After 2,5 years at Freespee the time has come for me to leave for a position as an Interaction Architect / Art Director at the Swedish usability and interaction design firm Antrop. I’m super-excited about my new job where I will work with very talented people and customers. Antrop has been around for about 10 years and have offices in Stockholm and Linköping. To mention a few customers antrop have worked with Stockholms Lokaltrafik, Riksgälden (Swedish National Debt Office), Posten (Swedens largest messaging and logistics operators), ABB, H&M.

It’s been a lot of fun with many different kind of challenges in my role as an Art Director at Freespee. I wish them the best of luck on their future journey to staying the leader in Call Tracking and Pay-Per-Call solutions for the Lead Generation industry.

When you’re running a website where the primary goal is to sell you need to convert visitors to buyers. Companies have tried to tweak the conversion rate with all kind of methods ever since the beginning. One of the latest trend (during the last couple of years) have been to add videos of the product or item you’re selling. One website where this is very powerful is the american shoe company Zappos.com that lets their employees demonstrade their shoes (and other products they sell) with videos.

In Sweden there’s another great example of videos that help describe the product they are selling. The online warehouse bygghemma.se for goods to your home when you for example need to build a new bathroom to tiling a new roof on your garage. The goods is price-ranged from a couple to thousands dollars. That means that if you’re going to purchase something quite expensive such as a new shower for, lets say $1.000 the website have to make you comfortable in your purchase. Pictures of the shower and the brand (if it’s a famous brand) will of course help the visitor to feel secure and go ahead with the purchase, but for this kind of website a video is perfect!

With a video you can get a good view of how it looks “in real life”, although it’s been recorded with video, but the fact that it looks like reality and that you almost can touch the shower controls make you feel even more comfortable buying the shower.

The web constantly evolve and website owners try to find new ways to make their website the best experience it can be. I love the idea that mankind is driven by evolution. It’s what keeps us all look forward over the hill for whats coming. Lets keep up with this and continue the evolution!

Since i live and work from Sweden the iPad just recently launched and I got myself the must-have gadget!

I’ve been using it during my breakfast with a cup of coffee, when i’ve been lying down in the sofa and in all other occassions at my home, when I didn’t feel the need to open up the 13″ Macbook Pro. Since I work with web development, graphic design and user experience as an interaction architect my iPad doesn’t fit all my needs but it sure is a sweet little thing.

So far I’ve tested some apps and in a true Rob Gordon style here’s my top 5 iPad apps list:

1. Facepad for iPad

This is the latest third-party application that lets you check your latest feed from your Facebook account. It’s based on the official Twitter app (2:nd place on this list) and is beautifully crafted. Read more about Facepad on Techcrunch.

A lot of users discuss these type of third-party applications that ask you to grant access to different type of personal information on your Facebook account. I go with the Google-phrase “Don’t be evil” and believe that the people behind third-party applications always have good intentions.

2. Twitter for the iPad

Twitter for iPad is perhaps the most beautiful app i’ve used. The design team at Twitter sure has studied the UI design and thought about how you really want to use a twitter client on such a gadget as the iPad. The finger gestures is amazing and it’s so easy to browse embedded shortlinks and pictures without leaving the feed for example. That’s one of the reasons why it places second on my list.

3. VeggieSamurai

Games is a big part of the iPad experience. Veggiesamurai is perhaps one of the most addictive games i’ve played since Doodle Jump and Angry Birds for iPhone. It’s all about slicing vegetables, as much as you can to reach the highest score possible. Easy, addictive and fun!

4. Reeder for iPad

Reeder is the tool I use to browse all my feeds. There are a lot of different apps for this, but Reeder has caught my attention for the simplicity of the app and therefor, it’s number 4 on my list of the best  iPad apps! I believe apps are both good and bad, but for this kind of content browsing an app is awesome!

5. Safari

On fifth place is the obvious web browser Safari. You can’t live without it, how many apps you prefer to use instead of traditional web browsing. Safari has some disadvantages on the iPad (like Flash-based pages) and browsing several pages is quite complicated compared to using a “normal” laptop. But to use your fingers instead of a keyboard and mouse is still so magnificent and gives you such a great experience.