So much of the conversation around digital wellness involves user-based actions, but what responsibility does product design have? Explore why and how helping users establish healthier relationships with tech is becoming a design consideration.
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How to Improve Your 404 Page Design
As UX designers we work hard to understand where users tend to go wrong and why in order to prevent errors. But no one's perfect. Eventually someone’s going to make a typo, forget to input something, or hit the wrong button. Errors are part of the experience so UX design shouldn’t end with them. A bad error experience and all the work you’ve done up to that point may not matter. Your users get annoyed, confused, or frustrated and they’re gone. 404 pages are one of the more common culprits for this. Like every other page, they should have a design and content strategy that positively supports a good user experience. Check out some tips on how to create better 404 pages.
Burnout: The next challenge for UX design
Call it Zoom fatigue, pandemic fatigue, or simply hitting the wall, burnout has set in and its running rampant. Over half of workers report feeling burned out; from elementary school to college, students have had enough; and parents are at their wits ends. It seems like no one is immune. Chronic uncertainty, endless trauma, and the need to keep on keeping on no matter what have created a toxic problem. This is why it’s important for UX designers to understand burnout and identify how it may be factoring into our work right now.
How Programming Knowledge Can Help UX/UI Designers
While it’s not a direct necessity to have this knowledge in order to create a good, usable design, understanding the medium used to bring your ideas to life can still be beneficial for UX and UI designers’ work. It helps you think differently, makes you a better communicator, a better collaborator and adds a skill to your resume.
Toward More Gender-Inclusive Form Design
Forms are like icebergs. They’re deceivingly more complicated and troublesome than they appear on the surface. Screw up a form’s design and you can stop users in their tracks, preventing them from meeting their intended goals, your business from collecting valuable data, or both. There are a lot of decisions that should go into determining how a form will be look. Since being inclusive and respectful of someone’s identity contributes to better UX, it's important to think through how even the smallest, design choices can be adjusted to help more people feel welcome using your product.
5 Reasons Why Social Media Managers Can Be Assets for UX
For many reasons, UX designers are not always able do the user research they desire before making design decisions. While there are always costs for skimping on user research, there are resources to help mitigate limitations, one being your social media manager. Social media and UX design share one important commonality, they are both centered around people. Learn how social media managers can be valuable assets for the UX research process.
Content Strategy Proposal: Fairmont State University
A content strategy provides a plan for how to use content to simultaneously meet user needs and support business goals. When redesigning a website it may be very tempting to just transfer all of the content from your old site to your new site – after all, it already exists, right? The problem is that just having content doesn’t mean it’s successful at doing what you need it to do for your business. Check out a sample content strategy proposal I've created for a redesign of Fairmont State University’s (FSU) main website.
The Ethical Precedent for Limitations on Branded Content
The free-for-all days of the internet and social media in the 2000s was bound to eventually run headlong into an ethical quagmire. Online content was never going to be easy to put limits on – even in terms of advertising which has historically been restricted for certain products, industries, and organizations by law or self-regulation. As we look to private tech companies to regulate the ever murkier world of content marketing and branded content what do ethical precedents on advertising say about who should and should not have the ability to use these content strategies for financial gain?
Content Analysis: MND Association
For this post, I’ve created a sample content analysis of the Motor Neuron Disease (MND) Association’s digital content on their website and social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube). The MND Association works on “improving access to care, research and campaigning for those people living with or affected by MND in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.” The aim of the analysis was to determine if the organization’s current content aligns with the business goals defined in its management strategy developed by strategic advisor Bernard Marr & Co., and report findings and recommendations to the organization’s Board of Directors.
Content Marketing and Content Strategy: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
Without content strategy, content marketing is basically a nonsensical house built without blueprints. This complementary relationship, though, is often why content marketing and content strategy are mistaken for the same thing when they are very much distinct practices. Learn what each one is about and how they relate.
Content Audit: Doctors Without Borders
In her book The Content Strategy Toolkit, Meghan Casey (2015) lists 3 methods for identifying the problems and opportunities of a website’s content: a content audit, an analytics review, and user testing. This first option – a content audit – is what she recommends starting with. For this post I’ve conducted a sample content audit of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders' (MSF) external-facing website for the United States. Read my full content audit report to learn more about how I evaluated the MSF site and what I found.
Prep Your Content Strategy for Success
From getting stakeholders aligned to planning a budget and pitching your project well, content strategy can be complicated dance. Learn why these factors are important and how to approach them to set your next content strategy project up for success.
Content Strategy and the Continuing Fight to End Content Waste
There's a lot of junk our there in terms of content and in the last 15 years, we’ve done a pretty good job of creating an astronomical amount of it in the digital sense. Faced with this new importance of content, businesses have looked to content strategy to help, applying it heavily to content marketing and UX. But how has the expansion of content strategy into new areas of focus recently effected the concept of content strategy and how may it continue to evolve with our content-centric world?
The Content Monster and Me
Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re being chased? You don’t know exactly what’s chasing you, what it looks like, or why it’s after you, but you’re certain if you slow down nothing good will happen? If I looked back to find out what this was in my dreams I'd bet I’d find a tangled, towering mass of words, photos, videos, GIFs, graphics, and URLs. I’d find myself being chased by a content monster. As a social media professional this is what my relationship with content feels like sometimes – an unrelenting demand for more.
A UX Research Report: Connecticut Forest and Park Association
In the last 25 years, business websites have evolved into powerful interactive hubs where users go for far more than brochureware. And as COVID-19 has shown, they are also now the front doors to organizations. Along with social media, they are often the first or only means of interaction people have with a business so, your website's experience better be on point. If it's not, the good news is it's never been easier to learn what it takes to build a good experience for your users. I recently completed a UX research project on ctwoodlands.org, the website for the member-based conservation nonprofit Connecticut Forest and Park Association. Check it out to see one approach for quickly getting the insights and direction you need for a successful redesign.
Usability Testing for an Existing Product
Usability is the measure of how well a person can use a product to achieve an intended goal. In a previous post, I talked about how usability testing should be a key part of any iterative design process, preferably being implemented as early as possible to identify design problems. But usability testing is also an important tool to evaluate existing products before you ever sit down at the drawing board to devise a change or new design.
Wizard of Oz Studies and the Application of Illusion for UX Research
How do you test something that doesn’t exist? The obvious answer is to build it. But what if it’s difficult, time-consuming, and/or expensive to build? You don’t want to risk wasting resources on an untested idea. A common approach that user experience designers (UX) use in such situations is Wizard of Oz studies.
A/B Testing as a UX Research Technique
Redesigning a website is usually about making its experience better. But change doesn’t guarantee better, just different. This is why user experience (UX) designers focus so much on user research. The more you know about user needs, as well as business and other requirements, the more you can eliminate some of that uncertainty about the impact of a new design. However, you will never know for sure how a design choice will perform until it's used with real users in real life. This is a nerve-wracking reality. A UX designer nor most project stakeholders are comfortable taking the risk of just changing something and seeing how it goes. Enter A/B testing.
Leveraging User Research to Get Stakeholder Buy-In
If you’re familiar with user experience (UX) design, then you understand the benefit of user research. It helps you empathize with users, evaluate usability, and determine the user requirements of a project (Baxter, Courage, & Caine, 2015). But what if I told you user research can have another application that can be just as vital to the outcome of a project as user empathy?
Module 7: Advanced Motion
Having completed my journey through Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation & Motion Graphics with advice on how to network and market your work once it's done, I decided to take on building the types of content that sparked my exploration into animation in the first place. See and learn how I built a branded social media PSA on voting and a series of accompanying GIF stickers using the full spectrum of Blazer's book, research examples of advanced and interesting animation techniques, and my experience from my past 6 posts on motion design.
Module 6: Interface Motion (User Interface Animation)
Animating user interfaces can help users and offer them a better experience, but in doing so these animated elements are made to feel so natural that we often don't consider that they can be complex to design well. For this post, I've taken the general advice from Liz Blazer's Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation and Motion Graphics and applied it to UI animation. Combined with research examples, I was able to create a looping sequence of UI animations for my previously developed Milford Resident App prototype.
Module 5: Motion for Promotion (Logo Stinger)
Whether your project is an animated feature or motion graphicsfor corporate marketing, making the right decisions about how you'll construct your piece is key. I combined advice on how to choose an animation technique and style from Liz Blazer's book Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation and Motion Graphics with research on Disney's 12 Basic Principles of Animation to create 2 logo stingers.
Module 4: Production and Post (Stop Motion II)
After completing pre-production work for 2 stop motion animation ideas in my last post, I continued on to production and post-production for one of them. With guidance on sound choices and establishing consistent rules for a story’s world from Liz Blazer’s Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation & Motion Graphics, I brought to life my linear story idea titled “A Bigger Purrr-pose.”
Module 3: Pre-Production in Action (Stop Motion I)
With advice on color choices and experimentation in animation from Liz Blazer's Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation & Motion Graphics, I began the pre-production process of creating a stop motion animation. In this stage of development I wrote pre-production summaries for 2 original stories (one linear in structure and one non-linear), drew storyboards, and shot a stop motion test to familiarize myself with the technical process.
Module 2: Mixing Motion (Cinemagraphs)
Cinemagraphs are a recently invented and popularized form of a seamlessly looping GIF or video in which still photography and video are combined to make a dynamically interesting visual that tells the story of a moment in time. With tips on how to craft a good animated story from Liz Blazer's book Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation & Motion Graphics, I've created 4 brief motion stories from a day in my life in the form of cinemagraphs using Adobe Photoshop and After Effects.
Module 1: Basic Motion (Animated GIFs)
Animated GIFs have become a popular digital content type for both personal use and brand marketing. See how I researched this content type and applied Liz Blazer's 6 steps of pre-production work from her book Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps For Creating Animation & Motion Graphics to create 3 different styles of summer-themed GIFS for marketing purposes using Adobe Photoshop and Animate.
Learn Web Development: It’s Empowering as F@#!
I finally got around to that “someday” task of taking a deeper dive into web development than just the hunt-and-peck-through-code-that-I-didn’t-know-how-to-read approach I’ve been using for the last 5 years. I figured this experience would confirm or deny once and for all whether my interest was genuine or a novelty. What I found is that learning how to build a website provided me with more than just a new skill.
Web Design Using A Template
So, you want to build a website, but you don’t know where to start. I have good news. Even though web design can be an intimidating process that requires technical and creative skills, you don’t always have to start from scratch. You can decrease the intimidation factor and even maybe decrease time and cost requirements of a website build by starting with a pre-built template.
Getting Started with SEO Basics
You’ve heard the acronym SEO. Maybe you know it stands for search engine optimization. And you’ve likely heard something to the effect of it being the unicorn strategy that will magically flip the script on your struggling website, improving its discoverability and effectiveness a hundred-fold. But what exactly is SEO and how does it work?
How to Add Media and Functionality to Your WordPress Blog
When you think about blogging you probably think about writing something, but a good blog can be about so much more. Images, videos, social media, and other functionality can support your posts and more deeply engage your readers. And the great thing about the WordPress content management system is that it makes adding these elements a snap. Let's look at some examples of the more common functionalities you might be interested in adding to your blog.
5 Options (Beyond Content and SEO) for Driving Website Traffic
Designing and building a great website is never enough. You also have to make sure people are aware of your site, want to go there, and, once there, want to stay or come back later. There are many ways you can drive traffic to a website. Good content and search engine optimization (SEO) are 2 ways that account for driving a majority of traffic to most sites, But let’s look beyond these efforts to 5 other opportunities.
An Introduction to Responsive Web Design
As the mobile revolution developed over the last decade, designers and programmers suddenly had to worry about supporting an ever-increasing list of devices and screen sizes. At first, the solution seemed to be to design unique experiences for each, but a leading school of thought has become designing one site to rule them all, or responsive web design. This creates a seamless cross-device user experience and future-proofs designs.
5 Ways to Optimize Images for Web
Users always have a need for speed. Think about it. Have you ever thought, “I wish this webpage would load slower?” And it’s not just because technological advances have skewed our expectations in favor of the fast lane. We rely on the internet more now than ever to provide basic information and services. But economic inequality or geography means users are accessing these on devices and networks with a wide spectrum of speeds. To build webpages to perform as identically as possible in all conditions is to show care and consideration for all users. One of the biggest impacts you can make on load speed is optimizing your images.
Communicating More Clearly with HTML5 Semantics
Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and in computer language making something semantic means using terms that both humans and machines can discern the meaning of. If you look at any chunk of HTML, you can easily identify terms that have no immediate meaning outside the language. HTML semantic tags more clearly describe the content within them, making webpages more accessible.
HTML Basics for Web Development
If you want to start learning how to build websites or web apps the most basic thing you need to understand is that HTML is the standard language of the internet. Learn about the structure of this language and the process from writing your first HTML document to using it to make a webpage come alive online.
Web Development: Hand Code or CMS?
Building a website is not just about deciding how it’s going to look, how it’s going to function, or what content it’s going to contain. You also have to decide how you’re actually going to build it. When building a website, you have 2 general directions you can choose from: hand code or use a content management system (CMS). There are pros and cons to both directions so one is not necessarily better than the other. You must evaluate your situation and decide which one works best for your needs.
Web Design Essentials: Color Palettes
A key component in your website’s feel, and some might argue the most readily noticeable, is color. We all have a favorite and before we can even read, we’re taught names and cultural associations for each. But choosing a color palette for a website that inspires the right emotions and works well with existing branding or content can be a challenge.
Web Design Essentials: Mood Boards
You should design your website to evoke the emotions that you want users to have, ones that make them have a positive opinion of your brand or content, and that motivate them to take actions you desire. Mood boards help with that. Mood boards are physical or digital collages of images, icons, typography, colors, patterns, textures, and other design elements that together speak to the intended mood you want to set with your visual design.
Web Design Essentials: Wireframes
Like architectural blueprints, wireframes depict the structure of a webpage but not the visual design elements of it. You can learn the layout of content blocks on a page, the types of content a page will contain, and some of the basic functionalities of a page from a wireframe.
Web Design Essentials: Sitemaps
Designing the bones of a website is the focus of an area of UX design known as information architecture (IA) design. IA design is about creating a structure on a website that helps a user understand where they are in the site and where they can find the information they are seeking. Information architecture is visually represented using a sitemap.
8 Usability Musts for Good Web Design
Users’ attention spans are short. They make judgments they may not even consciously realize about websites in seconds. Every element of a website’s design works in coordination to sway those judgments negatively or positively. There’s an overwhelming list of elements to consider for web design, but to be helpful I’ve highlighted the following 8 design areas I think are important to offer a good user experience.
Redesigning A WordPress Blog
Websites are like living creatures. We’re constantly interacting with them, updating them with new content, and making technological and design advances that shape our expectations of them. Knowing when it's time then to redesign a website can be tricky. Learn how I identified what needed updates on my WordPress blog one year after starting it.
A Social Media Strategy Pitch: Scratch Baking
Having strategy for your brand on social media is always important, but when you have a specific goal you'd like social media to help you achieve, it becomes vital. I've previously posted about how to determine a small business' social media presence, create a calendar, build personas, and write community management guidelines using one of my favorite businesses, Scratch Baking in Milford, CT. Based on this work, I've created the following slides and presentation outlining a social media strategy they could use
Using Personas and Micro-Moments for Social Media Strategy
Whatever the business-related goals of your strategy, you need to focus on the user-centered goal of bringing value to your audience through your social media presence. By empathizing with your audience you will build content that will make your brand more relatable and more trustworthy which will ultimately translate into brand awareness, website traffic, customer leads, revenue, brand engagement, loyalty, or success with any other goals you may have. Personas are good tools to help you start building a social media strategy with empathy.
Creating A Small Business Social Media Content Calendar: Scratch Baking
In my last post, I explored how to decide the social media presence for a small business using one of my favorite small businesses – Scratch Baking in Milford, CT. Now it’s time to activate that presence. It’s time to plan and create content. No matter how strategic you are in choosing your business’ social media platforms, that will mean nothing if you’re not strategically and regularly creating engaging content for them.
A Small Business Social Media Presence: Scratch Baking
Small businesses can face challenges such as human and financial resource shortages when trying to access the benefits of social media. With little money to pay someone to focus on this for them and little time or energy to do it themselves small business owners sometimes don’t even know where to start. Using one of my favorite small, local businesses – Scratch Baking in Milford, CT – as an example we’re going to walk through how to approach evaluating and planning your business’ social media presence.
Unmasking the Truth: Social Media and News
The sheer amount of information social media now presents us to digest is enough in and of itself to overwhelm us in to being less discerning about the truth. Add into this mix every individual’s opinion and the voices of those interested in misleading others or sowing division and social media becomes a very chaotic and confusing source from which to get your news. I decided to find out just how much of a filter I had to apply to find factual news on my social media accounts.
Social Media and Brands in the Time of Coronavirus
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our daily lives, perhaps forever, in countless ways we are still trying to grasp. But as a social media professional I’m acutely interested in how this crisis is affecting the medium I work in. What I’m seeing is the possibility that we are moving into a new phase of our relationship with it.
Getting Real with High-Fidelity Prototypes
There comes a time in every project when an idea transitions from conceptual to actual. In website and app design that time generally comes during the prototyping process. Prototyping can be done in a range of fidelities, or levels of detail, from low to high. Low-fidelity prototypes can be a great tool for quickly iterating design ideas and starting usability testing early in your design process, but the type of experience they offer is quite removed from a product’s endgame. High-fidelity prototyping is when things start to feel and look real.
Usability Testing Isn’t Optional
Good, usable design comes from an iterative process in which you create and revise designs in repetitive cycles, coming closer to the desired result with each cycle. One of the best ways to learn how a design needs to be revised is usability testing. Many development process eliminate this important step or leave until the final product is built for a number of reasons. Learn how I used the Prototyping on Paper app and Zoom to push forward with usability testing of paper prototypes for an app I'm designing despite the social distancing restrictions of COVID-19.