Calgary Web Designer Jenn Armour | Info Architecture + User Centric Web Design + Online Marketing + Social Media + Ideas

UXD – User Experience Design becoming more important.

// December 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Strategy

“The creation and synchronization of the elements that affect users’ experience with a particular company or brand, with the intent of influencing their perceptions and behavior” ~ Unger & Chandler 2009

It should not be surprising that UXD is becoming increasingly important in the design of digital experiences. As an interactive designer of many years I have seen increased need and importance for the application of UX principals. The simple reason for this is the online world of business is becoming increasingly competitive. There are higher expectations and increased stakes.

User experience designer’s focus on creating an emotional experience with the products or services through understanding the needs and expectations of targeted user’s. It is difficult to influence user’s opinions and decisions that you don’t understand. Similarly it is near impossible to create an impressionable, logical structure for those user’s without having first gone through the necessary phases of UXD. Examples of these include user research, persona development, and mental model creation.

Have you, as a business, ever spent over ten thousand dollars on a corporate web site and never been introduced to the user experience design process? There are reputable interactive agencies right here in Calgary that don’t employ either IA or UXD processes into their development process. They are still charging astronomical fee’s for large web development and design projects.

It is important to know what you are getting when you hire an interactive agency to do your online design and marketing. That is before a month after the launch and you are receiving hundreds of feedback comments from existing loyal user’s who are frustrated, confused and lost on your revised re-design.

Related readings on UXD

http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/user-experience-design/
http://www.montparnas.com/articles/what-is-user-experience-design/
http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2009/06/30/so-you-wanna-be-a-user-experience-designer-step-1-resources/
http://www.amazon.ca/Project-Guide-Design-experience-designers/dp/0321607376

Is your web site doing what you thought it would?

// December 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Strategy

Marketing your business online can be a tricky process. Small and medium sized businesses are learning that simply having a web site isn’t going to cut it. An insightful question to ponder is “why do we have a website?” or “why would we need to use social media?”.

It is important to know what you want your web site to do. What are the primary objectives of your corporate web site. Answer’s to these questions become part of your online marketing strategy.

Basically the success of your online marketing efforts can be determined by its return on investment. What is your website doing for your business? Are the right people, searching for your product or service finding your business EASILY? Further, are they taking action once your site is found? Exactly what are those actions and are you tracking them.

Search marketing is an area that has become increasingly important to businesses who want to tap into their online markets. There are many miss-conceptions about what SEO involves. If your business isn’t doing SEO and SEM you are truly missing the whole point of having a website. Unless of course online visibility is not one of your objectives.

Many of my clients are simply unaware of what search marketing is. There seems to be a belief that you hire someone to build you a site and that magically visitors show up. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

SEO/SEM is not a science but an art that entails many factors. Factors that change often. It is the process by which your web site’s pages, ad’s, banner, online company is placed in front of the people that you are targeting. It does not happen without strategic ongoing maintenance and work. Of which all begins with research and an online marketing plan.

Here are some pieces in the puzzle which i use to help build out your unique online marketing strategy.

Needs Assessment

Any good strategy has to begin with clearly defined set of problems or needs. Many times it is difficult to uncover what is needed and therefore the solution based on a vague idea is doomed to be un-successful. The best way to facilitate this process is through detailed Q and A.

Creative Brief

The creative brief is a summary of the Q and A. It outlines a brief description of the project, the objectives, audience, and assumptions for the project and details the creative concept.

This document serves as a foundation for the strategy and process of any project.

Strategy

In coordination with your company, a strategy that effectively meets the needs that were previously uncovered. This would include such things like: web mission statement, competitive overview, search engine strategies, user profiles, use case scenario’s, business goals and proposed methods of implementation.

Information Architecture and Content Structure

IA will include things like wireframes, site maps, content analysis, and task analysis. The purpose of strategically developing or re-developing the structure of any project is simple: It helps provide a map of how you will present your story to your targeted audience. Underneath this structure are assumptions or research about your users and how they behave. In order to attract and retain users this is a highly important step.

Technical Specifications

In order to meet the technical requirements of a project there needs to be a plan regarding which tools will be used to implement functionality. Here are some examples:

• Content Management Platforms (Open Source or Proprietary)
• E-Commerce Tools
• Online Community Tools (Social Networking, Business Blogs)
• Search Engine Specifications
• Hosting Solutions
• Domain Management

Search Engine Marketing Specifications

• Target Market research
• Searching statistics
• Keyword research and recommendations
• Existing web site analysis
• Organic Ranking Assesments
• Pay Per Click – Google, Yahoo, Miva
• Google Analytic and Web Position

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Write to me if you aren't in love with your current web site, if you have a question, request or if you just want to say hi that is good too.

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Why web developer’s should care about accessibility

// January 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Strategy

Web accessibility refers to:

..the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities and the principle that all web users should have access to information available on the internet.

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You can be assured that many surfers on the net may be blind or visually impaired, motor impaired, paralysed. This is generally what we think of when the word “impaired” is used. However, it is important to broaden this view of impaired as it relates to accessibility. This would include cross-browser compatibility issues. If i can’t view information on my browser of choice, Safari, then the information is inaccessible. Further, lets consider the aging population of baby boomer’s rampant on the web. We have to consider text size as well! Don’t we? There is also the wide use of mobile browser’s to consider too. As a developer/designer i can get lazy and not implement strict practices of adhering to WACG.

Why it is important to design accessible web pages?

• – Increase market share and audience reach. By not locking out a large portion of users, you are of course opening the door for them.
• – Increase search engine listings and discovery. Seriously, a lot of the techniques employed while building accessible sites really do aid SEO. Cleaner code is easier to parse. Alternative text helps to describe your site and provides additional content. Captions, table summaries, text descriptions, anchor titles and meta-data all provide additional descriptive data bout your site.
• – Improve efficiency by reducing maintenance and sometimes bandwidth.
• – Demonstrate social responsibility.
• – Reduce the risk of any legal implications.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) represented the first major effort to establish guidelines for accessible design. This standard consists of 14 guidelines, each with three checkpoint levels for web developers to meet: Priority One, Priority Two, and Priority Three.

In individual countries, national standards emerged later. Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act is based on WCAG Priority One checkpoints. These same checkpoints serve as the basis for standards in Australia, France, Germany, and many other countries. The Common Look and Feel standard in Canada and Guidelines for U.K. Government Web Sites in the United Kingdom are based on Priorities One and Two of the WCAG.

OS Payment Gateway and Shipping Comparison

// January 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Strategy

Comparing 4 popular Open Source E-Commerce solutions and their payment gateways and shipping modules.

Compare 4 Open Source e-Commerce Solutions

// January 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Strategy

Zen­Cart

• a. Standalone package
• b. Hard to customize
• c. Lot of modules in the box

OSCommerce

• a. Standalone package
• b. Hard to customize (more harder than Zen‐Cart)
• c. Lot of modules in the box

Ubercart

• a. User interface is awesome
• b. Simple
• c. More ready to go out of the box
• d. Immature(alpha)
• e. Drupal’s module

Drupal Ecommerce

• a. Bloated with functions
• b. More options for contributed modules
• c. Fantastic CMS
• d. Drupal’s module
• e. More stable than Ubercart
• f. More choices of products

-Zen Cart and OSCommerce are pretty nice too, but to change the layout is your worst nightmare.  
-Ubercart is simple but it’s still in alpha mode. 

The bottomline is Drupal Ecommerce outperform other solution where you can customize almost everything with its powerful CMS. After all, it’s one of the biggest module that makes drupal popular.

Why go the Open Source route?

// September 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // Strategy

Open Source is defined in Wikipedia as “Open source software (OSS) began as a marketing campaign for free software^[1]. OSS can be defined as computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that meets theOpen Source Definition. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open source software is the most prominent example of open sourcedevelopment and often compared to user generated content^[2]. A report by Standish Group says that adoption of open source has caused a drop in revenue to the proprietary software industry by about $60 billion per year” 

Source: wikpedia  (more…)