This is the first in what I plan to be an ongoing feature on everydayUX: the 3 x 3 review. These will not replace the in-depth, hands-on reviews you would get from a Gizmodo or Engadget but rather more of a quick-hit review laid out as 3 things I love and 3 things I’d change about a particular product or service.

The first product I want to talk about is Hootsuite the self-proclaimed “The Professional Twitter Client”. To set the stage a bit, I have a rather promiscuous history of trying many Twitter clients – Twitteriffic, Tweetie, Brizzly, Echofon, and Tweetdeck, to name a few. I’m hoping to give Nambu a go if I ever get a beta invite.

My favorite, and most-used, of the bunch is Tweetie (by far). I think it’s a near perfect 1 account Twitter client but I’ve started playing the field again for 2 main reasons: 1. Tweetie Desktop development has been stagnant for months (no RT support, no list support) while others continue to iterate and innovate and 2. the crisp + sparse Tweetie UI breaks down a bit once you start trying to manage multiple accounts, which I’m now doing with Tinker Studio. Because of that I’ve started to dip into some of the more “power user” apps like Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Hootsuite. I can unequivocally say after trying Tweetdeck for what seems like the 23rd time, is that there’s something that just doesn’t feel right to me, mostly in terms of UI responsiveness, about Air-based Twitter clients so I ended up at Hootsuite and luckily was immediately impressed.

Hootsuite has a ton of features (multiple accounts, brand managing, statistics, Twitter lists, Facebook pages, mobile apps, etc.) but I’m going to focus on the ones that affect me personally – managing 2 accounts and a Facebook page, posting links, viewing a couple of custom Twitter lists, etc. People looking for tools to enable a team to manage a brand’s entire online presence would most certainly have a different needs and a different take on Hootsuite so please keep that in mind.

3 things I love

1. Performing the primary Twitter actions on multiple accounts is a breeze. The interface and UI is excellent. Setup is easy peasy. Hopping between accounts is great and posting to multiple accounts at once couldn’t be simpler.
2. Interface feels so much more responsive than Air-based competitors. They’ve done one of the best jobs I’ve seen making a web app feel like a native client (thanks to the great Fluid app), something I personally think Adobe Air still struggles with, particularly when it comes to Twitter clients.
3. Slick iPhone app. While the iPhone app isn’t perfect (see #3 in the next list) it just feels really solid and presents some nice UX touches along the way.

3 things I’d fix

1. No support for other URL shorteners. Every link you post via Hootsuite gets shortened with their URL shortner (ow.ly). It’s obvious why they’re doing this – they want the data and they want you to see their bar (see # 2 in this list). These are both decisions that very clearly put their users second, which is never a good idea but wouldn’t be a dealbreaker if it wasn’t for most other major twitter clients taking a more flexible approach to the issue.
2. Let go of my browser! Every ow.ly link takes your unsuspecting friends to a version of the page you’re sharing with the Hootsuite toolbar having hijacked their browser and url bar. If there was a Dante’s Inferno of web chicanery (maybe there should be?), I’d place browser-hijack bars in the second or third circle and judging by my informal Twitter poll last night, I’m not alone. To be fair, Hootsuite is better than most culprits in that they at least give the end user the option to no longer get the bar but I still can’t excuse it. Over the past week I’ve been painstakingly shortening my links with Bit.ly and then pasting them into Hootsuite – both because I have already have a bit.ly account I use with other apps and also because I like and respect my friends and want to keep my hands off their browsers.
3. No Instapaper support in the iPhone version. As someone who consumes a ton of information from a variety of sources on my laptop and iPhone with equal vigor, I’m constantly trying to make my content consumption routine more efficient. Over the past year, the near ubiquity of Instapaper has made it the keystone to that routine and a clearinghouse for my content. I send everything I want to read there as well and make great use of the great custom folder support – i.e. Read Later, follow up, post to everydayux, save to delicious, etc. It’s become so easy to integrate support for Instapaper, you’ll find it in almost all of the popular Twitter clients for the iPhone… but not Hootsuite.

On the bright side, Hootsuite has managed to do a lot of the hard stuff really well. For the most part, my gripes center around deliberate business choices (particularly 1 + 2) they’re making so they might not change any time soon. I will remain optimistic and continue to keep an eye on the product as it evolves.

So what am I going to do? Until there’s Instapaper support on the iPhone client, I’m going to go back to using Tweetie on my phone. When I’m on the laptop, I’m going to continue using Hootsuite until I get tired of the Bit.ly > Hootsuite workaround – which could be soon. The fact that I don’t really have a better multi-account, non Air-based option at this point.

If anyone has any suggestions to resolve any of the issues above or about other clients I should try, let me know. In the meantime, stay tuned for the next episode of 3 x 3 on everydayUX where I tackle the FitBit.

A couple of weeks ago, New York City-based online grocer, FreshDirect launched their iPhone app (iTunes link), enabling their customers to easily shop for groceries in a way that caters to the needs of an audience that is increasingly mobile.

This is doubly exciting for me: first, as a huge fan of the brand and weekly FreshDirect customer for the past 7+ years but secondly as a mobile designer as it was the last project I had the amazing chance to lead while I was at Schematic.

FreshDirect.com occupies a very unique place in the world of online shopping for many reasons that I’m sure you can imagine. At a high level, it presents a fundamentally different shopping experience because a) many of their customers shop weekly and b) those shopping experience involves building a cart with many more items than most other cart-based online shopping sites. This creates very specific interaction needs that that the team at FreshDirect has spent the better part of the last decade honing and improving on their website. Solving the problem of taking the relevant parts of that experience and making them mobile was a really exciting one to tackle and this app is the result of that process.

We focused on designing an experience that complemented and enhanced the primary web experience while always remaining cognizant of the mobile medium – giving you quick access to previous orders and custom shopping lists you’ve created on the site, browsing your favorite items and weekly specials, updating your delivery times or searching for any item in the store for those times when you remember that one thing you neglected to throw in your cart.

Working on a mobile product for a local brand like FreshDirect that, if done right, could make a weekly routine that people undergo more pleasant, efficient and rewarding, was one of the best professional opportunities I’ve had as a designer. I couldn’t be more proud of the team I got to work with on the project and I’m so excited that everyone’s work is now out in the world for people to use. Also, FreshDirect has a history of listening to its customers to continually enhance their products so know that any thoughts/feedback you have on the app. will be welcomed by their team.

If you’re in New York and you feel that you’ve got better things to do with your time than spend hours each week combing the aisles of your local C-Town, check out FreshDirect and make sure you give the new iPhone app a spin (iTunes Link). Hope you like it!

Update from the comments: Also, wanted to let everyone know Fresh Direct just launched a contest to promote the app. Grand prize winner gets $500 Apple Store credit + $500 Fresh Direct credit, check it out: http://bit.ly/FD_AppContest

Check out some screenshots:

Why build a new weather app? There are a ton of them out there (until now I’ve been partial to Weatherbug) so if you want to to get noticed, you need to come to market with a fresh perspective and Outside (developed by Robocat) does just that. The first thing you’ll notice is that the UI is meticulously crafted (courtesy of superstar designer Michael Flarup) in a style that remains playful without compromising credibility (after all, you want to trust that this app will properly equip you in your battle against the elements). This is apparent both in the visual design style but also with the impeccable attention to detail paid to the interaction design.

Once you start playing around, you’ll start to get a sense of their refreshing approach to communicating the weather to their users – they do it in a very human way by a) simplifying the amount of features they offer and b) focusing those features on how the weather will affect you.

Here’s a look at the instructions you get when you first fire up the app letting you know how to navigate their information. This style gives you a great sense of the overall feel of the app.

If you’re looking for detailed satellite imagery from the Doppler2000, this is not the app for you but if you want to be alerted when there’s rain on the way when then you might want to give it a spin.

Their human-centric approach manifests itself mostly in the importance they place on user-defined notifications based on certain conditions. What’s so wonderful about this is that this is the kind of stuff that you really care about 90% of the time – weather changes that will affect your behavior. Below you can see the alerts that I’ve set up for Cold (below 30 degrees) and Rain.

They allow you to set alerts based on the following conditions: Cold, Rain, UV and T-Shirt (and clearly working on others). For each one, you set the threshold at which you want to be alerted and then customize the push notification you get when it crosses that threshold. They also let you customize what the push notification will say. Here’s what I have for when we cross my cold weather threshold:

The notification system is also where their business model comes in – the initial $2.99 purchase gets you the app + 1 month of notifications and then after that you can pay $1 for 3 months of notifications. I am certain that paying for a weather app, much less subscribing to one, is going to turn a lot of people off. I’m also curious to see how the somewhat wonky payment structure plays out as it presents an interesting communication challenge.

This app might not be for everyone (i.e. hard core weather fetishists, people who expect weather info to be free) but if you want an app that delivers daily weather information via a wonderfully designed experience and interaction and offers a thoughtfully-executed notification system, I highly recommend Outside.

In addition to that, I think it’s important to recognize how they’ve approached an oversaturated market from a new angle. Are there other apps we take for granted that could be given a similar treatment?

- check out a thorough walkthough of the app on their site.
- download the app. (iTunes link)
- follow the dev team on Twitter.

Amazing it took so long to design a flashlight this way.

If you’re still not convinced you need one, watch the demo video (I watched it once and had to order one):

After tweeting once every couple of months that I’m looking for an app/service that allows me to consume the links/photos/videos the people I follow are tweeting about, I was finally introduced to Readtwit (Thanks, @fchi!)

As people continue to get more and more comfortable with Twitter and start following more people, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the firehose of information contained within. While I’ve accepted I won’t always be able to keep up on people’s tweets about walking their dogs, going for a run and cooking dinner (I’m guilty of all three so settle down), I would like a way to stay up on all the media that’s being shared. Enter Readtwit.

Put simply, Readtwit creates an RSS feed of all the things the people you follow are linking to and converts it into a nice, clean RSS feed that you can dump into many of the most popular readers out there.

See below for an example of what a Mashable post looks like in my Google Reader. Notice how they include the context of who tweeted the content and what they had to say about it.

Also, in the footer of every piece of content, they give you two really useful links. One that allows you to hide future links from the person who tweeted that piece of content and a link that enables you to let them know that a particular piece of content is rendering incorrectly – presumably due to complications parsing, etc. (This weekend I was having problems with links coming from Radar and Twitpic.) The latter is more interesting to me because it shows that they are leaning on their users to help them create a better experience for everyone.

As someone who’s a heavy information consumer primarily using Twitter/Google Reader/Instapaper as my main tools of choice, I get the feeling that Readtwit is going to fit right in and actually streamline some of that workflow.

If you’re in a similar spot with your content consumption, I highly recommend you give it a try: Readtwit.

Today Amazon launched the iPhone app many had been speculating about for a while now. This post isn’t meant to be a review of the app as there are plenty of folks out their with sound opinions of what this launch means for the Kindle, Apple, etc. (Need more? Here you go.)

As a huge Kindle fan (V. 1 snowspeeder represent!) who’s spent a lot of time thinking about what it could be once the devices + service matures, what I find more interesting than the application itself are the possibilities suggested by the Kindle as a platform that seamlessly crosses devices. Just imagine if they opened it up to developers for other apps (Instapaper integration = very exciting).

Now one can more easily imagine finally being able to bookmark a Times article on the Kindle and have it sync with a NYTimes.com account to read later on at your desk. Or what about being able to suggest articles read on the Kindle to others? While you’d never want to manage the idea of a Profile (w/ preferences) from the Kindle, you’d be happy to do it from the web (or even your iPhone) and have it reflected on your Kindle (as it still remains the best of the devices for consuming text-heavy content).

These are not terribly forward looking features but you’ve got to start somewhere. Today gave us a decent app but more than that, it offers a glimpse into what a truly multi-platform consumer experience could one day be, where each device in the ecosystem can be leveraged for its particular strengths.

Karen and I recently took a fun introductory wine class (The Elements of Wine) at Astor Wines. They’ve got a really great setup over there:

(Reminded me a bit of Kitchen Stadium)

This was the lineup of food we’d be pairing with our wines. Loved the interactive voting setup (see remote on right) as much as I love the prosciutto.

Towards the end of the class they gave us a printout with different wines plotted on two axes alongside foods that they pair well with for both red and white wines (PDF).

Apart from being a really useful tool when learning about different wines (I’m cropping the images and syncing them to my phone for use on the go), I thought the visualization was well-executed and made a complex set of information and relationships pretty clear.

I highly recommend you check out all of their wine and food classes. They make a great gift, too.

I usually wouldn’t find it necessary to dedicate a post to a measly Greasemonkey script but I think this little add-on called Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google is absolutely worth it. In sum, the script pulls search results from Twitter (if there are any) and plops them atop your Google Search results (see above).

While it’s still technically a hack, it gives us a great glimpse into a) the battle that lies ahead for Search and b) why Twitter might not have been crazy to miss out on Facebook’s offer. It took a few seconds to get set up but once I saw the immediacy and relevancy of the results, it gave me one of those Internet “A-Ha” moments, like when I realized I could order a Palm V from Kozmo.com and not only would they deliver it under an hour but they’d give me a bag of cookies to boot. (I miss you, Kozmo!)

Read more and get yourself set up over at ReadWriteWeb.

I recently ordered a new over-the-shouler bag called, ahem, the “Blogger” (nevermind my friends, the name makes me want to make fun of myself) from Timbuk2. The bag looks like this:

…and while this isn’t meant to be a bag review, let me say that this is one of the better bags I’ve owned (and I’ve owned quite a few, sister!).

Quick lightning review of the things I like:

• portrait-style orientation makes for a much more nimble profile, particularly in crowded subways.
• lots of pockets for digicams, wires and such.
• side pouches for water bottles, etc.
• luxurious corduroy-lined pocket for my laptop separate from main compartment.
• ruggedized bottom that can withstand the muck I encounter on a day to day basis.
• not going to lie: I love the herringbone.

All in all, I highly recommend this bag. That concludes our digression. Now back to the original purpose of this post…

Timbuk2 ships their bags in these plastic pouches with a map of San Francisco on it:

Always a lover of maps I thought it was a nice touch to have a custom bag for their merchandise. Upon closer inspection I saw that it was in fact a bike map of San Francisco (that happens to be waterproof thanks to the material it’s printed on) so not only did they create something visually appealing, very much on-brand for a company founded in San Francisco in 1989, and environmentally conscious, it’s also useful (for those that live in San Francisco).

Check out a closeup of the message. Note how the tone and copy (“…stop kicking mother nature in the nads…” – ha!) are spot on for the brand.