A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger buttons and slightly different copy. After a while, take a look at the stats and figure out which group presses the button more often. Sounds good, right? The problem is staring you in the face. It is the same dilemma faced by researchers administering drug studies. During drug trials, you can only give half the patients the life saving treatment. The others get sugar water. If the treatment works, group B lost out. This sacrifice is made to get good data. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Make beautiful maps. Share them anywhere. That’s MapBox.

Build Desktop Applications for Linux, Mac and Windows using HTML, CSS and Javascript

Deep-dive into high performance web site best practices

SPDY is a replacement for HTTP, designed to speed up transfers of web pages, by eliminating much of the overhead associated with HTTP. SPDY supports out-of-order responses, header compression, server-side push, and other optimizations that give it an edge over HTTP when it comes to speed. SPDY is gaining a great deal of traction -- it has been implemented in Chrome, Firefox, and Amazon Silk, been deployed widely by Google, and there is now SPDY support for Apache through the mod_spdy module.

Listed below are our design principles and examples of how we’ve used them so far. These build on, and add to, our original 7 digital principles.

heatmap.js is a JavaScript library that can be used to generate web heatmaps with the html5canvas element based on your data. Heatmap instances contain a store in order to colorize the heatmap based on relative data, which means if you're adding only a single datapoint to the store it will be displayed as the hottest(red) spot, then adding another point with a higher count, it will dynamically recalculate. The heatmaps are fully customizable - you're welcome to choose your own color gradient, change its opacity, datapoint radius and many more.

The Busy Executive's Guide to Winning with Mobile

Adobe + HTML

Dive into Responsive Prototyping with Foundation

Getting Clients

From metaphor to maturity

Artistic Distance

Style Tiles and How They Work

A javascript library for multi-touch gestures

You don't need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account. To make it all happen, we work closely with some of the best financial institutions in the world.

What You Can't See You Can't Get

Welcome to the Post PC Era

Integrating UX into the Product Backlog

Are your users S.T.U.P.I.D?

The largest collection of Axure UI widgets on the planet. Axure Widgets Libraries for iPhone, iPad, Android, Web and more…

For someone without programming experience, starting in web development can feel very daunting. You’re in that uncomfortable first stage of competence (“you don’t know what you don’t know”), so you might think that you have to spend months assembling a foundation in computer science before you can build a website of any sophistication. Not so! Web development and CS are different enough that you can start learning the former without having a strong base in the latter. I say this largely based on my own experience.

As higher resolution screens continue to make their way to popular and increasingly affordable devices, the need for resolution-indendent (vector) graphics on the Web becomes more apparent. So I've been looking into what's possible on mobile browsers today.

The iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

Through fluid grids and media query adjustments, responsive design enables Web page layouts to adapt to a variety of screen sizes. As more designers embrace this technique, we're not only seeing a lot of innovation but the emergence of clear patterns as well. I cataloged what seem to be the most popular of these patterns for adaptable multi-device layouts and added one I'd love to see more of.

I found a very good presentation on Hacker News which outlines some key metrics that are important for "social games". If you're building a consumer app these days, adding some social gaming elements can make or break it, so those metrics are very relevant.

This CRAN task view contains a list of packages useful for natural language processing. Side-note on text mining: In recent years, we have elaborated a framework to be used in packages dealing with the processing of written material: the package tm. Extension packages in this area are highly recommended to interface with tm's basic routines and developers are cordially invited to join in the discussion on further developments of this framework package.

O ne of the most magical things about the Internet is that it's a whimsical rabbit hole of discovery – we start somewhere familiar and click our way to a wonderland of curiosity and fascination we never knew existed. What makes this contagion of semi-serendipity possible is an intricate ecosystem of "link love" – a via-chain of attribution that allows us to discover new sources through those we already know and trust.

One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data. Every day—in an effort at “self awareness”—I have automated systems send me a few emails about the day before. But even though I’ve been accumulating data for years—and always meant to analyze it—I’ve never actually gotten around to doing it. But with Mathematica and the automated data analysis capabilities we just released in Wolfram|Alpha Pro, I thought now would be a good time to finally try taking a look—and to use myself as an experimental subject for studying what one might call “personal analytics”.

I forget how I wanted to begin this story. That's probably because my mind, just like everyone else's, can only remember a few things at a time. Researchers have often debated the maximum amount of items we can store in our conscious mind, in what's called our working memory, and a new study puts the limit at three or four.

Over the past few years there's been a lot of discussion around whether an experience can be designed. But it seems like everyone's just getting hung up on semantics; an experience can be designed, but the user will always have the opportunity to experience it in a unique way. The reason every experience has the potential to be unique to the user is, in part, because cognition is unique to each user.

YAY! CODES! is a free service that makes it painless for developers to distribute promo codes to their customers.

Docracy is a social repository of legal documents. Our mission is to make useful legal documents freely available to the public. We also hope to make them easier to find, customize and sign. No more crappy templates behind a paywall that you download hoping everything will be alright. Instead: reputable, transparent sources and social proof to help you find something as close as possible to the perfect document.

The KT06 kit contains 6 Cubelets that can be snapped together to make a variety of robots with no programming and no wires. You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light and other objects, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.

Experimental Projects From The New York Times

TimesMachine can take you back to any issue from Volume 1, Number 1 of The New-York Daily Times, on September 18, 1851, through The New York Times of December 30, 1922. Choose a date in history and flip electronically through the pages, displayed with their original look and feel.

Make your course come alive. The simple way to manage your course and engage your students. It's free and always will be.

As more organizations realize they need to invest heavily in multi-device Web designs, the inevitable question of “how” comes up. Responsive Web design, separate sites, or something in between? Here’s how I’ve tried to simplify this decision.

FROM PASTICHE TO SOPHISTICATION, Garçon Grotesque improves on a classic for today's designer. Designed in a multitude of weights, extended latin character set, small capitals and a working lowercase, Garçon is built for any situation that calls for sophistication, elegance and culture.

Dead simple collaboration in the cloud

GoSoapBox is used during class to break down participation barriers, keeping students engaged, and giving teachers insight into student comprehension that was never before possible.

Entypo is a set of 100+ carefully crafted pictograms available as an OpenType font, vector EPS and web font. All released for free under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA.

Jonah Lehrer’s recent article in the New Yorker Groupthink: the brainstorming myth, is a tragedy. It makes many poor conclusions and will do more harm than good. The article is an attack on the concept of brainstorming, but his assumptions and reasoning are flawed. I have no stake in brainstorming as a formalized thing. It’s a method, and I’ve studied many idea generation methods. If done properly, in the right conditions, some of the them help. I’m not bothered by valid critiques of any of them.  However, sweeping claims based on bad logic and careless thinking need to be addressed.

The Web has entered an era of user-centricity. If businesses are to attract new customers and retain existing ones, they must create websites and apps that deliver intuitive and tailored experiences. Whether you run an online retailer or a not-for-profit community website, the user experience is mission critical.

Three beautiful, illustrated hardbound books a year, each holding six articles and six personal lessons that use the maturing of the discipline of web design as a starting point for deeper explorations of our work and who we are as designers.

One of the trickiest questions we can ask of data is how to compare a bunch of smaller items all at once. It’s also one of the most common questions, whether we want to analyze online advertisements, or understand different products, or compare customer segments by region. And to find an answer, we usually end up doing the same thing every time: we’ll take that list of items and rank them by some important value. For example, which online advertisements have the highest click rate? Or which products are purchased the most often? Or what are the top regions by revenue?

Cameras! It’s almost impossible to get away from cameras nowadays, yet most of us use them with the bare minimum of knowledge required to snap the nearest tweet-worthy scene. That’s not because we don’t care about truly pretty pictures — even casual observers know the difference between good and bad photography — but have you tried to make an educated choice between cameras lately?

The dashed line is exquisitely rich with information. A line formed from a continuous series of dashes is diminished in strength when compared to a solid line, yet in terms of visual language, it is just as powerful. The weakness of the dashed line is it’s strength.

Use It Better™ – behavioral analytics for rich media ads, games and websites made with Adobe Flash and soon HTML5

The speed geek's favorite time of the year

Wow! That sounds fantastic to me. I’d love to be able to use selectors in a way that makes sense for my architecture and let the rendering engine handle selector optimization. So, what did he do? Not just one thing, rather he created multiple levels of optimization — we’ll take a look at four optimizations in particular:

Style Sharing
Rule Hashes
Ancestor Filters
Fast Path

I’ve been recently working on optimizing performance of a so-called one-page web app. The application was highly dynamic, interactive, and was heavily stuffed with new CSS3 goodness. I’m not talking just border-radius and gradients. It was a full stack of shadows, gradients, transforms, sprinkled with transitions, smooth half-transparent colors, clever pseudo-element -based CSS tricks, and experimental CSS features.

Aside from looking into bottlenecks on Javascript/DOM side, I decided to step into the CSS land. I wanted to see the kind of impact these nice UI elements have on performance. The old version of the app — the one without all the fluff — was much snappier, even though the JS logic behind it hasn’t changed all that drastically. I could see by scrolling and animations that things are just not as quick as they should be.

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process.

Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for. In this article, we’ll show you how spending more time up front designing user flows leads to better results for both the user and business. Then we’ll look in depth at a common flow for e-commerce websites (the customer acquisition funnel), as well as provide tips on optimizing it to create a complete customer experience.

The timeless playability of classic games meets the latest technology to deliver a truly hands-on play experience.

Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper.

The Funf Open Sensing Framework is an extensible sensing and data processing framework for mobile devices, developed at the MIT Media Lab. The core concept is to provide an open source, reusable set of functionalities, enabling the collection, uploading, and configuration of a wide range of data types.

Track website keyword positions in search engines Google, Yahoo, Bing.

Make a smart help page for your website. Point the “contact us” or "help" link on your site to a FaqMe page. It's free and your users will be thankful.

A List Apart asked some very smart people (and me) what they learned about the web in 2011.

I wrote about my realization that the problems we face with a multi-device future, the problems we’re trying to solve with responsive design or with other interaction design strategies, these problems are just as much about content strategy, and the solution lives way down in the CM

The Mac wasn’t the first computer to present the user with a virtual desktop of files and folders instead of a command line and a blinking cursor. As every amateur geek historian knows, the core concepts behind the graphical user interface or GUI (including the icons, mouse, and bitmapped graphics) made their debut in 1968 in a presentation by Stanford Research Institute’s Doug Engelbart celebrated as the “mother of all demos.”

Better fonts for better websites.

h5ai makes browsing directories on Apache servers more pleasant. Directories get styled in a modern way and browsing through the folders is enhanced by different views, a breadcrumb and a tree overview.

This definition is a great place to start. Although the discipline has clearly evolved, this breakdown of its scope makes perfect sense. The aspects of content strategy that matter most to Web designers in this definition are design (obviously!), development, presentation and production. In this article, we’ll concentrate on the relationship between content strategy and design in creating, organizing and displaying Web copy.

The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge.

Listgeeks is a socially-oriented platform
for creating, sharing and comparing lists of things.

UI patterns for iOS, Android and more

AUDIOLET IS A JAVASCRIPT LIBRARY FOR REAL-TIME AUDIO SYNTHESIS AND COMPOSITION.

[Quasimondo] made an interesting exhibition project that can easily become a museum furniture.

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

D3 allows you to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model (DOM), and then apply data-driven transformations to the document. As a trivial example, you can use D3 to generate a basic HTML table from an array of numbers. Or, use the same data to create an interactive SVG bar chart with smooth transitions and interaction.

Printable templates for iPhone, iPAd, website and calendar.