How Are You Connecting?
Tim Leberecht wrote a challenging piece this week for Frog Design's Design Mind blog about what he calls Smart Brands in the Connected Age. He puts out a good question about what "connectedness" and "smart" mean for how brands interact
Resource Roundup: Things Agencies Should Know About
The last two weeks have seen a ton of content cross my screen. I'll sifted through it to bring you some of the things I've found to be most important, which include articles covering planning, declining client work, the cloud and design, eBooks, mobile stuff, libraries, and even robots...
Simple Usability Tests: Reviewing the Testing Process and Lessons Learned from the Trenches
Finding Time and Inspiration For Your Content Strategy
This past week, our project management team all got together and discussed our blog. We talked about strategies to approach the two main roadblocks that keep us (and our clients) from blogging regularly - lack of time and inspiration. Here are the ideas that we came up with that we hope will help generate excitement about content strategy in our own office...
What kinds of content should I be creating for my website?
Huge question! But to start out, I'd recommend thinking of content in this way: A website has one basic, practical function: to support and hold content. In turn, the content the website holds should do three key things: (1) Attract visitors to your site, (2) Inform them about how you can help them, and (3) Engage them in order to gain their attention and information. Ultimately, content needs to have three corresponding properties in order to satisfy each of these three requirements...
The Future of Mobile (is the Web)
How do mobile devices work and what role do they play in our culture? Does the best mobile strategy focus on apps or the web or both? Chris Butler attempts to answer these and other questions in this article, which advocates taking a mobile strategy based upon web content and adaptive design rather than getting sidetracked by the apps marketplace...
Should I create a mobile version of my website or an app?
The answer really depends upon your intent in using either platform. As far as intent goes, there are two basic categories: either you want to market a product or a service, or you want to deliver a product or a service. I'll explain the nuances between the two in a moment, but, at the risk of oversimplifying this, if your intent is to market a product or service, I think optimizing your site for mobile users is the way to go. But if you want to deliver a product or service, then an app might suit your needs best...
Using the Prototype as a Guide for Content Entry
Using the prototype as a guide for content entry can help minimize disconnects between prototypes and real pages, expectations and results. Here are some familiar disconnects between prototypes and real pages that we should watch out for...
Things I Wish I Could Tell Everyone About Analytics
Data is sexy, but data is dumb! I've noticed two recurring problems with website measurement. The first is easier to deal with than the second, and it's that data is seductive (and yes, I realize that data is plural but I just don't want to say "data are sexy" because I mean data as a concept not as a particular set). Because we have so many tools with which to collect data about our websites, our purchases, our tools, our bodies, ourselves, we are left with the problem of making sense of it all...
The Folly of the Flock
My first Interaction column for Print Magazine is now out in the June issue! After a long search