicks away, depending on how fast you realize that there are two versions of the website :-)
Total V: 1
Høyre
1. 1: Pretty good visually, would have been 2, if they had removed the banner on the right side.
2. 2: Hey, this one validates too :-) P.S. one typo: atl instead of alt, but we forget this.
3. 1: One click away, though the link name could be more descriptive
4. 2: Right on spot. Two clicks away and the choices you make are very logical.
Total Høyre: 6
FrP
1. 1: Nice visual, fonts chosen did not allow to give 2.
2. 0: well, there are other tags then div’s, you know.
3. -1: When clicking on link with the right name to see their “election promise” I was greeted with “access denied” (ingen tilgang) :-) he he, do they have something to hide? Though I could download a pdf version
4. 1: This one worked as intended, two clicks away from the front page.
Total Frp: 1.
Well, the web-developer votes Høyre this year.
August 26, 2007 at 13:27 · Filed under Linux
For those of you who want to use ctwm window manager on ubuntu.
I installed ctwm and was surprised that it did not show up among other sessions in the login screen of gdm.
With a little research I found that all you have to do is:
- cd /usr/share/xsessions
- copy one of those existing_session.desktop files I’ve chosen Fvwm.desktop: cp Fvwm.desktop ctwm.desktop
- edit this new file, exchanging Fvwm with ctwm everywhere: sudo vi ctwm.desktop
- restart and enjoy ctwm
January 22, 2007 at 22:13 · Filed under Design, Private, Web-sites
I tried installing a WordPress plugin today that should show random picasa albums (Picasa Web Matrix was choosen for the task). Of some reasons it did not work :-(, so I had to dig into code myself. Found out that probably google have changed the structure of the feed, so some minor changes should be done in the source in order to get it working.
If you need a solution drop me a notice, I share mine :-)
I’ll play a bit with WP widgets so I removed my old theme (it was to old for widget to work), and replaced it with one distributed with WP 2.0.7.
Let’s stick to this for a while.
January 22, 2007 at 1:01 · Filed under Private
One more gadget in my collection at home is this beatiful Network Storage device with a capacity of slightly over 1Tb :-)
It took a night to build RAID5, and another 15 hours to transfer everything from two external hard disks, but after that… it’s only joy. It runs scielently
I never felt so secure about my work related data, family pictures and videos, etc
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