Geek out

Jean Aw describes herself as “a user-experience junkie.” We’re certainly high on whatever she’s cooking up. Aw founded Notcot.com, a design blog, in March 2005, and was quickly inundated with recommended links from readers and fans.

“I wanted a solution to all the e-mail submissions that were coming in, as well as an easier way for people who weren’t into the long process of blog posting [to get their ideas out there],” Aw says over IM from her home in Los Angeles. She and Notcot cofounder Dan Frysinger decided to create Notcot.org in March ’06. “It began with the intention of being a space for submissions and where we would store the links and images we loved but didn’t quite need a full post,” Aw says. They sketched out a plan, on a napkin no less, for an image-based site that compiled user-submitted items. “As you can see,” she adds, “it quickly took on a life of its own.”

Notcotters stumble upon something cool—for example, I found a site that sells limited-edition abstract prints—upload a photo and write a sentence or two describing the product (or idea, or artist…). Aw and her team approve the submission, and it goes up on the site. Think of it as a global scrapbook of awesome stuff. “It’s  quite a fun and ridiculously easy process,” Aw says. Submissions get rejected if they’re “spammy” or duplicate other posts, but Aw says most of the suggestions “wow” her daily.

Notcot.org was such a success that she spun off Tastespotting.com, a food and cooking site, in February of this year. On a busy day, more than 20 new items are posted, including recipes, foodblog entries, news items and restaurant reviews. Its popularity encouraged Aw and her team to launch Notcouture.com, a fashion and beauty site, last week. Aw says the sites together get around 3 million page views per month, and that thousands of people submit links and photos. “Since we’re focused on the content, we don’t push users to submit, but instead hope that they’ll share the incredible things they find…regardless if that is one post a year, or five a day,” she says. “We have some of both.”

Aw says she doesn’t know what’s next for her flourishing family of interactive blogs. “We are currently exploring how we can enhance the user experience for the communities growing around the sites now, but as of yet we haven’t actually changed that much from the original idea,” she says.Why mess with a good thing?—Margaret Lyons