Earlier this year WEA, Atlantic Records and Warner Brothers Records teamed up with Bolt Peters to conduct user research across three of our top artist websites. On these sites we conducted automated tests using Usabilia, as well as moderated interviews – all with actual fans coming to our websites.

Check out the full case study on the Bolt Peters website.

I rarely have posts that are just links to other design sites, but this is an exception. Almost every post curated by Graphic-Exchange.com is award worthy and it makes up one of the best design collections I’ve seen on the web. A great resource for designers of any kind and an endless source or inspiration.

Check out Graphic-Exchange.com here.

Pinterest is a bookmarking tool, introduced to me by Jenny Bowskill, that operates like a visual pinboard – letting you save images you like and follow people who share your aesthetics. Users set up categories (known as boards) and pin images by clicking a browser plugin or bookmarklet. Unlike some visual collections, a link to the original is always preserved, but a poster image is saved on Pinterest should the original change. The site also functions as a stream of images which you can repin, like or comment on. Pinterest is well thought out, easy to use, and its unique user interface has already been the subject of (accused) imitation by the new Myspace.

Visit my Pinterest profile.

Check out Pinterest here.

While not all of the questions pertain to those of us outside of Silicon Valley, answering some of these questions will be helpful to anyone pitching new ideas/products. I’ve stripped down the survey to include 10 key quesions I plan on asking myself, and my product people at Atlantic Records, before we begin work on new products.

1. What are you going to make?

2. What’s new about what you’re doing?

3. What do you understand about your business that other companies just don’t get?

4. What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn’t exist?

5. How will you make money?

6. Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors?

7. Who do you fear most?

8. Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate?

9. What might go wrong? (This is a test of imagination, not confidence.)

10. Please tell us something surprising or amusing that you have discovered.

See the full application, with answers here.

I’m not sure if I’m the standard use case for Twitter, but ultimately Twitter is a replacement for my RSS reader. Google Reader failed for me, it was all business, and Facebook is all fun. I get most of my news from the service, but as a social stream it’s intended to be temporal, and important information can get missed or forgotten.

Enter Packrati.us. This service lets you configure your Twitter account (along with Delicious and Instapaper) to archive links. You can automatically save links that you tweet, favorite or are tweeted to you. You can add tags in delicious based on Twitter hash tags and blacklist certain words. The service is easy to configure and you never have to think about it while continuing to reap the benefits. Highly recommended.

Check out Packrati.us here.

Check out What The Font.

Click here for a link to the document.

Check out CSS iPhone.

Check out the project on GitHub.

Fontfeed.com has a great article on Helvetica and it’s alternatives, reviewing several fonts that have a similar clean feel to Helvetiva without feeling so repetetive.

Read the full article here.