Growth Driven Design Real business value in a fraction of the time.more
Can you remember a time where you visited a site and it felt as though the company knew you very well and were able to anticipate your every move before you made it? How about a time when you visited a site and the user experience was so clunky and disjointed that you ended up with your blood boiling as you clicked the “back button” on the browser while making the decision to NEVER do business with a company that cared so little? The following steps will help you create a user experience that wins you customers instead of alienating them through frustration!more
At MINDSCAPE, we have been advising clients to build mobile-optimized sites for years, mainly because of the dramatic improvements to the user experience when using a mobilemore
Imagine Sit back, take a deep breath, and imagine with me for a moment. Imagine that you could read the minds of anyone with whom you came in contact. You could read their emotions and their motivations. You would know what they wanted to hear and exactly what to say. You would understand what they wanted to achieve. You could take all of your insights and combine that with the person’s surroundings; you would know what they were doing, where they were currently and where there were headed, if they were using a mobile device, and a myriad of other small details. If they asked you a question, you could take all of this information and respond in a way that would perfectly meet their needs at that moment. If for some reason you didn't meet their expectation, you could know that and change your response. Wouldn't this be great if communication worked this way?more
During a meeting yesterday, I pulled up Ford.com to help illustrate a point I was attempting to make. While I was talking, Amy Snell pulled up the site as well, but didn't see what I was showcasing. It wasn't just different copy or a little detail, the entire design was different. This made me smile.more
There are two things we do a lot of here at MINDSCAPE. One is user experience (UX) design. The other is order Jimmy John’s. JJ’s is easily a team favorite, often with JJ branded cyclists making the trip to our office several times a day. After many years, they finally revamped their site. Along with their new look, they also created a new online ordering process. I love their new design. Actually, I love all their marketing. But there’s a minor issue with their “Repeat This Order” feature that would be super simple to correct, and here it is:more
This post has been republished here from its original source. As the years come and go, the types technology we use to access the web change and our approach to web design and development changes along with it. What made a good website five years ago does not make a good website today. When meeting with new clients, one of the first questions I ask is "What sites do you like and what do you dislike?" The answers are all over the board, but what I don't really see are examples of beautiful, modern websites that represent what it means to have a real online presence today. It becomes difficult for clients to understand what to expect from a modern website, as most of the sites they are seeing on a daily basis are not the types of sites we are striving to create at MINDSCAPE. This article aims to describe what I think constitutes a modern website in 2013, highlighting the way web design has evolved over the past several years. My hope is to illustrate to our partners the technology that's available to us today and why you should be taking advantage of it.more
The mobile application landscape is rapidly changing and evolving. New tablets and phones of all shapes and sizes are being conceived, created and released at an ever accelerated pace. Google’s Glass and Apple’s iWatch are confirmed and rumored new form factors just around the corner. There are mobile websites. There are mobile applications. There are mobile application stores. There are even multiple ways of distributing mobile applications. Clearly the options and possibilities are vast and potentially confusing. At MINDSCAPE, we typically take the approach of assessing a partner’s need and then compare that to the current and future mobile landscape to find the best fit. Today’s mobile development options generally fit into one of three basic types:more
This post originally posted at mark-swanson.com CSS frameworks have been around for awhile. They've just changed a lot in the last several years. What started out as basic fluid or static grid systems have now evolved to include Javascript libraries, responsive layouts, more robust user interface elements and advanced typography.more
One of the biggest usability problems I've run into when viewing sites that are not properly optimized for mobile is forms. They can look terrible, be incredibly difficult to use and are something to be avoided at all costs. Let's be honest, forms are generally cumbersome to use on desktop. They always have been. All of these flaws are amplified when you cram them into a 3.5 inch screen. So what can we do to make the experience better? Last month, I attended a workshop at An Event Apart Chicago, put on by Luke Wroblewski. He had some really great ideas on web form usability -- especially in the mobile context. The workshop really got me thinking about all the things we could be doing to create better experiences. So, with some inspirate from Luke, here are several things we can do right now to create them.more
If you're a Web Developer or Designer, you probably hear about Interaction Design all the time these days. I hear it a lot at work. After a bit of reflection, a lot of Web Designers would probably say "I already do that." Others might be intimidated by the term, confused about what Interaction Design actually means as it pertains to their job. And that's the thing. Interaction Design applies to all sorts of things, not just Web Development. Interaction Design is about understanding the behavior of people and how they use your product. Although its sort of a buzzword that's popped up in recent years, Interaction Design has always been a component of good Web Design. As our technology becomes more advanced, so do the interfaces and experiences we can dream up and bring to life. Interaction Design is a bigger component of Web Design now because we are viewing our content on laptops, smart phones, tablets, televisions and all kinds of other devices. Those are all unique experiences and we have some great tools at our fingertips to make each of them great.more
If you haven’t heard the word “gamification” yet, you’re not alone. But if you’re played Angry Birds on your phone, Draw Something on your iPad, or checked in someplace on FourSquare you’ve definitely been gamed.more
I recently had a client ask me if developing a mobile application would help them with their SEO and search engine ranking. I love the question, so I thought I would write a quick post on it. From an SEO perspective, an app actually COULD influence ranking, but not how you might think initially.more
So you've built a groundbreaking mobile app in the "virtual farting" genre or a great mobile website. You're hoping people will check it out. You've built it, but how do you know if they will come? Traditional Web analytics will sometimes work on mobile sites, but they are not always ideal. A more mobile-centric approach to analytics may sometimes be necessary. It really depends on how large your mobile audience is. But how will you ever find that out without mobile analytics? Here are six solutions to mobile analytics for your mobile website or mobile app. Spend some time reviewing each one to make sure it fits your needs. I'm not endorsing them so much as compiling them here in this article as a quick round-up of the major players in mobile analytics. In fact, the descriptions below each one are basically marketing copy pulled from their respective sites.more
I've been sorting through Google Analytics today to see which of our clients are getting mobile traffic. Not surprisingly, they're all getting it. I'd say relative to the overall traffic, the mobile slice of the pie is similar on all sites. What's not similar, though, is the the bounce rate, which is the amount of people staying on that site and the amount of people leaving without doing anything. On a lot of our sites, the bounce rate for the normal site hovers around 30%-40%, where the mobile sites are closer to 60-70%. It makes sense. Most of these people are accessing a regular site on their mobile phone, so it's not surprising that the bounce rate is a lot higher. It's just harder to use. So I compared this to a few of the mobile sites we've developed and noticed that just having that mobile friendly homepage in place seems to really level out the bounce rate. It brings it right back down to that 30-40% range, similar to the desktop site.more
You’re excited to begin working on your new website, and you’ve got it all figured out. Photos to be used, general ideas of copy, videos and overall layout and site map have been approved by the Web managers. All you have to do is execute your ideas. Easy peasy, right? Thinking of ideas is the easy part, implementing them is another (more complicated) story. How can you make sure your content is as great as possible once your website is ready for launch?more
Keeping in theme with my last post, Transforming in the Digital Age, I think it’s interesting and entertaining to look back at early uses of the Internet and Web technologies and the changes over time - it provides comic relief and demonstrates how Web technology has evolved from user demands and feedback. Today the Internet is about content and providing a valuable user experience, but it wasn’t always that way - remember silly “splash” homepages and animated flash sites with elevator music? Back in the day website functionality was not only trendy, it was an adventure. I thought it would be fun to compile a list of these hilarious out-of-date features. From the early days of the Web to Web 2.0, a list of the silliest and most obnoxious website features from the past:more
While shopping the LEGO website the other day, I ran across a free application they provide called LEGO Digital Designer. With it, you can assemble bricks from the included palette, then package and upload your creation back to the site. This looked pretty fun so I gave the software a whirl. Now, I am not a professional 3D modeler, but I do have experience in a few tools, such as Blender, and expect a few necessities in a 3D modeling application. LEGO Digital Designer does not have them. But that’s OK, I thought. I’ll just play around with it. For an experiment, I decided to model the building I work in, 25 Ottawa SW, Grand Rapids, MI, the home of MINDSCAPE at Hanon McKendry. My goal was to capture the feel of the building (being that it is LEGO and not a precise, 3D replica) without getting into too much detail. Well, that’s hard for me to do, and before too long, I found myself agonizing over placing bricks exactly where they should be to accurately reflect the building’s layout. Then I would take a step back, take a deep breath, and remind myself that I’m just capturing the building’s essence. Then it would get fun again.more
At Mindscape, I've really been jumping head first into mobile web development for the last year. I find it interesting to create something that works across the board on several different devices. We're at a point where we're starting to offer this to clients, and surely the question of "Why do I need a mobile site?" is going to come up a lot more frequently. So I thought I'd address some of the key benefits to creating a mobile-friendly website in this article. Keep in mind that developing a mobile site doesn't necessarily mean creating a separate site for mobile devices. It has more to do with creating a site elastic enough to display nicely on whatever device your end user is viewing it on.more
A month ago, I wrote about the Google Page service. The Page Service caches your static content and serves it up from their servers for faster page views. It sounds great in theory, and perhaps it will perform well in practice. Currently, it’s still in a beta period and available to only a small set of webmasters. While I was researching that article, I stumbled upon a service called Cloudflare. Cloudflare already does what the Google Page service does, but also protects your sites from known threats like spambots, can auto-minify your site’s CSS and Javascript files, hides your email address from any spambot that may get through, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. Basically, they level the playing field for small websites. A small website no longer has to pay large sums of money to get the security and reach that giant, corporate websites get. And Cloudflare manages to do it all for free.more
