What do your car, pants pocket, and refrigerator have in common with your life on the Web?

They all have a well designed, easy to use way of storing your data and actions, and they're called dashboards.

And now you're probably scratching your head or fighting the urge to raise an eyebrow, but trust me on this one. The wallet in your pants pocket and your refrigerator door with the hodgepodge of stuff are dashboards, just like the one in our cars and countless Web applications. But how can I safely make such an argument? Well, if a dashboard is an interface through which you get to key information and actions, then my point isn't as far off as you might have thought. In a way, your life is full of dashboards.

Going Existential

Your car, your refrigerator door, and your wallet are the most common real world dashboards. Whenever I intend to travel, make a purchase, or provide my contact information, my wallet is there to facilitate each action. It neatly holds my state ID, credit cards, insurance info, business cards, and small personal items. It’s the hub for nearly every transaction I make. Whenever I need to, I can easily reach for it and dive into something with very little effort. It's always my jumping-off point for transactions, quickly providing an overview of nearly everything I'll need.

Likewise, my refrigerator door is another dashboard. It has a whiteboard of to-do items, a running shopping list, magnets holding up coupons and notes, and an occasional piece of art. It's my hub for things that need to be done in and out of the apartment. But how does this pass on to life on the Web?

Well, just like your car, wallet, and refrigerator, nearly every Web application has a dashboard of some sort. Those dashboards can hold your friends' activity, provide managerial actions, and serve as a warehouse of your media or activity. For large-scale services like Google or Flickr, a dashboard is often the only way to access and create new content, manage users and permissions, read notifications and alerts, and more. It's the life-line of your activity and content.

As Luke Wroblewski points out, it's a "Me-centric structure" that truly sells a Web application's dashboard:

Within such a structure there may be a need for a dashboard that provides a horizontal view through the relationship layers (mostly snapshots of and links to content) to encourage exploration and highlight features.

Creating the Experiences

Your wallet and iGoogle are great examples of how dashboards should perform. Even before you start to add stuff to your wallet or customize your iGoogle, it's a functional and ingenious piece of design. As a platform that your visitors keep coming back to, these dashboards are the first real test of their—keyword being “their”—experiences with your service.

Once someone customizes their wallet or iGoogle, each easily fronts up actions and resources you'll need the most, streamlining your processes in a way that's tailored just for you. Just like a wallet becomes you as you customize it with your ID and credit cards, iGoogle evolves from simply news, weather, and e-mail to your news, your weather, and your e-mail. They go from being simply a structured hierarchy to a full on, me-centered experiences.

As Web designers, we have to be able to craft the platforms for dashboards. It's important for people to easily perform activities on the websites through me-centric dashboards so that they keep coming back. As a well designed and easy to use interface, the dashboard is key to showing visitors how to access and use parts of the site. It's their primary experience with which they gauge the rest of your service.

The question is: how much of a me-centric experience does your dashboard create?

Legend has it that creativity is an exclusive domain of artists, musicians, and inventors born with a special gift which sets them apart from ordinary people. That's ridiculous! You were born with just as many creative neurons as Picasso; it's time to work out the kinks and let them see some daylight. And we're going to show you how to get those juices flowing again.

So what does creativity mean to us? Creativity is a colorful blend of ideas, brainstorms, wireframes, sketches, and passion, which all roll up into a finished work of art. The cornerstone of creativity though, is process; it's what drives things forward. It provides a structure and helps you stay true to a goal, no matter how easy or how complex it may be. One key ingredient to the creative process that often gets overlooked is time. You need to set limits to get creative solutions done.

"[We] have no choice but to stop that [creative] cycle. I mean, if you don't work under time constraints you could never get anything done because it's a messy process, it could go on forever." - David Kelley, Co-Founder of IDEO

Let's take basketball for example. Time plays a deciding factor here as well. In basketball, a player is given 8 seconds to get halfway across the court, and a total of 24 seconds to put the ball into the hoop. If he uses up that time to dribble around and look fancy, the clock will run out, and his team will lose possession of the ball. Ignoring time as part of the process means that player just spent a whole lot of time and never got anything done with it. Time limits keep us honest by forcing us to finish what we're doing for better or worse.

One of the techniques that we use to get our creative juices flowing is our Friday 15's. The key ingredient? You guessed it: time. Let's borrow some goals from one of our previous Friday 15's. We're going to leave the creativity part up to you though.

Friday 15: Piece Yourself Together

• Find the nearest stack of old magazines.
• Grab some scotch tape, several blank sheets of paper, and a few pairs of scissors — one for each team member.
• Now, set the timer at 15 minutes and let your team dive in and tear up each magazine to create an ad that best represents themselves.
• Keep it short and simple, and most importantly, have fun doing it.
• Oh, and don't run with scissors!!!

"I'm just not a creative person." Really?

You're not a creative person... So you wake up, mentally punch out for sixteen hours and then fall back asleep? You must be great at parties. I mean, I get why people say it because not everyone is encouraged on a daily basis to be a creative snowflake. But confidence issues aside, we all need to realize that everybody is creative.

Actually, creativity is tied to passion. It's the desire to exceed the humdrum, bare minimum requirements for whatever you put your mind to. As long as you have a passion for something then you'll think creatively. Creativity is looking for solutions to challenges, and we all know life is full of challenges.

So why is this important for us to realize? Because the world you see outside your window - that's right, look away from the monitor for a moment - contains more inspiration and creativity than anything you're going to see your computer screen.

Jim Krause wrote that you should be a human satellite that constantly scans your surroundings for ideas, concepts and different ways of approaching your problems. Take for example, the surgical team who looked to Ferrari's pit crew for ways to improve their operating room techniques, or consider the fact that the shoes some of you are wearing right now are around because of a waffle iron.

All said, it's easy to get wrapped up in the world of creative publications, bleeding-edge blogs and $800 conferences. Just remember not to limit yourself to these sources for your creativity. Don't misunderstand, the good people who put their hearts and souls into developing these engines of creativity deserve praise and pats on the back. But try this - take your eyes off the sidewalk on your way back from getting a coffee once in a while. You may be surprised by what you learn.

Zazzle, one of our oldest clients, just won a TechCrunch Crunchie for Best Business Model. Over 100,000 people voted and awards went out to the likes of Wordpress, Facebook, and my personal favorite, the iPhone.

Congrats to everyone who won, and especially all those who were nominated!

We've been working with our friends at Photobucket for over a year on all sorts of changes to their service. We've designed and coded parts of their upload feature, photo albums, photo pages and "find stuff" section, as well as led the company's first user tests in Denver. It's been a fun ride watching their user base tick up from 20 million to over 50 million people and sell to MySpace for $300 million.

Photobucket is a cool company because they focus on giving people what they want--control over their content and a no-frills site to interact with it. Founder and CEO Alex Welch has also created a bootstrap culture not afraid to try and fail and try again. We like that kind of gunslinging approach because it's the quickest way to produce big, measurable results.

This past month we got on the horn with Alex, Michael, Dan and the rest of the team in Denver to talk about a little side project they have named TinyPic.com. Currently ranked 320th worldwide on Alexa's traffic rankings, TinyPic is one part Photobucket, one part TinyUrl. It gives you free upload for photos and videos without signing up for an account. There are no photo albums or private storage for pictures, you just post it up there, grab the links you need, and forget about it.

At least that's how a lot of people are using TinyPic. One of the aims of this redesign was to start changing that behavior a little bit. Could we figure out a way to expose people to more of that site's content? Would people even care? Would any new traffic stick? The idea was to measure some improvement in people's behavior and learn from the experience. Along the way the team added multi-lingual support, cleaned up the site's code to get pages loading and rendering faster for a snappier experience, and added a touch more personality with the visual design.

Two weeks later and the early returns are promising. Some of the changes in behavior we wanted are happening. We look forward to learning more from customers and making new changes to improve the service next year.