Article Prospect Experience Design Designer Biases and Usability Testing by Christopher Butler on March 31, 2014 We’re all biased. This process is biased. In fact, all usability testing is biased because it tries to synthesize the experience of a user — it’s amazing how difficult it is to reproduce something as trivial as using a webpage in a way that actually helps us make that experience better! So, we’re not going to avoid biases entirely. But it does help to understand some of the core biases... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design A List of Things Designers Think That Are Wrong by Christopher Butler on March 24, 2014 A list of things we think that are wrong... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Casual Fridays: The Propriety of Proprietary – How Portable is Your CMS? by Mark O’Brien on March 21, 2014 Is WordPress the only viable CMS choice? When you make a decision about who's going to build your next website, are you making a technology decision, a relationship decision, or both? How portable is a site that's perfectly tailored to your needs? In this installment of Casual Fridays, Chris and I might bring up more questions than we answer, but at least they're interesting questions. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Web design has changed. Have you? by Christopher Butler on March 18, 2014 Web design is changing. Of course, that's always been true. This month, Chris Butler looks at what's changing now, starting with modular content and how it changes our design practice, and then works his way back to some of the things that have become "fundamental" to web design... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Before You Report that Bug, Use this Pre-Contact Self-Diagnosis published on March 10, 2014 There's nothing fun about finding bugs on your website. While we strive to diagnose and fix issues as quickly as possible, our developers usually need to know more than "X or Y isn't working" in order to do so. There are a few things in particular that our developers usually need to know in order to diagnose a bug, and these are the things we’re likely to come back and ask you about if you haven’t already provided them. So, to ensure we can help you as quickly as possible, here's a pre-contact, self-diagnosis routine to help guide you in reporting problems. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Inside the Redesign of Merge Records by Justin Kerr on March 7, 2014 Last summer, Newfangled was hired to develop a new website platform for Merge Records, an established indie music label headquartered in Durham, NC. Read about some of the challenges that arose during the design process and how we tackled them. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design You Can Design a Better Store than Amazon by Christopher Butler on February 24, 2014 Amazon already has your customer in their store. Your customer is already browsing their aisles. Amazon will beat you, not because they have a better store than you, but because they have a bigger store than you. They sell enough things to already have your customer’s attention. It doesn’t matter if they came in to buy socks, if they’re at all likely to buy your thing, Amazon will have an easier time selling it to them because they are already there. So what do we do? Give up? Not just yet... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Calls to Action and Usability: How to Make CTAs That Work published on February 19, 2014 Having strong calls-to-action that are easy to notice, understand, and fill out is absolutely crucial for your site's conversion rate. However, don't fall into some common usability traps! Here's a simple usability guide to creating compelling, clear, concise CTAs. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design How to Test a Website in Ten Seconds by Christopher Butler on February 11, 2014 A few weeks ago I wrote up a quick explanation of how to test a website in ten minutes. Quick and easy. But did you know that you can test a web page in ten seconds? Believe it. I started doing this after I read a page abandonment study by Jakob Nielsen, and have put together a method you can use right now... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design The Future of Web Development is Information Logistics by Christopher Butler on January 27, 2014 Last week, Mark and I had the pleasure of speaking at Valuable Content's Bristol Content Group event — virtually! Thanks to the technical wizardry of Sonja and Matt from Desynit, we spoke to a packed crowd in Bristol, UK, from the comfort of our Chapel Hill offices. After reading our article last fall on why "We Don't Build Websites Anymore," Sonja was eager to find a way to present this material to her community and put together the event in pretty short order. Mark and I spent an hour presenting on the lead development ecosystem and the future of web development and then took questions from the crowd. It was a great event, and hopefully a step toward an in-person event in the UK sometime soon. Below is a transcript of my portion of the material... Read Now About