Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin - a Danish business-weekly - has just elected the top-100 young entrepreneurs in Denmark. To our great pleasure one of our founders - Anders Lau Nielsen - tops the even more exclusive top-10 of the most promising individuals.

As Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin puts it, the criterium has been to find the elite within the ‘young, forward-driven and result-oriented.
Should you be interested and Danish-speaking, you can read the entire article in the Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin special ‘Talent100′ (out today) or the resume.

Here’s a rare opportunity to see what we’re working on in the design department, when we’re not beating the sales team to a bloody pulp in Wii Tennis.

(Warning, long post, but you can scroll down to the pretty pictures if you only have a sec before Paradise Hotel is on).

This is an idea I came up with when browsing historic tube maps of the London Underground. What weirdo browses tube maps you may ask. You just use tube maps to figure out how to get from Piccadilly Circus to Camden market and that’s it, right?

That’s exactly why they’re interesting. Tube maps are remarkable examples of good information graphics.

Here’s an example:
Think of the last time you used a tube map. Try to think of a specific design detail that you either hated or thought was cool…

Nothing specific pops into mind right?

Now try to recall a time where you couldn’t figure out which tube stops on what stations…

Again, nothing.

That’s because tube maps are so well designed. They’re visually pleasing, but still nothing steals your attention away from the actual task. That’s in essence how every interface should be.

Now on to the funnel chart concept.
In a way funnel charts is like tube maps. They show something “traveling” from A to B and every stop in between. In this case A is the entry into the funnel, B is the final step in the funnel a.k.a. the conversion point, and all the stops in between is the various web pages in the funnel.

Below is an illustration where I’ve tried to visualize the idea.

Of course the end result should require no explanations, but since this concept is in it’s very early stages, here’s a quick description of what you see.

1. On the left, you see all the entries into the funnel. It could be directly from a specific marketing activity, another page, or another site etc.
2. Behind the colored lines in the middle is some boxes representing the pages in the funnel.
3. To the left you see where all the people went, who didn’t continue down the funnel.
4. Each colored line represent a source that led people into a specific page in the funnel.

The idea is that you are able to follow the source (A) all the way to either conversion (B) or where they exit from the funnel (the stops in between).

Here’s an idea for interaction that would help to home in on the path from a specific source.

That’s it. A hundred years old information graphics design is inspiration for cutting edge software of tomorrow. Actually it is exactly hundred years ago in 1908 that one of the first London tube maps with separate colored lines was created. So let’s call this post a tribute to the great tube maps of yesterday.

(source: A History of the London Tube Maps)

Skilled Interface Designer wanted
We are looking for a talented graphic Interface designer to join our design team in creating astonishing interfaces for our marketing suite, Headlight. As designer you will join the creative design crew of our chief designer, design communicator, and chief of innovation. Your task will be to participate in the conceptual design phase to the final development phase, by visualizing ideas, designing finished screens, to creating HTML mock-ups for future Headlight modules.

At TraceWorks we have strong opinions on how we want our software to look, and how it feels to work with. Endless feature lists doesn’t mean much to us. It is more important that our software fulfill the actual needs of our customers and is a pleasure to work with. By constant use of the latest knowledge and technology, we are continuously pushing the barriers of what our customers are able get done with our software. Our highest priority is to break down complicated marketing data into comprehensible actionable information that doesn’t require a doctor’s degree to interpret.

Needed qualifications:

• Passionate about graphic user interface design
• Strong theory of general graphic design
• Creative and has good illustration skills
• Strong in web design technologies like HTML and CSS.
• Fluent in relevant Adobe software
• Good skills with Flash and JavaScript is a plus
• Comprehension of online marketing is a plus

To learn a little on what we’re influenced and inspired by, check out this post on The Dojo

To learn more about working at TraceWorks and how to apply, go see the jobs section

In the attempt to show who we are and what take we have on software design (by we, I mean the freaks in the TraceWorks design dept.), I’ve collected a list of sources from which we gather our inspiration.

The amount of information available on interface design today is massive compared to last century when I started practicing this mystical art form. By that I mean to warn you dear reader, that we’re only human(ish) and the list is by no means the complete list of everything worth knowing.

Consider it a good starting point, and by all means tell us if you know of something we should check out. Ok! here we go:

Clever people

• Donald Norman, author of Design of Everyday Things, which we read a hundred years ago and started our crusade against poor design.
• Alan Cooper, a fairly new addition to our inspiration chest. We found out that we share the same views on software design, but Cooper has formalized it into a method called Goal Directed Design (which is what we’re tampering with at the moment).
• 37 signals, we where very inspired by these guys in the early days. They where sort of the first to shout out that business software don’t have to suck.
• Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing With Web Standards, and the master mind behind a list apart
• Edward Tufte, the man to see for theory on information graphics (although his books is a wee bit on the dry side).
• Seth Godin, has some pretty good points on marketing and product design, along with a good sense of humor.
• Henrik Birkvig Danish author of several graphic design books. Basic but imperative knowledge for any designer.

Blogs in our RSS reader
Here’s a list of blogs about design, software, or technology that we read frequently. To describe each one individually would make both you and I sleepy. Because, you probably know how it is with blogs; you read some of the posts, others you ignore, and they even post the same stories now and again. So it’s really just about leeching the information you want from all of them at the same time.

• xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
• information aesthetics
• Cool Hunting
• The Dashboard Spy
• Smashing Magazine
• TechCrunch
• Mashable
• Logic + emotion

Of course there’s a lot more than these on the radar, but if tied naked to a seatless chair with a eastern European gangster holding a set of red hot pliers uncomfortably close to my reproductive organs, that is the list I’d make.

Books
Here’s a list of books on the theory of product design and interface design. Some of them you should read cover to cover, others you can just pick out the tasty bits you need in what ever design task you’re facing.

They’re pretty good for proving points as well. People tend to believe what they read in books. So should you, may higher powers forbid it, be confronted with a disbeliever in you team, you can always slam “the manual” on the table and say “it says so right here”. I’d recommend a slightly more gentle approach if you’re dealing with clients though.

I’ve collected them all in an Amazon list here, if you want to investigate further.

This one is in Danish.

Smukkere grafisk design a danish book by Henrik Birkvig. If you’re an experienced designer, you’ll probably not learn anything new from this book. But it’s pretty cool for brushing up on basic design principles now and again.

On the basis of our focus on user-friendliness TraceWorks has acquired help from Snitker & Co. to engage in collaboration about Headlight and the individual user. Through different workshops we will try to find out exactly how we can make Headlight even better and more intuitive for our different users.

The danger in any development phase is, of course, to develop solutions which you find useful or cool yourself; thereby making decisions center around “what we want” rather than “what users need”.

In order to get a clear picture of actual user-needs together with Snitker & Co. we have used Personas which has proven to be very useful. In short, ‘Personas’ are tangible, but fictitious descriptions of the users and their actions, which you setup to fully understand demands, needs and interactions with Headlight.

As you can see this method involves a lot of post-it’s.

We’re delighted to announce that TraceWorks has been nominated for The Innovation Award 2008 presented by The Foundation of e-Commerce.

This year the Foundation of e-Commerce (e-Handelsfonden) brings “the personalized net” and the customer into focus. And furthermore; what are the next steps of e-commerce?

We are of course thrilled that others also regard us as innovative – and especially in connection with our focus on next-level marketing solutions through ease-of-use.

As The Innovation Award is given out for “a creative way to use the online-channel to create value or future value” it’s nice to be recognized as one of the top dogs by the industry. In particular as we’ll focus even more on different values for different customers in the future – and always with innovative systems built with the user’s understanding in mind.

The award takes place on the 27th of March. Fingers crossed.

Many - especially Danes - would argue that Denmark’s not the cheeriest of places this time of year. And, consequently, we need to focus almost entirely on indoor activities.

So, with distinct lack of vitamin D, but eagerness to keep improving TraceWorks and especially Headlight, we’ve jump-started 2008 with the hiring of yet another super traceworker.

As our new DBA (database administrator) Andrés will be part of what we expect to be a very significant year in the history of TraceWorks. So, welcome Andrés, and - to all friends, customers and affiliates - a great 2008!

TraceWorks is growing like crazy. The last 3 months 5 new super talents joined the TraceWorks Express.

Help us out, we’re looking for 5 more:

Technical Development

• Expert MS DBA & Architect TAKEN
• Obsessed API Senior Developer
• Fanatical ASP.NET Developer

Sales

• Regional Sales Representative, Scandinavia

Marketing

• Marketingkoordinator

The job postings are also listed on Denmark’s best job board, SpotAJob

All TraceWorks Team will be out of office the next 1½ days.

Office will be closed between:
Wednesday November 28th 9:00 through Thursday November 29th at 14:00 (GMT+1)

In case you really really need to get in touch with us, please dial +45 33 118 118

WHY is that?
We will be planning and creating Great-New-Stuff for all existing and new team members and customers…

I’ve seen a lot of PowerPoint presentations lately, most of them was ok but there’s plenty of room for improvement in general. As a designers we’re probably a bit more sensitive to visual noise than non-designers, but never mind that. I’m not going to go all design-elitist on you, everyone that can open PowerPoint can create a good presentation. Unfortunately some that can open PowerPoint seem to think that BECAUSE it’s created in PowerPoint, it’s a good presentation. That is more or less as far as you get from the truth.

So in the interest of making the world a better place here’s a presentation on creating presentations that should be mandatory for all presenters.

Via core77