So check out UXMinded.com for more interesting and new posts on this subject. Starting from the 1st of March 2012!

A little while ago (as far as 2 years is ‘a little while’) I paid a lot of attention to my personal branding. Not just branding, but online branding. I wanted to have topics on top in search engines that where related to me and of course especially the results in Google.

That time I started to have bad stuff (although there was none ) removed in each way (kicking down those results, remove pages, etc) and also started to improve my personal presence on the web. That way those preferred result start to popup and bad results where gone.

Last year I moved from Dutch into English with my website-language, which could have an impact on my results for my personal website. But after monitoring this I noticed that I did well on the changes I made and next to a lot of other results, the results showing this website are still very good and very on top on all searching related to me and my working area.

Although I’m not a huge fan of Twitter, I did decide to use it more often to check the impact and the results. Related to the subject of this post I’m very keen on seeing not only my Twitter account in a prominent place in Google, but even my recent posts are showing up now and then in a great way (check the screenshot).

The fun part of this is that I wanted to have a descriptive page to shown up in Google when people would search on ‘wie is Tim Huijbers‘ (who is Tim Huijbers), the result is even in English phenomenal .

Maybe I should make a presentation this and present it within the company I work for, maybe..

One of the core aspects of User Experience is measuring your succes. Not only as a proof of your optimization, not only to be able to determine next steps, but also for fun!

So besides having details about usage etc, I’d also started to measure my new mobile websites with a dedicated mobile analytics package! Again, not just very informative, but also just very, very cool!

Feel free to checkout my simple screenshot of one of my mobile sites and if you want an account yourself (free, with limitations), check out Percentmobile.

This week I launched my first mobile website, fully designed and created by myself ! Although it is still in beta (some menu functions aren’t working) and probably a lot of functions will be added soon, it is now live for the iPhone and Android mobile phones!

You can check the website on http://sushitoko.mobi which is a Dutch website about restaurants serving sushi! You can easily search for a sushi restaurant nearby in the place you are living (or driving ) and directly call or mail them (by a simple click, no need for copying numbers etc, ideally when you’re driving!) , also you can check youtube movies of that restaurant (if available) and check other stuff like opening hours and location.

You can even click on the ‘google map’ option to directly open your Google Maps and use Google’s free navigation to navigate to that restaurant, ain’t that slick!

This website is a ‘sister website’ of http://www.sushitoko.nl (and http://www.sushimaken.nl) which are both designed by me as well. This way I already had the content available both the thoughts behind the websites are complete different. While the pc-websites are focussing on informing the user, the mobile site only serves what’s directly needed. No redundant information there, only direct info like what restaurant is close, how’s the food, when are they open and of course direct actions like ‘call directly’ and ‘enter navigation’, all focussed on phone use!

Please check out the beta and be there when the next update will be done to the website, there is more to come!

Sometimes I’ll feel kinda dorky as care about figures shouldn’t be the most important thing in live.  And although poor children in countries who recently experienced a big disaster might need more attention, I still do care about those figures (and not just because it’s a part of my job ).

Anyhow, next to my normal day job I also have a few (to many..) websites my self which have in total about 110.000 visits each month (and so many pageviews that Google even wants to charge me for it, sorry stupid Friday afternoon joke).

And as many people I do have some websites which I threat as my ‘little baby’ and one of those website has had a lot of SEO time, so maybe my other babies might start complaining about this soon, but thanks to that SEO time the already grown up baby started to reach a pretty mature state..

If you checkout that full version screenshot which I toke from my Google Analytics account, then you’ll notice my website has 15.000 visits on one day and about 60.000 pageviews one that same day. Pretty amazing as the site normally has around 2000-3000 visits a day and thanks to Google the visits ‘rijzen de pan uit’ (sorry for that dutch sentence, it means something like ‘break every limit’).

Next to being proud I’m also feeling sorry for my other soon to be grown up children, the seem to lack this kind of attention of SEO. Some of them grow as well, thanks to their big brother, but the main thing is that I’ve proven my SEO skills (again, yeah!).

Next step is to earn money of this as advertisers don’t pay per CPM at this moment, to bad for me!

(and feel free to send me your success stories and graphs!)

Recently I read an article which was about an interview. The interview itself was about marketing stuff (I won’t bother you with it, it was in Dutch). So the topic was not that bad, but still I had a hard time following the full interview.

The complete interview toke place in about 7 minutes and there were 2 people sitting at a table discussing some topics. But after a minute and half I start clicking in the progress bar to skip to next parts of the video to speed it up a bit. Is that because the video wasn’t that interesting as I just mention, or is that just me acting like the next generation, scanning the video instead of viewing it

After this happends I made a comment about this below that interview, but somehow it kept my mind busy and I felt I needed to write it down.

Most of you know how people read the web already, so just check out that page if you need more info on that. But could it be that we are also evolving to a new way of ‘reading’ online videos? Although you might think I’m the the only (although I don’t ), there must be some explanation for this. Or at least some possibility to measure this and take actions.

Videos become important

Online video is booming. Not just now, but it growing fast for years and it’s getting bigger and bigger (so far the things you already knew..). But as it gets bigger, it becomes more common and familiar for users. Also videos aren’t execeptions anymore but everybody is pushing that information. As a reaction to those things the mass will start evolving their way of reading the videos, which means that we also need to adapt on the development side to be sure we can still deliver the message as intended.

How we will view videos

The big question will be ‘how do users view videos?’. Of course i don’t have a solid answer, but i can at least tell you my ideas and convert the tradional reading tips into viewing tips.

First start with translation Jakob Nielsen’s idea’s into meaningful tips for viewing online videos (so keep this article in mind):

• Highlight important information in the video (repeat, focus or use another technique to show that this info is important)
• Good structure of the video. Make the structure logical (follow AIDA) and make sure the user understands where it will lead to)
• Make sure people can check the information they want to without the need to view the complete videos or with the risk missing information (use markers, start your video with an option to jump to specific parts
• Make it fast to load, and beware of using HD as a lot of users might have interruptions during playback.
• Make it short,  commercially short.
• Let people know the content of the video in the beginning (as the info in the descriptions might be lost when embedded).

That’s just a start keeping videos interesting for your target audience. It’s almost like giving them a presentation, but then more fluid, more cool and hopefully more interesting.

With some research we can probably come up with more stuff we need to focus on.

Mobile usage

A subject we have to keep in mind is that videos are very related to mobile. The mobile market is also still growing, mostly for next generation phones like the iPhone, Blackberries and Android cellphones.

On mobile phones people might even be harder to catch and to stay focussed than people viewing videos on their desktops. On a mobile you are always in a hurry, you sometimes need to pay more for your data, screen is smaller etc. So all above point also count for mobile users.

Wouldn’t it be cool when mobile users could just see what the video is about and then skip to the part that’s interesting for them, and afterwards feeling good instead of afraid that they missed something or they’ll get the biggest phone bill ever?

Measure videos

Somehow you need to measure how many people are viewing your videos, what they watched, whether they skipped sections etc. Although I won’t go deeper into these techniques now, I just wanted to let you know that this is possible with every analytics package like Google Analytics (use events or virtual pageviews) and you’ll have the first data inhouse within soon.

Another good suggestion to measure this is user testing. Just get someone of the streets, a few of time, and let them view your videos. Next to fun it will also come up with interesting details, give it a try.

Examples

I just want to show you that everything is possible already, but just a small bunch of people is using it. For example, did you see the Youtube Piano? This move is about playing piano directly by clicking in the movie. The technique behind this can be used for changing videos into more useful and interesting information.

I know that there are a lot of those examples so if you’d like to share your examples, feel free to post them here. If I’ll find some high quality videos myself which are matching the above information then I’ll post those as well.

I think Google Wave already passed his preview stage. Actually it already passed it’s beta, live and hype stage. Worse, it might be dead already.

Can a product as cool (gool..) as Google Wave can die so soon without being released to the big crowd? I just read a Wave from someone who said ‘is it dead yet?’, he might be right, or isn’t he? I’ll give you some reasons why the big G lost this one already.

Crappy usability

The whole interface has a Gmail feeling, which is good. But the placement of sub-screens (especially when they are minimized), the unclear menu options, wavelets everywhere (even for the settings) are not really helping the acceptance of this new product. Did you ever check the new scrollbars, nice design but crappy to use.

Most of this is because we’re just not used to this standard, so it’s cool to see but if the mass cannot use the product because their IQ doesn’t reach 100, the product becomes useless.

Lot’s of errors

Going into big waves is horrible, they take hours to load but even days to scroll through them. So please don’t invite your mom to join the wave. Before you’ll even notice the wave gets filled with details about upcoming Christmas, you cousin or how bad the neighbors behaved and you wave becomes so slow that you’ll never be able to send a reply back to your mom.

Oh wait, that can be a good thing either..

It’s slow, really really slow

Did I already mentioned that is was slow? Not just a big wave is slow, the entire programs loads like a big pile of sh*t going down the toilet (sorry for that). Nowadays when I want to load the website, I even start up my Android for a nice game of Mahjong. When I’ve finished my 3rd game, finally something shows up on my screen. I don’t want to spend 2010 on waiting for apps to load, that ain’t a good example off working in the cloud!

Unclear how and where to use for

It’s something like emailing with the speed of Twitter and the possibilities of chat. Lost me? That’s exactly what I mean. Although it looks cool, it also gives you a bad feeling about what it is about, why the hassle? So you use it once, twice if you are really geeky, but then it end with a pure dissatisfaction. Yeah your account died to, join the club.

Ugly and stupid gadgets

In your wavelets you’ll have the possibility to add gadgets, which can be used by all readers of the wave. There are gadgets like mini conference rooms (you can even see each other;)), drawing (yeah you can draw together, WOW!), showing maps and polls (don’t push me) and other fancy stuff.

The problem is that this fancy stuff makes the waves slower, are as ugly as.. , screw up the layout even more and mostly contain stuff from the 80s.

Thanks Google for bringing Paint back to live in the cloud, can’t wait for Word Perfect!

Bot’s in your contact list

You have the possibilities to have real time translation on sentences you type (although speaking of realtime such a slow speed might not be realtime, that’s for you to decide), also you can chat with bots and ‘god’ knows what else. But everytime you add such a service, it shows up in your contact list as a new contact.

Why should you have 10 bots in your contacts, while the real people you want to Wave with are buried deeply somewhere in your contacts overview.

Terminology used by l33t

Sorry but introducing new terminology like Waves, wavelets, blips, blaps and blops isn’t really cool, it’s annoying. Even I have a hard time to understand and fully read articles about Google Wave terminology and in my opinion I’m not in the same target audience as my 90 year old granny, so I guess she will never understand what’s happening on her screen. She is a fan of Facebook though…

Great!

Maybe I should bring my first aid kit and try to save this high quality piece of technology, but I probably need some more people to help me save it.

I’ve some invites left, so if you really care to save the Wave from its cardiac arrest then send me an email. I’ll will send you the invite via Google Wave. (yes that means that I have an account myself and my template is black, deathly black).

More information on what Google Wave actually is can be found in the article on Mashable.

I’m always looking for fun and new e-marketing possibilities. Not just to use them myself but also to read what other people do with it.

Relatively new are the mobile QR codes, while existing for a while now, not many companies used them for their cool campaign yet. Some of them did and came up with nice ideas, I’ll just want to share a few of them with you together with some basic mobile phone QR code background information to get you started.

First of all, if you have no idea what i’ve been talking about so far (QR codes, what codes?), then you really need to read the wikipedia pages first. If you are already aware of those codes and how they work, feel free to continue reading this very informative story .

Create your own QR codes

Of course the most fun thing to do after reading this story is to create those codes yourself. Via on online generator (this one is very good) you can easily created the codes yourself and copy the generated image into anything you want. Via the generator you can quickly create codes for:

• Calender Events (send you friends a card with this code!)
• Contact Informat (vCard, how cool is it to let people scan you business cards and then automatically save you as a new contact!)
• Email Address (Use the codes in your signatures, isn’t that fun!)
• Geo Location (Create routes for the kid, a whole new dimension in GPS based real life games!)
• Phone Number (Scared to ask you favorite girl for her number, ask for her QR code!)
• SMS (Send out predefined SMS, easy for companies to have people send a sms to a pre-defined number with the text ‘call me for an offer now’!)
• URL (On your websites, magazines or whatever, let people easily go to the websites (of course prepare for a mobile version of your website!))
• Text (of course all kinds of normal text are available, be creative and send a postcard to your favorite valentin with a QR code saying ‘I love you’ , ain’t that nice!)

The options showed here are standard options within the generator but as the code can store anything, be creative and use your imagination (e.g. Android Apps can be easily found in the market using the market:// as an url, more information on the Android Dev website)

Cool virals

Recently some websites reported about the AMOR campagin from Editoras Online which was quite a nice campaign using Twitter, QR Codes and old-style books. Lots of code where sticked on whatever it would stick (see those pictures on Flickr) and a whole buzz was starting. Check out that story for more information on that or view the video.

Another cool viral and buzz which trigger my memories is the Lego Codes MyToys.de. They created advertisement built by real lego bricks. When people scanned those ad’s they were sent to the website where the could buy the Lego. Results showed shat they had a huge increase on sales, of course mostly because of that campaign.  This video shows you how it worked.

Just a few examples and more will possibly follow. If you did find any cool other usages, let me know and feel free to post them in the comments!

After a while everybody got his own reasons to use or not use specific services like Facebook, RSS feeds or forums. Also some people hate Internet Explorer and others almost live within the Apple offices. But that’s also the fun part of opinions; it will never happen that everybody agrees on same side.

Therefore I want to challenge you with 10 reasons why you should avoid Twitter and should never send out any tweets or follow any accounts. And yes, I know that Im using Twitter…

Going even further then the article on Mashable that shows us reasons not to follow someone, I would like to give you 10 reasons to get your life back and stop using Twitter.

So be innovative, cancel your account and just talk to your friends in real life!

1. Even interesting people are sending tweets about the weather

Al lot of people who hate Twitter from the beginning had this comment; “why should you be interested in someones private life”. And although a lot of users told me that Twitter is more then that, it just isn’t! Probably 90% is just tweet-crap about the snowy weather, hot tea drinks in the city, pictures of drunk idiots, spam of company activities, useless location info, crappy music sites, idiotic re-tweets (can i stop now..).

Anyway, although you try to follow interesting in inspiring people, it always end up pressing the unfollow button as you just don’t want to know what their kids did this weekend.

2. 20 kids in a circle

Did you ever play this game? 20 kids sit in a circle and the teacher tells the first kid a short story. The kid had to tell that same story to the next kid, and so on. At the end the last kid had to tell the teacher the story and it’s always completely different to the story originally told to the first kid. Now that’s Twitters and the kids, that’s you again!

Someone tweets some news into the world and at the end the person spoken about ends up dead, killed by a serialkiller and will be cremated while a gospel choir sings Halleluja. The news in the tweets will never be of high quality as we just ain’t journalist (at least most of us are not). So the information quality will start running down the hill as the tweets appear. That’s why the experiment of journalists living on Facebook and Twitter info only, won’t last long.

3. Pictures are crap

Did you notice that 75% of all pictures shown on Twitter do not only contain idiots, pigs (animals..), drunk colleagues or objects hidden in noisy images? I would almost beg for 5 megapixel cam’s in every cellphone so at least the object in the pictures can be recognized, but as people are still making photo’s with the first generation Sony Ericcson’s the picture options in Twitter should be banned.

4. Video’s are crap

You probably didn’t see this one coming, did you? Shall I start talking about crappy SE’s, or maybe this time it’s Nokia’s fault? No it’s just ours. You cannot record friends while losing their heads, throwing up after drinking 6 bottles of water or create movies which have more blur in it, then I’ll have in my mind on a bad monday morning.

5. Contact channel for companies

What the heck is a individual doing on Twitter, it’s for companies only. Why? As some individual cannot find the contact-button on a company website and therefore sent out their own incompentent actions and hope for acknowledgement from other cool individuals. Shouldn’t someone tell them that complaining is not a good habit?

Companies now need to react on such complaints or else they will be bad, get spanked and might not ever use social media again. Didn’t anyone ever heard of a tactic called ‘ignore them’?

6. Twitter advertising is coming your way

Within soon you will be overwhelmed with commercials, banner’s, contextual ad’s and other beautiful and annoying commercial crap which will spoil your Twitter-experience. for now Twitter is finally earning some money via selling their search to the big giants, but it’s just a matter of time before we will be bombed with ad’s as well. Hopefully a full size flash banner fits your mobile screen.

7. It’s for wannabe’s without friends

Okay it sounds kind of harsh, but okay it’s not for all of you, but 60% (..80%) is just using Twitter as they feel a urgent need to be there, get in contact with people who just don’t want to contact them, be interesting, have someone listening to their voice and to spam out there 10 unique-visits-a-day-websites. People following 10.000 of other people can’t be serious, or there dayjob should be ‘checking your tweets’, stop fooling yourself.

8. Just another SPAM channel

No this isn’t about the companies that are on Twitter, this is just us posting crap. Next to shitty tweets we also try to fill in as much crap in our profile as possible, try to get our myspace url’s into the website field (or worse our made-for-adsense-websites) and post unrecognizable bit.ly links to spammy websites which are trying to enter your computer with 50 trojan horses at once.

I’m not even talking about profiles which will automatically follow people based on certain keywords in their profile or tweets, just to send out a I-follow-you-message which contains more commercial info then the weekly package of advertisements I receive in my mailbox. And although you can report those profiles, I’d rather not cause a blind spot on my touchscreen because of pressing that button 100 times a day.

9. Another channel helping the information overload

Should I put in the list of websites & services you need to follow to stay informed about what’s happening in the world? Of course I don’t, as I’m not the first one talking about this.

Twitter is just a new channel with the same information, brought and compiled in a different way. More information to consume, more time to spend, more lifehacking problems. Okay, it goes easier, but posting by mobile isn’t new, Twitter is just smart of using online sms-ing (it that a word?), but I’m glad sms is (still) a bit private (hopefully).

10. RSS feed copied into Twitter

This one is just a personal annoyance of me. Why do websites have the option to follow them on Twitter but just have their RSS feed connected to Twitter? I don’t want to have the same texts and links on the websites and the RSS feeds in my tweet-list. Why shouldn’t my RSS reader be enough, it’s realtime, it’s easy to use, it’s good!

Of course they can send in there links into Twitter, but at least change the text and don’t just connect your feeds, again the unfollow-button is the only cure.

That’s a nice list

Now feel free to send your comments. And yes, you can also send me tweets with your comments ((don’t) follow me on Twitter..)

I’m moving the site to a new layout and from now on everything will be in the English language instead of Dutch.

During the migration the old website will still be available under REMOVED. After 2 years of using various beta versions of the website I now decided to move on to WordPress as I don’t have time to update my own developed code and since WordPress offers so many cool features you’re now looking at the WP template

Step by step stuff may change further, but for now I’ll focus on content, categories etc and maybe some nice stuff.

Meanwhile feel free to follow me on Twitter as I’ll post great articles found on other websites, cool marketing news and other stuff on my Twitter account!

Update: the old site will be removed, it’s now redeveloped to permanently move pages from search engines to the correct new pages. Old website has been translated by Google Translate / SDL.