The ZURBlog is where we discuss interaction design and strategy.

CyberRead is a "socially responsible ebook retailer providing outstanding customer support for today's book lovers." They offer over 55,000 ebooks in a variety of formats for hundreds of devices, including your PC, Blackberry, Pocket PC, and more.

We helped CyberRead integrate a new look and feel while ironing out the architecture and spearheading the addition of new site features like reviews and recommendations. Having begun our work with redesigning the product pages, we had a renewed sense of direction and focus for the rest of the site.

We focused our efforts on the product pages, homepage, and browse pages. By doing so, we addressed the three methods of accessing and purchasing ebooks, improving each one along the way.

We're excited that this has finally gone live. It was a joy to work with Clint and his team of developers while moving this forward. We can't wait to get back in there for some more!

And if you like ebooks, visit CyberRead and be sure to let us know what you think.

We've been working hard with the TinyPic crew over the last several months, and it's really paid off. We've seen more uploads, more browsing, more sharing, and had a great time seeing it all unfold. Today, TinyPic has launched their new Categories feature, an updated way to browse for images and videos.

The homepage saw the most changes with this push. We removed Featured Images & Videos in favor of Featured Categories and added a new Categories tab to the main navigation. Categories will be a nice addition to searching for images and videos on TinyPic, providing better SEO and showing the wide variety of content TinyPic has to offer.

What's really cool is that for each category, we have a featured image to represent it. Note the little magnifying glass in the bottom right. Clicking that will take you to the full size view of that image, but clicking anywhere else on the image will take you to that category. It's a neat little UI feature that we've taken from the TinyPic Plugin we've been working on.

The other changes are the most obvious: Categories and sub-categories. We've gone only one level deep here to keep things as simple as we can. For instance, you want to find People, and we've got that and more: Kate Beckinsale, Michael Phelps, and more.

Go forth and browse Categories!

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.