Yearly Archives: 2016Blog

NPR Axes User Comments, Shines Light on User Behavior

NPR’s axing of comments on its articles provides a few take-aways:

  • Readers are commenting on articles less and less and preferring to participate in discussions on social media more and more.
  • Commenters are becoming more vile and difficult to police.
  • Commenting systems are expensive to maintain, which becomes more of a problem with decreasing numbers.
  • The news world, and the web in general, continues to observe and adjust as people utilize technologies in new or unexpected ways.

As has been said, ‘there’s no there there,’ and this applies to the internet as well. There are few online absolutes. Behaviors, patterns, and standards are all subject to change in today’s high-speed tech society. That’s why modern business must be lean, agile, and quick to make changes.

Read full article: http://n.pr/2bzBC3n

Type, and Digital Design

Designing for digital requires efficiency, consistency, and clarity to make it easier for people to do things. Consider that digital interfaces need to work at the ‘speed of thought.’ That’s why people prefer clicking to scrolling. It’s also why movie cuts work since cuts mimic eye movements. Designers should create digital interfaces that allow people to glance, scan, feel for hierarchy, and find things in expected ways. It’s what we mean when we say a digital experience is ‘intuitive.’

Typography is a big part of visual communication. And an essential aspect of typography is ‘letter case,’ which uses capital and small letters to convey meaning. This article looks at Title Case vs. Sentence Case and provides some insights on the use of each.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/2aGLV4b

Graphic Design Insights

Graphic design. Almost everyone wants to do it. And with a laptop and a design program, almost anyone can. But is that good? The fact is, design is an integral part of nearly everything we do, from planning your day to hosting an event to writing software. Designers will tell you that design is about solving problems. Good design results from careful consideration of purposes, audiences, tools, and constraints.

Here’s a thoughtful interview with someone who’s designed hundreds of movie titles that provides insight and reveals some of the craft’s subtleties.

Full article with video: http://bit.ly/2aja4xn

Want Better Google Rankings? Make Your Site Faster

Website load time is part of Google’s criteria for ranking sites and one of the things within your control to help you gain visibility in search engines. A few others are responsive (mobile friendly) design, publishing ongoing, helpful content, and optimizing pages with the right keywords. Let’s look at some things you can do to speed up your site.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/29TPAzf

Instagram’s New Business Tools

We’ve seen marketing steadily move to digital since the first banner ads appeared on websites in the 1990s. Newspapers, especially classified ads, were the first to feel the full impact of changes brought about by digital marketing and its unique characteristics of interactivity, data capture, and search-based advertising. Today, TV, which is currently the number one advertising medium in terms of dollars spent, is seeing its growth steadily decline, especially as advertisers move to mobile following the explosive growth of those devices. In fact, analysts expect TV to lose the top spot by 2019.

Last week, Instagram became the latest social network to offer advertising tools for businesses. Budgets for online advertising are growing, so it’s time for companies of all sizes to learn about the available digital marketing options and develop a strategy to utilize them. The move to digital is on. See you on Instagram?

Read full article: http://bit.ly/29VJ1Nl

How the Internet is Further Concentrating the Wealth of the World

The internet has been the great disrupter for over 20 years now. But the greatest effects of the worldwide network we’ve come to depend on are yet to be seen. This article points to one — and it’s big.

Nintendo and its partners are rumored to be earning more than $1 million per day from Pokémon Go. That money is flowing away from small and medium cities and toward big technology companies concentrated in big cities.
Amazon is doing something similar, diverting business away from local retailers and sucking cash into its corporate headquarters in Seattle. Companies like Google and Facebook are drawing ad dollars that previously went to local newspapers and television stations.

The big tech companies are at the root of a new economy that is funneling real money in ways that we may not have expected or wanted. Check out how the success of Pokemon Go points to an economic reality that needs to be dealt with.

Read full article: http://cnb.cx/29BadMX

Branding Is Changing In a Connected World

Consumers don’t care for advertising. They want the real dope on goods and services from people who’ve tried them. This is what they can get thanks to social media and the always-on connectedness of today’s world. And this has a profound effect on branding. Branding is typically about creating perceptions and predisposing people to like your product. But today, branding is all about what people are saying about your products, not what you’re saying. This article talks about ‘de-branding,’ and if correct, points to a very different future for what differentiates products.

The brand that screams the loudest no longer commands the most attention; the one that offers something genuinely useful does.

When you boil it down, value is all that people want.

… go back to the original notion of a brand. Fine-tune your product’s quality, design, and its durability. Become a producer of shoes again instead of surrogate spirituality. It will make your life, and consumers’ lives, simpler. Don’t throw a new product on the market if it’s not intrinsically better and more durable than what already exists. We don’t need more branding; we need fewer, better-quality products. People will find you.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/22MRlQw

Understanding Users

In the end, we’re all users. No, not the manipulators who want to steal someone’s time, money, or ideas, but the everyday people who use technology. Those of us that create solutions from tech often take users for granted or consider them with disdain when we see the ‘mistakes’ they make while ‘using’ our latest product. But we all know what it’s like to be left adrift by technology that hasn’t been well thought out or whose developers have made assumptions about us that are ill-founded at best. This article sheds light on tech from the users’ end, which can serve as a guide when we’re designing something with the goal of someone doing business with us online. The quick take-aways? Make it easy, put yourself in their place, and never call your customers ‘dumb.’

Read full article: http://bit.ly/1ORqWOQ