Joey Primiani | Pioneering the New Internet Revolution

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on commenting recently. Most of our information is out on the web already, why is it that we still have to re-enter it every time we want to make a blog post comment? Good design is all in the details and the only reason for the email form is to keep in contact, I can do that on twitter. Besides, isn’t this a little overkill?

I am not a big fan of authentication badges, due to the very fact that people are not quite sure what they will be giving up or posting by clicking. I am even hesitant to click on the badges when there is no clear call-to-action what they actually will do.

I decided to come up with a completely custom commenting system that is a super fast, simple and auth-free way to collect all the data needed. The solution – a wordpress twitter hybrid commenting system.

It’s easy. You enter in your twitter username and comment and this pulls the avatar (transient thanks to Joe Stump’s http://tweetimag.es/), full name, location and website url. The obvious caveat is that you have to have a twitter account, but I anticipate the target audience to have one already, even if not active.

Next step… comments across the web are more fragmented than ever. There needs to be a unified way to federate them together (ie Google Wave commenting example across platform).

Interested to know what you guys think, leave a message in the groovy comments below.

[UPDATE] – Download the official wordpress plugin here

This site is two way discussion blog focused around communication and collaboration around technology, web, entrepreneurship, design and culture. It will be the place for me to share my thoughts, ideas and updates. I hope to meet many amazing and fascinating people through it. That is what it is all about to me. Thanks to the very talented developer Matt Vickers @envex for helping me bring my vision to life. The design is in the details, enjoy!

I’ve been getting a lot of inquires recently regarding my logo. What does it mean? What is it? etc… I purposely designed it to represent many elements of me and what I stand for. Starting from left, clockwise – the conch shell represents my love for the golden ratio, fibonacci sequence, numerology and the math that is all around us in nature. The star represents all things mystical, mysterious, magical, energy, power, the occult, the divine, the goal, unknown, paranormal, science, the cosmos and anything astronomy related. The smiley face represents happiness, joy, positivity, bliss and love of everything. The girl represents wisdom and infinite knowledge. The spiral reminds me of designing and art. Three blocks, because three is one of my favorite numbers. JP is my initials (and twitter username @jp) and red and black have always been my favorite colors. From bottom up, the swirl also purposely looks like a giant squid tail going up to the stars – representing everything in between from the deepest darkest oceans to the stars in the sky, the journey in life is what matters. Overall, I think the reason why it was received so well is that it is fun, creative and has that ultimate whimsical feel.

Think brighter! Out with the dark and grays, turn a boring sad rainy day design happy and bright. I’ve been noticing a common trend around the web, and that is to include excess amounts of grays and dark heavy elements.

The key to effective landing page design is clarity. The visitor should be focused on taking a simple path that leads to the desired conversion action. Take these two before and after examples:

The results were stunning.

The client ran a split test to their email list. The winning new version had an 84% better offer conversion rate (84% more people signed up for the plan when they saw the new page). Why the radical difference?

What can be learned from this research study:

It can be argued that the landing pages are similar. Both show a single image of a phone and a distinct call-to-action button. In order to answer this question my agency employed our visual attention prediction tool.

By understanding the way the visual perception system and brain works, it is possible to accurately simulate with software how a site will be viewed during the first few seconds of eye movement, and where attention will be focused.

The results are instant and do not require expensive eye-tracking studies, or page-tagging and time-consuming data gathering to create mouse-tracking heatmaps. “Attention heatmaps” can even be created based on in-progress visual mock-ups that have not been deployed as live pages.

The “before” page shows scattered eye movements (yellow lines) that bounce all over the page. Drawn by bright blocks of color and sharp areas of contrast, the eyes do not find a place to “settle.” The colored attention heatmap likewise shows attention spread into many areas on the page. In the midst of all of the visual “noise” the most important green call-to-action button is lost and ignored.

A few things this does, this increases speed perception and visitor frequency. Research studies have shown that people often enjoy returning back to a site that is lighter than one that is dark. It is ingrained in us as humans it is natural to read dark text on light background. Makes sense right?

Given another example below – What is easier to scan? Which one is friendlier to look at?

So when you are designing your next site or app, give color some major thought. Color and texture is one of the most important ways to communicate to your message to the audience, and is often overlooked.

Thanks to Clickz and Attention Wizard for providing the heatmaps

Mocks behind the famous Google Pacman doodle. Huge shout out to the very talented design engineer Marcin/my office mate for creating the fun interactive Google doodle today! See the brains behind Google’s PAC MAN (via @shiralazar) My mom even called, she liked it 😉 via Marcin Wichary.