mr.brain

This is beside my desk, it helps in rough waters. So does the bottle of rum I peeled it from.

Loading mentions Retweet

Posted July 21, 2010
// 0 Comments

Ad Placement Fail

While riding the 127 Davenport this morning I came across this interesting Ad placement. Solve your money problems, or spend your last 4 bones on a scratch ticket? What to do.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under  //   advertising   fail  
Posted July 7, 2010
// 0 Comments

Double Rainbow All The Way! My favourite video right now. UPDATED.

This guy absolutely loses his shit over a double rainbow. Hooting and asking “What does this mean?”, it even brings him to tears.

After a few clicks around the old youtubes I discoverd that believe it or not this man cage fighting is the same fella loving the double rainbow all the way.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under  //   viral video   YouTube  
Posted July 6, 2010
// 1 Comment

Who designed this?

Recently I ventured to the Pickering Town Center. I have one question who designed this place? It resembles an airport from the 70's, just awful.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under  //   design  
Posted July 5, 2010
// 0 Comments

After a weekend here, going to work is that much harder.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under  //   kinmount  
Posted July 5, 2010
// 0 Comments

No T.V.? No problem, watch the game at the mall.

Loading mentions Retweet

Posted July 2, 2010
// 1 Comment

@randymatheson I concur. #beeroclock

Loading mentions Retweet

Posted June 30, 2010
// 0 Comments

the invisible victims of the G20 summit.

As the protests raged on and police arrested peaceful protesters. Shoppers of the Eaton center lost out..

 

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under  //   g20   YouTube  
Posted June 29, 2010
// 0 Comments

what you see is what you get. nope.

This is one of my biggest bones with fast food. Everyone has felt this way at one time or another and we've all wanted to go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down. 

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under  //   advertising  
Posted June 14, 2010
// 0 Comments

To Contact Us Please Answer: (square root(64) x 14) / 2

The Following was originally written for my agency blog. I will occasionally repost those articles here. enjoy.

I recently came across an interesting post from Rethink. The aptly titled “Five more reasons your website stinks” post had a great little tidbit (reason #10a) about uber long forms complete with CAPTCHA’s that actually deter people from contacting you. I found myself asking, “Why are we still using them, in the first place?”. In today’s landscape of instant communication, the contact form just feels archaic – inconvenient and not very user-friendly. The entire process of completing a typical form takes way too long and often requires the user to surrender too much irrelevant information.


So why do we use forms in the first place? SPAM. Evil SPAM bots have forced regular old mailto links off the page altogether. The bots easily spider page content searching for @ and .com/.ca/.net/.everything combinations. Embedding the recipient address in a form worked until bots were programmed to automate the entry process and compromise the form. Enter the CAPTCHA, an undecipherable, accessibility-hindering, annoying little samurai sent to halt the nasty bots from entering Form Kingdom… and in the process upping your abandonment rates to record levels. So why do we still use forms for simple contact?

Well we shouldn’t, period. Or, at the very least, we should give users some options. Why not adopt the communication technologies and channels of your end users? At this moment these are based around social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Think about the difference in user experience between offering nearly real-time interaction or expecting someone to wait over an indiscriminate amount of time for a response to a submission (assuming one actually arrives at all). Which scenario better represents your company’s value proposition?

Yes, we already know you’re worried about resources… but don’t you already have a resource assigned to reply to those form submissions? Have those same individuals monitor the newly-minted contact channels as well. Chances are these team members are already well-versed in company policy, legal, and brand positioning and should be able to easily adapt to the new technology. It’s really about improving user experience and engagement by removing barriers between the user and the brand or company.

I guess the one thing to remember about all of this… We don’t build websites for ourselves, we build them for users. So try and give them what they want, and always what they need..

 

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under  //   usability  
Posted May 15, 2010
// 0 Comments