90% Of Everything: Links

One of the more common problems which tends to create doubt and confusion is caused by the inexperienced and anxious executive who innocently expects, or even demands, to see not one but many solutions to a problem. These may include a number of visual and/or verbal concepts, an assortment of layouts, a variety of pictures and color schemes, as well as a choice of type styles. He needs the reassurance of numbers and the opportunity to exercise his personal preferences. He is also most likely to be the one to insist on endless revisions with unrealistic deadlines, adding to an already wasteful and time-consuming ritual. Theoretically, a great number of ideas assures a great number of choices, but such choices are essentially quantitative. This practice is as bewildering as it is wasteful. It discourages spontaneity, encourages indifference, and more often than not produces results which are neither distinguished, interesting, nor effective. In short, good ideas rarely come in bunches.

Targeted selling refers to the delivery of content and offers to different site visitors and customers based on what you know about them. You can apply targeted selling rules to featured products on a home page, cross-sells/upsells on product pages, promotional banners on home pages or search results, or even in the shopping cart.

The most common offer you’ll find on a cart summary page is “you are $X away from free shipping” when a free shipping promotion is offered on purchases above a certain dollar amount. The message is called a “carrot,” to entice customers to add a little more to the cart to qualify for the offer.

A unique application of the “carrot” based on cart contents is used by Maghound. Maghound is a kind of “Netflix for magazines” — Maghound’s subscription service allows customers to build their own subscription bundles for a monthly price, with the ability to change subscriptions at any time during the year.

Want to participate in a competition worth almost US$1000? Read on!

There has been a lot of discussion about the concept of information aesthetics lately, mostly focusing on the seemingly rapid rise of misplaced attention to "pretty, flashy mash-ups of something or other", in the press and on some (hmm hmm) online media. Despite these disagreements, I do hope we can all agree on some sort of visualization spectrum, with on one side the functional, expert-geared field of "information visualization", and on the other, that of the intriguing, visually persuasive "data art". I personally do believe we should not focus on defining such a hard divide, as there already exists an overlapping subfield in between where all the exciting things currently happen. Potentially, and maybe egoistically, I would propose this subfield could be labeled with the name of this blog. However, for the purpose of this competition, this issue is not even of much relevance.

While we keep discussing the necessity of theoretical frameworks, start dozens of vizblogs with endless "best-of" lists, and criticize the best practice of data visualizations, we seem to have lost the attention to a parallel universe, which no-one really recognizes the need to write a manifesto for. A field that is potentially more prevalent than all visualization "tools" and "artwork" put together. I mean those data visualizations that are neither "eye candy" nor "useful", neither "beautiful" nor "functional", neither "art" nor a "tool", neither "user-satisfactory" nor "effective", and neither stimulating the "heart" nor the "brain". The challenge of this competition is thus for you to find the most "ugly", "useless" and "disfunctional" data visualization online. It sounds easy, but can be more difficult than you might think.

Courtesy of our long-term sponsor FusionCharts, the 2 winners will each receive a FusionCharts Developer Bundle, worth US$499.