4/5/2012
How do we encourage people to visit our websites and spend time exploring products or services? We try to anticipate what the user might want to do next, depending on where they are in the site. Providing options for exploration in the form of contextual information or a strong call-to-action are a way to avoid dead end pages.
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Tags: UX, Websites
2/24/2012
It is important that we understand User Experience to be the collection of responses, feelings, and thoughts that our users experience when interacting with technology. Simply put, UX is a sum of its parts. But wait - so is the term Website User Interface (WUI) or (UI)... this is where it gets tricky; enter the food analogy.
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Tags: UX
1/27/2012
The sound of crickets on an otherwise silent night can invoke an empty, alone feeling—a pleasant feeling that it's just you and the crickets. But this feeling is deadly to your website or collaboration portal. Things like calendars, discussion boards, press release pages can be important communication and engagement tools, but neglect will start the crickets to start chirping.
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Tags: Portals, UX, Websites
1/24/2012
In a recent blog post by Mark Fidelman, he discusses how companies need to be more like IBM and less like Apple. Mr. Fidelman recalls that, in the past, IBM was known for being the thought police and Apple for allowing employees to think outside the box. This is no longer the case.
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Tags: General, Social, UX
8/9/2011
Just as it’s important to know what consumers want and tailor your products to their desires, it’s also important to ensure that every form of interaction they have with your brand is driven from their perspective and shaped to appeal to them.
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Tags: Collaboration, UX, Websites
1/28/2011
Don't neglect your error pages! A good error page and a good 404 page go a long way towards keeping a visitor on your site when things don't go quite as planned.
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Tags: General, SEO, UX
1/12/2011
With the ever-increasing number of mobile device users and growing sales of smartphones and tablet computers, the need to design and develop websites with the mobile user in mind is shifting from an advanced benefit to a business necessity.
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Tags: Mobile, UX, Websites
12/14/2010
Although a vital part of digital marketing, Facebook and Twitter aren’t representative of a company - they are their own sites with their own brands, and their goal is to help communicate. The face of any company is their website.
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Tags: UX, Websites
6/7/2010
I get a LOT of emails from a variety of industry sites that I opted into, but I admit that many go unopened. Well, this morning from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, I received one with the title "Does SharePoint Destroy Intranet Design?"
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Tags: Collaboration, Portals, SharePoint, UX
11/13/2009
As Northridge has developed various SharePoint-based business solutions for clients, and assisted clients in a consulting capacity with SharePoint strategy and governance, we have developed a model that we call the SharePoint Site Governance Lifecycle.
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Tags: Collaboration, Portals, SharePoint, UX
9/30/2009
2009 and 2010 will be remembered as the time when the words "search" and "Microsoft" became closely associated in the minds of enterprise technology customers, vendors, and developers.
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Tags: Portals, SharePoint, UX
9/19/2009
On September 1, 2009 Microsoft announced the availability of a preview release of Windows Embedded Standard 2011, the latest in Microsoft's line of embedded/compact editions of the Windows operating system.
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Tags: Mobile, UX
8/19/2009
A paradigm shift is underway for how .NET solution developers work with identity and authentication. The shift is not only in the tools and recommended design patterns for validating user identity (authentication) and managing role-based permissions for what a user is allowed to do (authorization).
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Tags: Portals, UX
6/23/2009
Good news: WCF programmers no longer need to suffer REST envy in relation to their brethren in the wider development world. .NET developers will now be able to easily achieve both RPC and REST type services in WCF.
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Tags: UX, Websites
6/15/2009
Digg is looking to take its approach currently used for stories to how it displays ads. Users will be able to vote ads up and down just as it does stories.
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Tags: UX
6/12/2009
...but you HAVE to touch! With the release of Windows 7 later this year, Microsoft is introducing Windows Touch, a platform designed to provide an enriched multi-touch experience, bringing Windows to the Surface.
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Tags: General, UX
5/21/2009
As our design team works closely with our SharePoint development team with the MOSS 2007 platform, we continue to push further into interesting realms.
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Tags: SharePoint, UX
2/8/2009
My favorite study ever done was the eyetracking survey done several years ago. I still refer to it often when explaining to clients and even new designers how to approach information design of a specific screen.
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Tags: General, UX
10/28/2008
With the release of Version 2.0, it seems as though Silverlight is definitely headed in the right direction.
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Tags: UX
4/8/2008
I was recently asked by a client what resources exist to dig into the whole world of user experience. I am the worst at adding and maintaining bookmarks, so most of my top sites reside in my brain.
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Tags: UX
3/8/2008
There is a whole lot of information and misinformation out there in terms of what are the real characteristics of Web 2.0 (I have seen early articles on Web 3.0 but that is another topic entirely!).
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Tags: UX
12/18/2007
High level summary is that Ajax, rich internet user interface design, mashups, and user-generated content can create a lot more complexity to the overall user experience than they are worth.
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Tags: UX
4/7/2007
Any project whether building a new website or planning a campaign starts with a basic question. We can talk about goals and audiences, but simply put, What is Success?
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Tags: UX
7/1/2006
The concept of "correctness," as it relates to software, is usually discussed in relation to the known requirements for building or using a particular piece of software.
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Tags: UX