So I finally made a proper, complete website for myself. Each and every website thus far has always been lacking in some aspect, weather it be in the portfolio, about or blog department. And I’ve always, always ended up hating the design so much that I had to change it only weeks after.

Today that stops. It’s a new year, with new possibilities and with the wonderful opportunity of “resetting”. I’ve spent all December designing, developing and editing it, so I hope you’ll enjoy what you see and read.

I’ve also changed the format of my blog. It will still include articles like before, but I’ll also be posting links to all kinds of different content, with my opinion or comment below. The new blog setup is inspired by Daring Fireball.

I’d really appreciate to hear your thoughts, be it good or bad. Feel free to add a comment below or message me on twitter. Thank you!

This is so clever and so cynical. People in nightclubs experience a carefully designed evening, much like cows on a field. Really.

Yale Fox, a DJ from Toronto, has for the past few years been researching the effect music has on people, especially how it affects human behavior in nightclubs. His findings are very interesting and show how easily we can be guided into doing something, or rather buying something. All on a subconsciously level of course. Some of his findings include:

• Experienced DJ’s balance big hits, which makes people dance, with slower songs, which makes people go to the bar buying drinks instead of dancing.
• House music generates more cocktails and vodka sales.
• Rock music generates more beer sales.

Another thing that was particularly interesting, is if we’ve had a great time going clubbing and dancing, we tend to subconsciously give the credit for the successfully night to the liquor brand we drank. So the next time we go to the store to buy liquor, we buy that particular brand in search for creating that same good feeling and evening.

No wonder brands spend so much money associating themselves with different events, people and settings. Also, the reason clubbing is enjoyed so much by many people, is because when dancing with a group of friends, the brain produces a higher level of Oxytocin, which increases the level of trust you have towards the people around you and reduces fear and anxiety.

If you’re interested in some more tidbits, you’ll find them over at Teehan+Lax, which was just given a visit by Yale.

Image from VancityAllie.

RIM refused to believe that it was possible to create the iPhone when it was introduced in 2007.

It was the morning of January 9th, 2007. Steve Jobs took the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center to change the mobile industry forever. With a brilliant presentation, the Apple Chief introduced the very first iPhone.

The following day, around 24 hours after the 2-hour-long presentation, RIM (makers of the BlackBerry smartphones) executives invited the whole company to an all-hands meeting to talk about the newly-announced iPhone.

A former employee said they then concluded that it was impossible to create what Apple said they had created. RIM refused to believe the iPhone could do everything they said it could, without having terrible battery life.  They also allegedly thought several features was impossible to create. Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola and Palm is said to have had similar reactions.

Enter the release on June 29th, when RIM disassembled an iPhone for the first time, and found that they had been completely wrong. They found that the iPhone was almost one big battery, with a tiny logic board strapped to it, and that it worked exactly as Apple had said it would.

RIM only then started to work on a iPhone competitor, The BlackBerry Storm. Failing to believing the first time, they had however given Apple an even bigger head start.

Such an interesting story, and it shows how big of a leap the iPhone really was. No wonder we had such bad phones when this kind of attitude and ignorance was all over the place.

Via SlashGear via Electronista via Shacknews.

I’m going to start writing again, after six months of laziness.

So I feel kinda bad for not having written anything on my blog in 2011. Things have been crazy busy with new projects taking lots of time, as well as a new full-time job. That is however no good excuse. Everybody is busy, and it’s really just a matter of prioritizing correctly and taking the time to do it. That’s what I’m going to do now.

There’s a couple of new things:

1. The design has been updated. It has been crafted for the single purpose of giving you the best possible reading experience.
2. Comments are now activated and will be active on all future posts. I’d love to hear your thoughts, questions and critique.
3. The blog will become more topic-focused as time goes on. I won’t write about things that doesn’t belong here. I haven’t picked any particular topics yet, but I’ll definitively create some guidelines for myself in a couple of weeks.

I hope you’ll follow along and hopefully find what I write interesting.

Image from cambodia4kidsorg.

This is so simple, yet so genius. Perfect user experience design.

The urinals in the toilets on the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, has what looks like a small fly inside of them. When you look closer however, it’s actually the outline of a fly, etched into the porcelain itself. The staff at the airport did research afterwards found that urinals with the fake flies reduced spillage by 80%! When a man sees a fly, he automatically aims at it. Genius.

Via Thomas Krampl Via Dickson Fong Via Xianhang Zhang and lots of googling.

Everything Pixar touches ends up being solid gold.

They have to be doing something right to achieve that kind of quality. The interview embedded below is a fascinating look at how Pixar works and how the company is organized. It’s full of good stuff from start to finish.

The interview was done in March earlier this year, at Innovation 2010 by The Economist. Martin Giles interviewed Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar.

Via Ryan Singer via Scott Berkun.

I use commands, instead of statements, to encourage people to do things. There’s a reason for that.

First of all, you should follow me on twitter.

I find subconsciously human behavior extremely interesting. It doesn’t matter what we do knowingly, it’s those milliseconds where our brain is making hundred of choices that affects what we do. All of our smaller actions, like clicking a link or not, is done utterly subconsciously. We just do it, but there’s always a reason behind it. There’s obviously different reasons, and often more than one, for us doing something (like the visuals), but for this article, I’ll talk about the text, specifically the difference between using a statement and command.

I’ve read several interesting articles over the last year about how certain smaller changes have affected clickthrough rates with huge results. I’d love to give them all credit and link back to them, but I could only remember and find two:

What I find interesting in both articles isn’t which exact phrase worked better than the other, but the fact that a command did so much better than a statement.

Do we humans, subconsciously, like to be told what to do, instead of having to manually take a choice of doing something? Is there a much bigger chance that we’ll do something if we being directly told to do it, instead of having to create an action from a statement (or a fact)? And the stronger the command, does the chance of doing it grow as well?

When we’re presented with a statement, we process a fact and may choose to read the fact and move on, or to execute the possible action a statement can give us. For example, as Dustin uses in his article: “I’m on twitter.”. The primary here is that he’s on twitter. The secondary is that we may follow him on twitter.

When we’re presented with a command however, we process an action and choose to execute on that action or not. Again, in Dustin’s article: “You should follow me on twitter.”. The fact has now changed from the primary, to the secondary, and the command has become the primary.

So it would seem that the brain subconsciously responds much easier to a command, where it only has to go through one process (the action), compared to a statement where it has to go through two processes (the fact and the action). The data shows that in both Jason’s and Dustin’s cases, changing from a statement to a command more than doubled the action they wanted people to do.

And that is the exact reason I use commands, instead of statements, when I really want people to do something. Obviously you can’t use commands everywhere, but on important things, like encouraging things to signup for something, subscribe to something, or follow/like something, a command will probably work much better than a statement.

I’m still very much interested in wether a much stronger command will create better results, and if there’s a limit to how strong a command can be. I’ll definitely try different A/B tests around this topic in the coming future and report back on my findings.

Image from Wikipedia, created by Patrick J. Lynch.