Group items tagged

“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”.

brands are increasing their use of the social network for marketing and consumer engagement. As reported by CMSWire, a recent Simply Measured report shows that 64 percent of the Interbrand Top 100 now have an active Google+ Brand page (up 3 percent from December 2011), 22 percent of the brands now have circler counts more than 100,000, up from 13 percent, and more brands are posting more frequently: 43 percent are posting more than three times a week (up from 15 percent in February).

Among the top brands, the study showed that engagement on outbound posts is growing. Circle engagement is up 112 percent since February and content engagement is also on the rise as it increased 65 percent since February. 

During this preview period, organizations that use Google Apps will be able to use the business features of Google+ for free through the end of 2013

Digital advertisers and publishers may also want to consider using a responsive design strategy to ensure that their sites deliver consistent, high quality digital experiences across desktop and mobile channels

the usage of a single URL improves site analytics and SEO performance, and sites can easily be resized for new viewing formats.

These include longer time required to develop individual responsive pages, the need for code workarounds to account for older legacy browsers, the need for live device testing, non-compatibility with many existing e-commerce and CMS platforms, the need for a front-end rewrite, the need for a phased development approach in large enterprises, and the extra effort required to provide unique experiences for each form factor.

80 percent of all B2C and B2B transactions involve some form of word-of mouth-recommendation during the purchase cycle (Forrester: North American Technographics Empowerment Online Survey), then influencing and amping up those conversations is quickly becoming an opportunity that no one can afford to miss.

As the number of Internet-enabled consumer devices continues to grow, so does the propensity of consumers to sequentially use multiple devices to complete a single online task. In fact, according to a new study from Google, 90 percent of people move among devices to accomplish a goal.

Examples of how consumers sequentially use multiple devices for a single task include opening an email on a smartphone and then finishing reading it on a home PC and looking up product specs on a laptop after seeing a TV commercial

98 percent of sequential screeners move between devices in the same day to complete a task

Today I searched for “search engine” on Google. The first result was for Wikipedia, then came Dogpile, searchengine.ie, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. The Google search engine didn’t appear until the third page of results, which means it might as well be sitting on top of Mount Everest from a search findability perspective.The Google homepage is absolutely atrociously optimized for search engines, but tremendously well optimized for people who search. The Google design is focused on what the customer wants to do, which is to search and find stuff. Google is not focused on getting itself found but on helping customers find.

Yes, it’s important to get found. But what happens after you get found is crucial. From a customer’s point of view, finding a particular website is just the first step in completing a task.

Google wasn’t always popular. Once upon a time it was a totally unknown website run by two students. Its strategy to get found was based on being useful. That’s by far the best philosophy

comScore reported earlier this year that there are more than 100 million smartphone users in the United States alone and mobiThinking reports there are now more than 1.2 billion mobile web users worldwide, accounting for more than eight percent of total web traffic.

Gartner predicts mobile will be the number one Internet access device as early as next year.

According data from comScore, the amount of video watched via the Internet continues to climb. In June, 33 billion videos were viewed online.

Where are people getting all of this video content? Google Sites (primarily YouTube) is leading the pack. In June, Google attracted 154, 507 million unique users that viewed an impressive 1,238.1 minutes per video.

comScore shows Google led the market for video ads in June by serving up 1.41 billion ads that reached almost 25 percent of the total US population.

Forrester Research defines digital intelligence this way: The capture, management and analysis of data to provide a holistic view of the digital customer experience that drives the measurement, optimization and execution of marketing tactics and business strategies."

According to a new report from consumer researcher Nielsen, Net advertising saw the biggest increase among all ad spending worldwide in the first quarter, with a 12.1 percent increase compared to a year ago at the same time.

The report, called the Global Adview Pulse, also found increases in all other media, except magazines. Radio was second with a 7.9 percent increase, followed by outdoor advertising with 6.4 percent, ads in cinemas at 4.1 percent, newspapers at 3.1 percent, and 2.8 percent for TV. Magazines dropped 1.4 percent in ad spending.

Ad budgets in North America grew by 2.1 percent, and recession-hit Europe dropped 1.4 percent — the only region to see a decline.