King & McGaw Developers

• Unofficial documentation for the Tesla REST (ish) API. I never expected to see something like GET /vehicles/{id}/command/honk_horn in a car!
• 2013 trends in interactive design. Hint: mobile-first and bold, flat designs.
• No more ‘mobile’. The term ‘mobile’ is as good as useless these days, so we may need some new terms to define what we actually mean.
• A really long Scoble interview with the co-founders of Path. Some really interesting insights from seasoned technology veterans.
• Design for continuous experimentation. Etsy’s Dan McKinley talks about some of the successes, failures and processes at Etsy.

And a quote on branding:

The consumer now appears to believe that the brand should earn its public attention the way all of us must. Say boring, repetitive stuff and you suffer the punishment that every bad conversationalist faces. First, we ignore you. Then, we exclude you.

Grant McCracken in the Harvard Business Review.

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It’s been a busy week for the tech team at Easyart this week (more on that later), but I’ve got a backlog of some interesting links in my Evernote that I want to share.

• The 90 day plan. We try to do quarterly plans here, but this has inspired me to do better.
• Developer creates Github issues for his house.
• Anil Dash: All dashboards should be feeds. I don’t entirely agree but he makes an interesting case.
• Hessian is a pre-made brand, for sale for $18,000.
• Multicolr Search Lab.

And this quote from Justin Kan’s article Experienced Hires Will Save You From Yourself:

My general rule of thumb at Exec has been that as a founder, you should do the first version of everything yourself. Build the first product, test the first sales channels. By doing things yourself, you can quickly discover if they will pay dividends (or if it is time to move on to the next experiment). Once you discover something worth doing, then hire a professional to come in and clean up the mess you’ve made.

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Looking back some of our metrics for Easyart.com for 2012, this one stood out:

92% more mobile transactions YOY

Coupled with our responsive design and performance improvements (like improving our average page speed by 40%), we’ve also increased our mobile conversion rate significantly over 2012 and hope to see that trend continue in 2013.

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Here’s some things that popped up on my radar this week:

• Slideshow with 15 years of the Apple homepage
• LayerVault have had a lovely redesign.
• Abe Burmeister: How I Built A Fashion Brand With No Experience, Just Punk Rock Spirit (And The Web). Inspiring presentation on the story behind Outlier.
• howdoi looks like a really useful way to get inline help in the terminal for a number of languages
• Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution. An in-depth article on Google’s new focus on design.
• Skinny Ties and responsive eCommerce. Case study on a responsive redesign of an ecommerce store.
• Reminder: Design is still about words
• The Great Discontent’s profile on Jessica Walsh. Surprisingly I’d never seen this site before, but I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it.

I’ve also been making my way through some of the talks from last year’s Bacon conference. The three I have watched so far have all been top-notch:

• Monitoring sucks (and what you can do about it)
• Customers who bought music also bought beer
• Stories from a music-fueled distributed streaming bender

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I liked this nice little post-install message from HTTParty:

Post-install message from httparty:
When you HTTParty, you must party hard!

Code can have personality too!

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