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Pedro Gonçalves

The 3 Keys To Agile Content Development | Co.Create: Creativity \ Culture \ Commerce - 0 views

  • When brands come to agencies for agile content development, the main criteria is usually that the content must be high quality, compelling, low-cost, high frequency, and quick-turnaround. But often their internal structure and processes aren’t yet optimized to embrace this type of approach. In agile content development, timing and efficiency is everything. Without it, there is no liftoff.
  • Brands can optimize themselves for agile content development by making internal adjustments that improve communication, the first of which should be to empower a small team to manage the process. This team should have the authority to secure and approve budgets, as well as weigh in creatively and strategically on content as it goes to market. Creating a nimble group that has real ownership of the process will make things more efficient and reduce the chances of unnecessary stress being put on your brand marketing team as a whole.
  • This exercise will also help your brand get into the right mind-set. Think of your brand marketing team as the police force, and your agile content group as the SWAT team.
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  • Agile content development is best executed by a partner that has strategy, production, and analytics under one roof, combining what agencies traditionally do best with what production companies traditionally do best.
  • When strategy, creative, and production teams can sit side by side and collaborate fluidly, agile content is the by-product.
  • A perfect example of this is Red Bull, which has even gone a step further to combine brand, agency, and production company into one. No one would argue that they are not one of the most successful agile content marketers on the planet.
  • The most important part of setting your brand’s agile content strategy is having a clear idea of why your brand is creating content to begin with.
  • Next, your responsibility is to make sure that the content you’re creating is meeting your brand’s overall objectives. Your selected content partner should be responsible for making sure the content you create is something that your target consumer actually wants to see.
  • Once your brand’s content strategy is set, it should be seen as a living framework that should evolve over time. Recognize that your brand and content both live in a dynamic world that changes constantly.
Pedro Gonçalves

10 Developer Tips To Build A Responsive Website [Infographic] - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • “We are now looking at how we display and order content differently from screen size to screen size,” said Jeff Moriarty, Boston Globe VP of digital properties in an interview last year. “This ‘responsive content’ concept is emerging and we are starting to see in data that users want different types of content depending on their context and the device they are on. We have to now think about how content performs differently from the biggest screens to the smallest, how that content is organized and even how headlines are written from platform to platform.”
  • The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity.
  • some website builders may over-design for the desktop, making some websites fun to play with but absolutely impossible to navigate.
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  • focus around content and avoid the pitfalls that certain aspects of websites can create.
Pedro Gonçalves

How To Maintain Hierarchy Through Content Choreography | Smashing Magazine - 0 views

  • Three specifications that we’ll likely find ourselves using in the future are: “Flexbox4,” “Regions5,” “Grid Layout6.”
  • Magic numbers in CSS are best avoided.
  • We need fewer of these HTML containers and more CSS virtual container classes that we can apply to different elements as needed. In other words, instead of this… <div id="container"> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> </div> … we need more of this: <div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div>
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  • In the latter block, each division might have a different class name or perhaps different additional classes applied. This allows for greater flexibility in rearranging them in the layout. In the first block of code, the three content divisions will always reside inside their parent container.
  • With CSS, we have the ability to rearrange blocks inside a container. We don’t have the ability to break content out of one container and move it inside another container. If you want more mixing of blocks, then you’ll need fewer containers.
  • there are currently far more instances of websites that are dropping columns wholesale
  • Every element is its own unique block and serves as its own container. The page’s main heading is its own contained block. All of the meta information is inside another container directly below it. After that, every paragraph, subheading and image is also its own self-contained block of content. The same goes for anything else that might end up in a post, such as a block quote or code block.
  • a challenge to how we think about structuring our HTML, particularly to how we use containers. Elements can’t move from one container to the next. We can fake it with complex CSS, or we can rewrite the HTML with JavaScript; but, ultimately, if we want to intermix elements, we’re best of using fewer HTML containers to create columns. Instead, we should leave more of our content blocks in their own containers and use CSS to create virtual columns in the layout. This solution doesn’t confine our elements to structural containers and instead enables us to more easily rearrange the elements in different layouts.
Pedro Gonçalves

How Website Speed Actually Impacts Search Ranking - Moz - 0 views

  • in 2010, Google did something very different. Google announced website speed would begin having an impact on search ranking. Now, the speed at which someone could view the content from a search result would be a factor.
  • Google's Matt Cutts announced that slow-performing mobile sites would soon be penalized in search rankings as well.
  • While Google has been intentionally unclear in which particular aspect of page speed impacts search ranking, they have been quite clear in stating that content relevancy remains king.
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  • When people say"page load time" for a website, they usually mean one of two measurements: "document complete" time or "fully rendered" time. Think of document complete time as the time it takes a page to load before you can start clicking or entering data. All the content might not be there yet, but you can interact with the page. Think of fully rendered time as the time it takes to download and display all images, advertisements, and analytic trackers. This is all the "background stuff" you see fill in as you're scrolling through a page.
  • Since Google was not clear on what page load time means, we examined both the effects of both document complete and fully rendered on search rankings. However our biggest surprise came from the lack of correlation of two key metrics! We expected, if anything, these 2 metrics would clearly have an impact on search ranking. However, our data shows no clear correlation between document complete or fully rendered times with search engine rank, as you can see in the graph below:
  • With no correlation between search ranking and what is traditionally thought of a "page load time" we expanded our search to the Time to First Byte (TTFB). This metric captures how long it takes your browser to receive the first byte of a response from a web server when you request a particular URL. In other words, this metric encompasses the network latency of sending your request to the web server, the amount of time the web server spent processing and generating a response, and amount of time it took to send the first byte of that response back from the server to your browser.
  • The TTFB result was surprising in a clear correlation was identified between decreasing search rank and increasing time to first byte. Sites that have a lower TTFB respond faster and have higher search result rankings than slower sites with a higher TTFB. Of all the data we captured, the TTFB metric had the strongest correlation effect, implying a high likelihood of some level of influence on search ranking.
  • The surprising result here was with the the median size of each web page, in bytes, relative to the search ranking position. By "page size," we mean all of the bytes that were downloaded to fully render the page, including all the images, ads, third party widgets, and fonts. When we graphed the median page size for each search rank position, we found a counterintuitive correlation of decreasing page size to decreasing page rank, with an anomalous dip in the top 3 ranks.
  • We suspect over time, though, that page rendering time will also factor into rankings due to the high indication of the importance of user experience.
  • our data shows there is a correlation between lower time-to-first-byte (TTFB) metrics and higher search engine rankings. Websites with servers and back-end infrastructure that could quickly deliver web content had a higher search ranking than those that were slower. This means that, despite conventional wisdom, it is back-end website performance and not front-end website performance that directly impacts a website's search engine ranking.
  • Our data shows there is no correlation between "page load time" (either document complete or fully rendered) and ranking on Google's search results page. This is true not only for generic searches (one or two keywords) but also for "long tail" searches (4 or 5 keywords) as well. We did not see websites with faster page load times ranking higher than websites with slower page load times in any consistent fashion. If Page Load Time is a factor in search engine rankings, it is being lost in the noise of other factors. We had hoped to see some correlation especially for generic one- or two-word queries. Our belief was that the high competition for generic searches would make smaller factors like page speed stand out more.
  • TTFB is affected by 3 factors: The network latency between a visitor and the server. How heavily loaded the web server is. How quickly the website's back end can generate the content.
  • Websites can lower network latency by utilizing Content Distribution Networks (CDNs). CDNs can quickly deliver content to all visitors, often regardless of geographic location, in a greatly accelerated manner.
  • Do these websites rank highly because they have better back-end infrastructure than other sites? Or do they need better back-end infrastructure to handle the load of ALREADY being ranked higher? While both are possible, our conclusion is that sites with faster back ends receive a higher rank, and not the other way around.
  • The back-end performance of a website directly impacts search engine ranking. The back end includes the web servers, their network connections, the use of CDNs, and the back-end application and database servers. Website owners should explore ways to improve their TTFB. This includes using CDNs, optimizing your application code, optimizing database queries, and ensuring you have fast and responsive web servers.
  • Fast websites have more visitors, who visit more pages, for longer period of times, who come back more often, and are more likely to purchase products or click ads. In short, faster websites make users happy, and happy users promote your website through linking and sharing. All of these things contribute to improving search engine rankings.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Infinite Grid · An A List Apart Article - 0 views

  • Creating a layout is like doing a jigsaw puzzle; you have a bunch of pieces and you have to figure out how they should fit together.
  • designing native layouts for the web—whatever the device—we need to shed the notion that we create layouts from a canvas in. We need to flip it on its head, and create layouts from the content out.
  • When designing from the canvas in, the canvas dimensions are the constant on which the whole grid is anchored. Everything is sized and positioned relative to them. Designing from the content out means finding a constant in your content—be it the ideal measure of a paragraph or the dimensions of an ad unit—and building your grid out from there to fill the space available.
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  • Fluid layouts are often compared to water, but water isn’t always fluid. H2O has three different states, and depending on the temperature can be a solid, liquid, or gas, transitioning seamlessly from one to another at specific points (0ºC, 100ºC). An infinite grid also has multiple states (single column, multi-column, etc.), and should transition as seamlessly as possible between them at specific breakpoints as well. For example, just as ice is an appropriate state for water when the temperature is low, a single-column layout may be the appropriate state for an infinite grid on smaller devices. Water’s state change is caused by the rearrangement of its molecules. When an infinite grid changes state, we rearrange its components.
  • Each state in a responsive layout tends to be made up of the same components, such as an image gallery or navigation menu. However, as Ethan Marcotte recently outlined, the form these components take can vary dramatically between one state and another, usually involving a change in one or more of the following attributes: Hierarchy: What’s its order and prominence in the layout? Density: How much detail do you show? Interaction: Should it be a list of links or a dropdown? A carousel or a group of images? Width: Is it fixed (a specific width), flexible (set with max-width), or fractional (set with percentages)?
  • Pixels size an element relative to a particular resolution Ems size an element relative to its font size; large rems size it relative to the document’s base font size Percentages size an element relative to its container VH and VW units size an element relative to the viewport
  • Absolute units like pixels effectively give a layout a sell-by date, locking it to a finite resolution range in which it will “work.” Proportional units (ems, rems, and percentages) enable you to define the important relationships between elements, and are a crucial first step on the road to resolution independence.
  • lets say my largest state is 75em wide (any larger and the white space starts to dwarf the content), and my smallest is 34em (any smaller and the measure is less than optimal). In the largest state it makes sense for my navigation to be a horizontal list (interaction) at the top (hierarchy), but in the smallest state it might make more sense to move it to the bottom of the layout (hierarchy), or collapse it into a show/hide list (interaction). Designing these independently of one another helps you be more objective about what is best for each state, rather than stretching a one-size-fits-all solution across every state.
  • Just like water changes to steam when its molecules get too far apart, one state should change to another when the relationships between its components begin to break down, such as when the measure is getting too wide, or the left-aligned logo is getting so far from the right-aligned menu that the visual connection between them is broken.
  • The number of states you require will depend on how much your layout changes from one extreme to the other. For example, my smallest state has a single column with a collapsed menu, and my largest state has three columns and an expanded menu. However neither state looks quite right between 34em and 53em, so I’ve added an “in-between” state which maintains the smallest state’s single column article, but expands the menu and divides the footer into three columns to make the most of the space available. This smooths out the transition from one extreme to another quite nicely.
  • With each state change, remember to reconsider the hierarchy, density, interaction, and width of each component
  • the goal is to make the most of the space available, relative to your content, to maximize readability and presentation.
Pedro Gonçalves

A Primer on Responsive Design | UX Magazine - 0 views

  • According to IDC, mobile web browsing will soon eclipse desktop browsing in the U.S. and worldwide. This consumption of mobile content isn’t just happening on the go; 93% of people are now using their mobile devices to browse the Web from their homes, according to a study from Google.
  • The main development methodology behind responsive design is the use of media query functionality in CSS3. Media queries target not only certain device types (e.g., Android vs. iPhone), but actually inspect the physical characteristics of the device that renders the page. For example, the code below “asks” the device if its max horizontal resolution is equal to 480px: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css", media="screen and (max-device-width: 480px)", href="http://uxmag.com/iphone.css" /> If it is 480px, the device will load iphone.css. If not, the link is ignored. You can also include media queries in CSS as part of an @media rule:
  • a responsive design approach does not involve putting all of your content in front of the reader. Responsive design is about putting the right content in users’ hands according to the context of their interaction.
Pedro Gonçalves

Designing for a Responsive Web Means Starting with Type First | Design in the... - 0 views

  • differences in screen size, device resolution or text rendering don’t matter in and of themselves, but only because they influence how someone will read our content.
  • Typography carries the literal message, and its legibility and readability impacts not just the audience’s understanding of the content but how easy it is for them to hear the brand’s personality.
  • Typography’s role in imparting the implied message is just as profound, and we can see its impact most clearly on mobile devices. Here, the design is often stripped back to its simplest form. Gone are the graphics, gradients and pixel-perfect details. It is the aesthetic personality of the type and the colour palette that influences our emotional response as readers and defines the experience.
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  • Designing for our readers requires us to understand the information that they will find useful and relevant and then shape that content into a beautiful experience.
Pedro Gonçalves

Why Insourcing is the Next Social Media and Content Marketing Trend - 0 views

  • social media is becoming a skill, not a job. Companies like Intel and Dell and IBM are leading the way in broadly distributed social participation, giving thousands of employees the opportunity to win hearts and mind in social and with smart content.
  • This decentralization of social communication has widespread ramifications for social media management software vendors, as it puts additional emphasis on triage and workflow tools.
  • The days of one social media manager handling Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and the rest is coming to a close (as is the era of the one or two person content marketing team) and the same way all of us have a corporate email address and phone number, we’ll all (or nearly all) have a role to play on behalf of the company in social and content marketing, eventually.
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  • Where does this ultimately lead? We’re not there yet, but I suspect it’s predictive modeling, with internal social and content opportunity routing based on artificial intelligence and enterprise knowledge mapping. If we know the specific areas of expertise of each employee and can store that in a relational database, and we can also know via presence detection who is online and/or what their historical response times have been, we can use natural language processing (a la Netbase) to proactively triage and assign social interactions to the best possible resource in the organization.
Pedro Gonçalves

New Defaults In Web Design - How Much Has The Web Really Changed? | Smashing Magazine - 0 views

  • Many mouseover interactions are completely dysfunctional on a touch device
  • Instead of buying a state of the art monitor, buying a cheap monitor and several low-end devices to test your work on might be a better investment.
  • Hiding content and showing it on mouseover was considered to be a decent design pattern
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  • When you hover over a menu item, a submenu appears. But apart from hovering over an item, you can also simply click on it to follow the link. Now, what should happen when you tap on the item with a touch device? Should the submenus appear, or should the link activate? Or both? Or should something else happen? On iOS, something else happens. The first time you tap a link like that, the submenu appears; in other words, the hover event fires. You have to tap a second time to actually follow the link. This is confusing, and not many people will tap a second time. On Android, the submenu appears and the link is followed simultaneously. I don’t have to explain to you that this is confusing.
  • It’s very well possible to think of complex solutions11 whereby you define different interactions for different input devices. But the better solution, I think, is to make sure that the default interaction, the activate event, just works for everybody. If you really need to, you could choose to enhance this default experience for certain users.
  • The same principle that we follow for interactions — whereby we design the activate event first and enhance it later — applies to graphic design. We should start designing the things that we know everyone will see. That’s the content. No matter how big or small a screen is and no matter how minimal the feature set of a browser, it will be able to show letters.
  • rather than pollute the page with all kinds of links to get people out of there, we should really focus on that thing in the middle. Make sure it works. Make sure it looks good. Make sure it’s readable.
  • you start by designing the relationship between the different font sizes.
  • When the typography is done, you would start designing the layout for bigger screens; you can think of this as an enhancement for people with bigger screens. And after that, when the different layouts are done, you could add the paint. And by paint, I mean color, gradients, borders, etc.
  • When I say to start with typography, I don’t mean that you aren’t allowed to think about paint at the same time. Rather, I’m trying to find the things that all of these different devices, with all of their different screen sizes and all of their different features, have in common. It just seems logical to first design this shared core thoroughly. The strange thing is that this core is often overlooked: Web professionals tend to view their own creations with top-of-the-line devices with up-to-date browsers. They see only the enhancements. The shared core with the basic experience is often invisible.
  • All of the things we created first — the navigation, the widgets, the footer — they all helped the visitor to leave the page. But the visitor probably wanted to be there! That was weird.
  • To build a responsive website that works on all kinds of screens, designing for a small screen first is easiest. It forces you to focus on what’s really important: if it doesn’t fit in this small square, it is probably not terribly important. It forces you to think better about hierarchy, about the right order of components on the page.
  • Once you’re done with the content, you can start to ask yourself whether this content needs a header. Or a logo. Or subnavigation. Does it need navigation at all? And does it really need all of those widgets? The answer to that last question is “No.” I’ve never understood what those widgets are for. I have never seen a useful widget. I have never seen a widget that’s better than white space.
  • does the logo really need to be at the top16 of every page? It could very well go in the footer on many websites
  • the option to add extra luggage to a flight booking might be most effective right there in the overview of the flight, instead of in the middle of a list of links somewhere on the left of the page.
  • does the main navigation look more important than the main content? Most of the time it shouldn’t be, and I usually consider the navigation to be footer content.
Pedro Gonçalves

Content Marketing: Start With Your Story - 0 views

  • Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and one of the first evangelists for content marketing, describes content marketing as: //Zone: 300x250 googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1336852434508-3'); … a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
  • In the past, editors and reporters held companies captive, and we vied for their attention to cover our products, services or insights on trends. But no longer.Today, communities and influencers have overtaken the importance of media outlets, and the responsibility of reporting has shifted to the marketing department. In fact, many organizations now consider themselves publishers rather than marketers. And that’s smart
  • A good story entices someone to want to know more, and they transition to the next step: engagement.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Science Behind Why Content Gets Shared | Fast Company | Business + Innovation - 0 views

  • "meme" as it came into existence: Richard Dawkins, the rabble-rousing evolutionary biologist, coined it in 1976 as a way to describe how ideas are like genes--reproducing by moving from one mind to another, mutating while they're there, and spreading, spreading, spreading into society.
  • the most successful memes (and we can responsibly generalize that to content as a whole) have a certain evergreen quality to them. This has also been confirmed by Bitly data scientist Hilary Mason, whose link-fueled data set acts an index of the Internet's attention: the most enduringly shared articles have a more timeless than timely quality to them, she once told me in an interview, which presents an interesting dilemma to companies in the business of news.
  • "Past research about memes shows two things that should surprise no one, but are worth emphasizing: If you can figure out what someone is interested in, you can predict how likely she is to share a piece of content. And the more similar a piece of content is to what she has shared before, the more likely she is to share it."
Pedro Gonçalves

Cultural factors in web design | Feature | .net magazine - 0 views

  • Some cultures are High Context. This means most communication is simply understood rather than explicitly stated. These cultures have a much higher tolerance for ambiguity and understatement. You could say that, in a High Context culture, the responsibility for understanding rests with the listener and it’s left to them to divine deeper meaning from the conversation or statements coming at them.
  • Low Context cultures, on the other hand, are much more explicit and often rely on directness and true feelings to communicate.
  • In these types of cultures, the responsibility for understanding is on the speaker to convey their ideas clearly and without ambiguity.
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  • I propose we use cultural variables to show the appropriate content for specific groups of users in the same way that we use media queries to show content according to viewports or breakpoints.
  • Slow Messaging cultures are more easygoing about the speed at which messages and information travel. Fast Messaging cultures demand that information travels quickly and efficiently.
  • High Power Distance societies tolerate a high level of authority in their leaders, and their orders are often unquestioned. Symbols of this power are important. On the other hand, Low Power Distance societies have bosses that are much closer to their employees in power levels, and instructions can be debated or challenged.
  • How do we make our fellow humans comfortable with our interfaces and site? Start using cultural queries in our designs.
Pedro Gonçalves

Instagram-Omnicom Deal Signals the Future of Digital Advertising | Adweek - 0 views

  • the partnership is a very public acknowledgement of the industry’s faith behind investing in a more visual, native approach to advertising in response to the emergence of the Visual Web.
  • While Instagram may have been one of the first to lay the groundwork for purely visual content, it is not alone. Every day, more publishers—including Time, Fox News and NBC News—are redesigning their sites in a visual-centric manner and de-emphasizing text. The escalating adoption of mobile has necessitated the change. Images are the way today’s tech-savvy consumers prefer to consume content.
  • Brands will now create and design ads with the clear objective of having this branded content be shared exponentially.
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  • Instagram may be great for some brands, but not a fit for others, as its audience is largely young and female. Over 90 percent of the 150 million people on Instagram are under the age of 35. And of Instagram's 150 million monthly active users, more than 60 percent live outside of the United States. Omnicom and Instagram must also be careful not to oversaturate the audience with ads or the audience will flee. On a site that is largely based on photo sharing, with no firm editorial context, it will be a challenge to ensure the ads fit into the context of the user’s feed and be relevant. Even if it is beautiful and not disruptive, if it is not providing value, it will not be effective.
Pedro Gonçalves

Native app or responsive web? How to choose in 3 steps - Tech News and Analysis - 0 views

  • during the audience review (which is typically our first workshop session), we focus entirely on user personas and, critically, the context of the mobile interaction with a company’s intended end users. The goal here is to map out the type of user, mindset, location, and specific needs at the time they are interacting with or accessing the mobile content. It’s not enough to know just the demographics and some sample scenarios. We need to study the end user’s goals through all touchpoints that frame the context.
Pedro Gonçalves

25 Of The Most Engaged Brands On Twitter - 0 views

  • “Most brands have fallen into the trap of using Twitter for push marketing: broadcasting messages and expecting to influence customers with little to no listening or community building,” says Nestivity founder and president Henry Min.
  • “This view of Twitter as a one-way communication tool severely limits quality interactions between brands and their customers. It is a short-sighted use of an inherently interactive communication channel,”
  • When it comes to follower counts, a high number doesn’t necessarily mean an engaged audience. While all of the 25 most engaged Twitter accounts had over a million followers, so did the bottom 70% of the same.
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  • As far as best practices, the group found that 76% of content that was shared had a photo attached, and 18% had a video as part of the message. As a whole, tweets sent between 2 and 5pm PST generated the most response.
Pedro Gonçalves

12 Best Practices For Media Companies' Facebook Pages - AllFacebook - 0 views

  • Share breaking news updates: Lavrusik and Hershkowitz said posts that included the terms “breaking” or “breaking news” saw engagement 57 percent higher than non-breaking news posts
  • Use a conversational tone and include analysis: Posts with a personal tone or clever language saw engagement of 120 percent above the average, and posts with analysis received 20 percent more referral clicks.
  • Start conversations by asking questions and responding: Posts with prompts for conversation of questions saw engagement 70 percent above the average
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  • Share stories visually with photos and videos to grab users’ attention: Posts with photos receive 50 percent more likes.
  • Page targeting enables page admins to publish stories into the News Feeds of audiences who are going to be most interested in the content, without inundating those who may not.
  • Use engaging thumbnails for link stories: Links with thumbnails received 65 percent more likes and 50 percent more comments.
  • Vary your post type — users don’t engage the same way with every post: Mix it up between status updates, links, polls, and photos.
  • Optimize your page for Graph Search and mobile: Ensure that your page description is complete and up-to-date, which will help its performance in Graph Search results, and pin posts to ensure that users see the most important stories on both desktop and mobile.
Pedro Gonçalves

20 top web design and development trends for 2013 | Feature | .net magazine - 0 views

  • “If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”
  • During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”
  • Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.
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  • Bluegg studio manager Rob Mills reckons 2013 will see a “further step in the direction of storytelling and personality on the web, achieved through a greater focus on content and an increase in the use of illustration”.
  • Apps remain big business, but some publishers continue to edge to HTML5. Redweb head of innovation David Burton reckons a larger backlash is brewing: “The gold rush is over, and there’s unrest in that apps aren’t all they promised to be. We now live in a just-in-time culture, where Google can answer anything at the drop of a hat, and we no longer need to know the answers. The app model works the old way. Do we need apps for every brand we interact with? Will we even have iPhones in five years’ time? Who knows? But one thing is certain – the internet will remain, and the clever money is on making web apps that work across all platforms, present and future.”
  • Designer/developer Dan Eden says that with “more companies focussing web efforts on mobile,” designers will feel the pressure to brush up on the subject, to the point that in 2013, “designing for desktop might be considered legacy support”. Rowley agrees projects will increasingly “focus on mobile-first regarding design, form, usability and functionality”, and Chris Lake, Econsultancy director of product development, explains this will impact on interaction, with web designers exploring natural user interface design (fingers, not cursors) and utilising gestures.
  • We’re increasingly comfortable using products that aren’t finished. It’s become acceptable to launch a work-in-progress, which is faster to market and simpler to build – and then improve it, add features, and keep people’s attention. It’s a model that works well, especially during recession. As we head into 2013, this beta model of releasing and publicly tweaking could become increasingly prevalent.“
  • “The detail matters, and can be the difference between a good experience and a great experience.” Garrett adds we’ll also see a “trend towards not looking CMS-like”, through clients demanding a site run a specific CMS but that it not look like other sites using the system.
  • “SWD is a methodology for designing websites capable of being displayed on screens with both low and high pixel densities. Like RWD, it’s a collection of ideas, techniques, and web standards.”
Pedro Gonçalves

Want To Hook Your Users? Drive Them Crazy. | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • online, feedback loops aren’t cutting it. Users are increasingly inundated with distractions, and companies find they need to hook users quickly if they want to stay in business. Today, companies are using more than feedback loops. They are deploying desire engines.
  • Desire engines go beyond reinforcing behavior; they create habits, spurring users to act on their own, without the need for expensive external stimuli like advertising. Desire engines are at the heart of many of today’s most habit-forming technologies. Social media, online games, and even good ol’ email utilize desire engines to compel us to use them.
  • At the heart of the desire engine is a powerful cognitive quirk described by B.F. Skinner in the 1950s, called a variable schedule of rewards. Skinner observed that lab mice responded most voraciously to random rewards.
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  • Humans, like the mice in Skinner’s box, crave predictability and struggle to find patterns, even when none exist. Variability is the brain’s cognitive nemesis and our minds make deduction of cause and effect a priority over other functions like self-control and moderation.
  • Recent neuroscience has revealed that our dopamine system works not to provide us with rewards for our efforts, but to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful response we call desire.
  • Email, for example, is addictive because it provides all three reward types at random intervals. First, we have a social obligation to answer our emails (the tribe). We are also conditioned to know that an email may tell us information about a potential business opportunity (the hunt). And finally, our email seems to call for us to complete the task of removing the unopened item notification in a sort of challenge to gain control over it (the self). Interestingly, these motivations go away as soon as we’ve actually opened all our emails and the mystery disappears. We’re addicted to checking email while there is still variability of reward and once that’s gone, emails languish in our inboxes.
  • We’re meant to be part of a tribe so our brains seek out rewards that make us feel accepted, important, attractive, and included.
  • But as sociable as we are, our individual need for sustenance is even more crucial. The need to acquire physical things, such as food and supplies, is part of the brain’s operating system and we clearly wouldn’t have survived the millennia without this impulse. But where we once hunted for food, today we hunt for deals and information. The same compulsion that kept us searching for food coerces us to open emails from Groupon and Appsumo. New shopping startups make the hunt for products entertaining by introducing variability to what the user may find next. Pinterest and Wanelo keep users searching with an endless supply of eye candy, a trove of dopamine flooding desirables. To see an example of how the hunt for information engages users, look no further then the right side of this page. There, you will find a listing of popular posts. Using intriguing images and short, attention-grabbing text, the list is a variable reward mechanism designed to keep you hunting for your next discovery.
  • We also seek mastery of the world around us. Game mechanics, found everywhere from Zynga games to business productivity apps like to-do lists, provide a variable rewards system built around our need to control, dominate, and complete challenges. Slaying new messages in your inbox stimulates neurons similar to those stimulated by playing StarCraft.
  • Variable rewards come in three types and involve the persistent pursuit of: rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, and rewards of the self.
  • As B.F. Skinner discovered over 50 years ago, variable rewards are a powerful inducement to creating compulsions.
Pedro Gonçalves

Facebook Wants To Fill Your News Feed With Actual News - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • Today Facebook announced an update to its news feed ranking that emphasizes shared news posts over memes and similar airy material that's often shared on the social network.
  • Facebook’s push to incorporate more news into timelines could be a response to Twitter’s success as a news platform. According to Pew Research, Facebook still has some catching up to do—only 47 percent of Facebook’s total users get their news on the site, compared to 52 percent of users on Twitter.
  • Facebook says people prefer “high quality content” over popular memes, so the company is putting an emphasis on tracking how frequently articles are clicked on from news feed on mobile to deliver more relevant posts.
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  • The move represents Facebook's latest push to eliminate “low quality” posts from users’ news feeds. In August, the company announced a similar algorithm update to encourage the managers of Facebook pages to post less junky material and to provide users with better-targeted updates.
Pedro Gonçalves

6 Smart and Effective Email Marketing Tactics - 0 views

  • There’s no denying that email is showing signs of decline — the number of visitors to web-based email sites fell 6% in 2010 compared to the previous year, and email engagement declined at an even greater rate, according to a report from digital analysis company comScore.
  • In response to these changes, brands are quickly adapting by combining email, social media and even mobile marketing tactics.
  • successful brands are doing just that — cross-pollinating email marketing strategies via email clients, social platforms and mobile devices. Ultimately, brands still find email effective because it’s inexpensive and universally accepted by people all over the world.
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  • The key to creating hyper-timely emails is planning and being nimble, says Christopher Stemborowski, associate communication strategist for marketing agency Oxford Communications. “Seeming timely can be the result of preparing multiple emails or just one email and waiting for the right time to send it.”
  • Build multiple versions ahead of key events: In the same way that shirts are made ahead of the Super Bowl declaring each team the champion, you can design two versions of an email to respond quickly to the outcome of major events.Plan an email for an event that has an unspecified date: Snowstorms will happen each winter. Will you have an email ready to go out the moment it happens? With a little planning, you can.Track trending online memes: In 2011, we have seen a #winning Charlie Sheen and a really excited Rebecca Black ready to have fun, fun, fun. Smart brands can tap into these memes in email blasts. You can keep track of these popular memes by viewing the trending topics section on Twitter.
  • Blasting irrelevant content to your email subscribers is one of the biggest email marketing mistakes you can commit.“For example, if a salon sends an email to men that highlights services solely for women, it shouldn’t be a shock when the men unsubscribe,” Stemborowski says. “To avoid this, the salon needs to know who in its database are males and who are females and then avoid sending irrelevant messages.”
  • “Self-selection means subscribers willingly receive emails that are in the categories they asked to get,” Stemborowski said, adding that it’s vital to keep the screening short so users don’t abandon the process.
  • More than ever, people are reading emails on their mobile devices. Mobile email usage increased 36% in 2010, according to comScore.
  • The first line of your email should never read, “If you are having trouble reading this email click here,” he adds. “Remember, the first line of the email is what shows up as the preview on smartphones. For this reason, the first line is premium real estate and, with this in mind, you should put your most important message first for a well-crafted call to action.”
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