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.

Stikk.se is my personal project where I sell stickers for walls, laptops and Apple iPhone. As a part of another project I started to evaluate the Open Source e-commerce system OpenCart.

OpenCart is a neat little system that is by far the most easy e-commerce system I’ve come across. Over the years I’ve tried systems such as ZenCart, OsCommerce, Magento, Prestashop and now OpenCart. What I really love about OpenSource is the ability to change the core system and files whatever way you want.

The Admin inteface of OpenCart is easy to manage out-of-the-box, but every here and there you have specific needs that fit your needs. I personally wanted to improve the way to edit a product. Out of the box there is a “Edit”-link on every product to the right of your browser. After just a few products in the system and working with adding products/editing products I decided to add the “Edit”-link to the product name (and also the image). This small edit to the admin interface made my work so much faster. A small fix in the admin – but it has a huge positive effect on my work.

The design of Stikk.se isn’t very different from the previous version, but there has been some adjustments and improvements. Overall there is a new style with different link colors, another navigation that hopefully will make it easier for the visitor to browse the shop. Another thing that I gave som energy to was to create a neat shopping cart.

Out of the box the shopping cart is placed in a right column, but I personally like one-page layout on websites so the shopping cart was moved to the header. With some help from Google and other OpenCart users out there I managed to code som PHP and style the shopping cart to the exact idea I had in my mind for my new shopping cart.

Overall I’m very pleased with the new system and hopefully my customers will be too!

Wow! This was an awesome piece of art, about one of my favorite things – skateboarding. The mix of concrete and dirt from Kabul, filmed with an artistic view is stunning… Take 10 minutes of your time to reflect, and enjoy. Learn more about Skateistan at skateistan.org

The interactive marketing agency Dare has done a really beautiful infographic to attract new grad students. My guess is that the response from the targeted audience is way more positive than other agencies trying to attract the students attention. Either way, the video is one of the best pieces i’ve seen in a while!

Recently I have been working together with a client coding and styling of the all-new website for SeaCart 26.

The SeaCart 26 boat is a 26-foot trimaran made by Oceanlake Marine. They client were in need of a website where potential visitors could learn more about the boat and make a pre-order. The client had the design ready and my mission was to code the website.

The website is built on WordPress with plugins like WP Super Cache, Page columnist, NextGen Gallery, jQuery Lightbox.

A gallery was very important for the client, since they based their sales on 3d rendered images of the boat. NextGen Gallery is one of the most popular photo plugin for WordPress and is very powerful. With a little customization you can also create your own templates for viewing photos in galleries and slideshows.

As with every WordPress site the best SEO plugin “All in one SEO” is used. The plugin provides the very basic needs when it comes to SEO and is a must-have with WordPress! To split up the content from the loop “Page Columnist” is used. A neat little tool that uses the page-wrap function in WordPress to split up content in several columns. For SeaCart 26 a 2-column layout was used.

More art to the people!

Wonderwall.se is an online shop where you can buy extraordinary print design to affordable prices – simple and beautiful! Personally this is the sort of stuff that makes my day a little brighter! I love wall decoration and especially modern art. The fact that it’s a swedish webshop offering art from a lot of swedish artists really makes me proud to be a swede!

One of the thing I really love with Wonderwall is that it’s built on my favorite publishing system WordPress! The design is very neat and down to earth with brown/off-white which makes the webshop a nice experience to visit.

Recently i’ve been playing around with a new design for one of Freespee’s products, as a Facebook application.

I really loved it the first time I laid my hands on the iPhone GUI PSD package that the guys over at Teehan+Lax have been sharing to the world for some time now. When going in to work mode with a new user interface a pen and paper gets you very far – but when it comes to visualizing the ideas in to the details – a GUI in Photoshop is perfect. You can get in to the specifics and really get close to what the result is supposed to become. Surgeworks released a Facebook GUI Photoshop file earlier this year, and it’s really awesome! Almost everything I wanted to use was in the file. Sizes, graphical elements such as buttons and avatars where there. It’s all about building your mockup and not about getting stuck in creating the basics from Facebook.

What Surgeworks helps me with is time – one of mans most valuable things. So, Thank you Surgeworks for making my world a lot nicer.

At Freespee I did a small poster (A3) to put on notice boards across Uppsala University’s computer science department. The message says something similar to “Are you done with this now? Freespee’s looking for people. Apply at freespee.com/newjobs”.