Blog

August 2nd, 2011

Insight Article, UX Design

The Student 2.0 lives and learns as much on the web as anywhere else.  Unfortunately it seems that for many universities and colleges student portals tend to be a lower priority than the donor and prospective student facing external websites. As universities invest time, effort, and dollars into their online presence, student portals should become a high priority. When a student becomes frustrated with the portal – whether because of the inability to access directories, register for classes, check transcripts, or read university news – the result can be a half-hearted user adoption that degrades the value of the interface or even worse, contributes to a negative student life experience. (more…)

Pete Rose

June 29th, 2011

Insight Article, User Research

As User Experience consultants, we spend a lot of time on extraordinary websites. There are two things we’ve noticed about these websites, first is that they belong to the most successful organizations in their industry, and second is their ability to deliver an engaging and valuable online experience across many diverse audiences. What’s clear is that they’ve taken the critical step of identifying their distinct audiences and immediately providing them with the pathways and specific calls to action that help them quickly locate the content they desire.

For Hospitals and Healthcare organizations, this “best practice” has special application. These organizations in particular serve a unique and diverse set of audiences. Understanding those groups, their needs, perceptions, and how they look for information, is essential to architecting a site that will serve each of them while maintaining brand integrity. (more…)

Chad Van Lier

April 14th, 2011

Insight Article, Web Content Management

“Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.”

 - Linus’ Law[1]

Drupal has arrived. The enterprise level open-source content management system is powering an estimated 7.2 million sites as of July 2010. With well over 3,000 attendees from around the world at last month’s Drupal Conference in Chicago, Drupal is everywhere.  For some, the question remains if Drupal is truly secure enough for enterprise. The U.S. Government believes Drupal is secure enough to run Whitehouse.gov and after our experiences, we fully concur that Drupal provides state of the art security. (more…)

Franz Hartl

March 17th, 2011

Insight Article, Project Management, Technology

The use of website analytics and reporting software isn’t new to most website owners. Tracking and analyzing the usage of your website by people and search engine ‘bots are obviously essential activities for validating your investment. Typical metrics tracked include number of visits by various user types, number of downloads or access to particular content, and navigation routes most commonly taken by visitors to, through, and out of your site.  These metrics, perhaps aggregated into meaningful reports (i.e. overall unique visits per month), tell you how your site is performing. But are these reports evaluated for the impact or opportunities they reveal with respect to your entire IT budget? In other words, do your web analytic reports support “Key Performance Indicators” (KPIs) for your entire IT Investment portfolio, not just the website maintenance budget?

If your answer to this is “no”, your overall organizational IT investment may not be properly balanced to deliver the maximum ROI from your website, resulting in a lot of money left on the table and accumulation of very real business risk.

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Ted McLaughlan

January 20th, 2011

Insight Article

2010 brought us the iPad, Google Android 2.2, 3D Televisions, and Wikileaks. Twitter surpassed 20 billion tweets and Facebook surpassed 500 million users, so what’s next? We have our sights set on a groundbreaking 2011. Our team has some predictions of what is to come:

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The NavArts Team

November 9th, 2010

Insight Article, Visual Design

As both a designer and Creative Director I spend a good bit of my day looking to arrive at a “right” solution for our clients and more importantly, the appropriate solution for their users. It’s not a struggle unique to us here at NavigationArts, on the contrary; it’s the age-old battle that applied design presents with each and every engagement: “Will it resonate?” “Will it be readily adopted?” “Is it brand strengthening?” and so on.

When the design team shows up, so does subjectivity. As I have never found a reliable “creative solution decoder ring,” we’ve had to rely on alternate methods to ensure that we do all that we can to remove as much of the subjective as possible and to understand the visual desires of our clients.

We use worksheets and questionnaires.  We conduct interviews.  All of these steps are taken in an effort to gain a greater intimacy with our client’s respective brands. One question we like to pose is, “Are there specific websites, either in the competitive landscape or not, that you aspire to be like?” It’s a simple enough question and one that reveals significant insight into what visual priorities/ styles resonate with our clients. The answers to this question vary widely but with one exception; on nearly every occasion, someone in the room mentions Apple.com. Regardless of the industry in which they operate, regardless of their respective business goals and existing brand visuals, the majority of clients aspire to be like Apple.

This obvious trend got me thinking… What is it about Apple’s site that makes it so universally desirable? I decided to spend some more time on the site and form some of my own conclusions. (more…)

Matt Schleyer

August 4th, 2010

Insight Article, Social Networking, User Experience Design

Participation in social media is higher now than ever before – the demographics are staggering: over 50% of the world’s internet population is under 30, and 96% of those have joined a social network.  Yet, most digital marketers appear to be content with their current advertising within social media; creating ‘token’ social media presences with very thin content and pointing people to them with “follow us on Facebook” buttons, placing banner ads and sponsored content within social media, etc., nothing more.

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Shivani Aneja, Robert Bachle, David Mead

July 12th, 2010

Insight Article, Internet Strategy, Social Networking, User Research

Healthcare organizations today face many challenges on both the mission and margin side of the house.  While grappling with the implications of the new healthcare legislation, many healthcare providers are trying to understand “meaningful-use” directives regarding Electronic Health Records (EHR) while simultaneously seeking systems that will streamline hospital-physician interactions and promote physician alignment and loyalty. Of course, ever-present are the demands for increasing customer acquisition and revenue generation, along with driving reductions in operating expenses, while providing enhanced levels of service to patients, families, and all levels of caregivers.

While many of the early visions of a fully digital healthcare economy are still to be realized, some health organizations are finding success in pursuing a small set of focused, tactical objectives rather than attempting more comprehensive and ambitious strategies sometimes characterized as “boil the ocean” approaches. The best results seem to follow when new Web-based applications / functionality are deployed carefully and incrementally in phases that are closely tied to the individual organization’s ability to metabolize such change.  This approach will certainly leave some important aspirations pushed out till much later on the timeline. However, it does streamline the crucial process of internal socialization necessary for adequate funding and broad-based institutional acceptance.

There are three Web tactics we see driving significant ROI for healthcare organizations. The first is focusing on demand-generation, or using the Web platform as a customer acquisition tool. The second tactic is focusing on patient retention through access to quality information and self-service convenience tools. And the third tactic focuses on using the Web as a platform to promote physician alignment and loyalty. If the appetite and urgency is sufficiently high, some healthcare organizations will move forward simultaneously with aspects of all three tactics.

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Leo Mullen

June 8th, 2010

Insight Article, User Experience Design, Visual Design

Like most digital marketing consultants, I’m concerned with improving the online user experience for users of my clients’ Web sites – arguably the quickest way to provide a positive return on any Web marketing investment.  With few exceptions, upgrading the online experience to meet a marketing objective involves making enhancements to the email marketing program in parallel.  What I’ve noticed, lamentably, is the number of often systemic hurdles that prevent marketers from treating Web sites and emails as one user experience.

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Bob Bachle

May 3rd, 2010

Information Architecture, Insight Article, Internet Strategy, Social Networking, Technology, Usability, Web Content Management

When I pose the question “What’s keeping you up at night?” anywhere in the C-Suite these days, the conversation inevitably turns to issues of measuring and managing their extended Web enterprise.  In all sectors of business, not-for-profit organizations, and government agencies, the Web has rapidly and thoroughly become the undisputed platform for communications, commerce, and community building.  But while many execs celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit that has blossomed in their respective organizations around the Web, the proliferation of sites, applications, microsites, tools, widgets, and social media connections has confounded many user segments and placed growing strain on the ability of organizations to manage this distended organism.  Of course, it has also greatly complicated the challenge of extracting meaningful performance metrics from this platform which could indicate how cost effectively (or not) the organization’s business needs are being supported online.

As we dive into the depths of some of these large enterprises, we see symptoms of unplanned and unconstrained organic growth.  The benefits of time-to-market advantage are obvious, but the risks less so. I’m reminded of a comment made to me by Dr. Max Coppes, Head of Oncology at Children’s National Medical Center; he said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of a cancer cell.”  That’s hardly the analog we’d hope for when inventorying a business Web enterprise.  But in many offices the idea still prevails that “If I can build it, I should build it.”  So as we watch organizations innovate, add new product lines, and expand their global markets, we see their technologies and business processes proliferate, and any vestiges of coherent discipline seem to vanish in that euphoria of growth. (more…)

Leo Mullen

April 14th, 2010

Insight Article, Web Development

At the Shakespeare Association of America’s annual conference two weeks ago, I participated in a workshop called “Shakespeare 2.0″ that attempted to describe the essential methods that Shakespearean scholars use, and how those methods will change because of emerging online technologies. Two questions arose that might be of interest outside this field: first, what is unique about scholars and what they do? Second, what is so special about Shakespearean scholars?

In working to build Web sites, I’ve worked with several different kinds of professionals, and I’ve observed that the three groups that I’ve gotten to know the best – journalists, diplomats, and scholars – work in very similar ways, at least when it comes to publishing things. Their traditional editorial processes usually include these elements: (more…)

Eric Johnson

March 16th, 2010

Application Development, Insight Article, Interaction Design, Technology, Web Development

ASP.NET’s ability to populate controls into pages at runtime is a very powerful feature. Instead of knowing exactly what the structure and content of a page is at compile time, webpages can be made to be more programmatic, adjusting to situations on the fly. There are certain amazing things that can be done with CSS, such as controlling the styling and positioning of webpage content, but an ASP.NET programmer can literally add and remove controls on the fly as they see fit.

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Randall Davis

February 12th, 2010

Insight Article, Interaction Design, Technology, User Experience Design, Visual Design

This collection is for those of you who have already gulped down the typesetters Kool-Aid. You know who you are; the crowd who grimaces at badly kerned movie credits, who get misty-eyed about old motel signs, and who think comic-sans was created by fascists hell-bent on making your Chinese food menu look festive. It goes without saying, in any discipline you have to know the rules before you can break them, yet among young designers there is a perpetual debate revolving around the use of grids and scales. The bottom line is if you’re serious about your craft, these are fundamental tools. As a designer they are as crucial as internalizing the gestalt principles of perception or the basic tenants of color psychology.

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Jesse Burgman

January 11th, 2010

Insight Article, Web Development

So you are at the beginning stages of your new content management system (CMS) implementation project.  You are finally going to get rid of the very painful, homegrown content management system you are currently using.  Your head is filled with dreams of eliminating all of your manual processes and replacing them with fully automated integration points between your shiny new CMS and your entire hodgepodge of legacy systems. (more…)

Corey Burnett

September 1st, 2009

Information Architecture, Insight Article, User Experience Design, Visual Design

Beautiful Solutions

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Buckminster Fuller, architect, designer, and inventor:

Recently, Jeff Applegate, an Art Director in our office gave a presentation explaining the origins and advantages of using grids in Web site designs. He explained that grids are used to create visually harmonious design layouts and that principles of good design are rooted in the Golden Mean, a mathematical proportion that—when followed—produces designs that are aesthetically pleasing to most people.

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Lynn Cheryan

August 1st, 2009

Information Architecture, Insight Article, Internet Strategy, Usability, User Experience Design, User Research, Visual Design, Web Content Management

With health information Web sites like WebMD setting the standard, hospital Web sites must at a minimum meet basic user expectations. Your hospital Web site is a direct extension of your brand and a poorly designed or outdated Web site will translate in the public’s perception to a poorly run hospital with outdated services.

What are the keys to developing a successful hospital Web site? All of the principles outlined below are rooted in the practice of user-centered design.

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Heather Hogue

July 1st, 2009

Insight Article

Today’s Web sites and Web applications are getting more and more complex. On the front-end at least, this is largely because interactive features are getting more advanced. There’s been a jump forward in recent years in terms of Web browser capabilities that has enabled sophisticated, almost desktop software quality features. Loading external content, hiding and showing page elements, fixed positioning, animation, drag and drop, and alpha transparent layers have all become commonplace in advanced Web-based experiences.

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Rob Cherny

June 1st, 2009

Insight Article

Early Web Animation

At the beginning of the Internet boom there were two ways to create animation. One was by using an animated gif – a very rudimentary web based version of flip cards. An animated gif strings together a number of images that change slightly, creating an illusion of movement when viewing them quickly in order. Not only could the files be very large at times, but they were also highly pixelated and not very smooth.

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Navaro Kim

May 1st, 2009

Insight Article

User centered design is the main tenet of the user experience profession. It has become a mainstream concept that seems simple, but underlying this simplicity are layers of complexity.

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John Moffitt

March 1st, 2009

Insight Article

Content migration is easy. You take an old page, copy it, and then paste it into a new page. It’s a one to one relationship, no real changes happen, and a couple hundred pages can be done with minimal effort. Most sites designed today could even be done without a CMS, simply using straight HTML.

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Dustin Collis

January 1st, 2009

Insight Article

Web site personalization provides customers with information that is relevant to their specific needs, making their online experience more efficient and ultimately more satisfying. Once Web site personalization hits its golden age, the next generation of Technoratis may look back at today’s web technology in the same way we look back at the now archaic sites of Web 1.0. Despite the lack of fundamental information architecture, Web sites were built. This was before user experience design was even a consideration, and well before any thought of personalizing the web was technologically feasible. Just getting a web presence online in those days was an accomplishment.

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David Alexander

November 1st, 2008

Insight Article

The title “information architect” was coined by the innovative architect and designer Richard Saul Wurman in the mid-1970s, but it didn’t emerge as a profession until around 2000. At the height of the first internet frenzy the internet industry needed a title for this skill set. Information architects are experts at organizing information and designing user interfaces. We work at the crossroads of content and technology and use both to create highly usable online experiences.

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Lynn Cheryan

October 1st, 2008

Insight Article

Content Management Systems are a core component of the web delivery stack for many companies. Using a CMS, companies are able to exert greater control over the branding and presentation of their web properties. The CMS also helps to establish a repeatable and tunable process for creating, testing, approving and deploying content.

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Daren Arnold

September 1st, 2008

Insight Article

According to a 2007 Nielsen study, intranets are no longer the “impoverished cousins of Web sites,” but rather have success rates that average 33% higher than the Web ¹. A Web search for intranet best practices unofficially corroborates that data—many results address how to incorporate information architecture rather than whether it’s necessary. That’s good news and represents a more mature view of intranets that companies have long lacked.

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Justin Borntraeger

July 1st, 2008

Insight Article

Web strategy is the determination of how a business or organization’s web presence will manifest its overall business strategy. Whereas a Web site can accommodate the needs of its users and contribute to a company or organization’s bottom line without a pre-defined strategy to follow, informed pre-planning and thoughtful execution of that plan can only increase your odds of success.

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Douglas Brashear

June 1st, 2008

Insight Article

On most design and development projects, the project sponsors and team want to see some manifestation of the concept well before the final launch, and a prototype may fit the bill. Prototypes can take on drastically different forms, from a paper sketch to a fully functional beta version. For this reason, it is not always simple to plan and set expectations for how a prototype will integrate in your project lifecycle.

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Navaro Kim

May 1st, 2008

Insight Article

The customer experience encompasses what a person experiences on and off of your Web site. As experts in user experience design, we focus all our attention on the Web site to make sure the user’s experience on the site is the best it can be. Remember that the user’s experience with your company doesn’t start the moment they land on your home page and end once they leave your site. It begins with advertising, word of mouth recommendations, or an email campaign announcing an upcoming sale. Nonetheless, a Web site attracts and aggregates many different types of users and serves as an excellent platform for measuring and researching not only how they experience your site, but your brand overall.

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Toral Contractor

April 1st, 2008

Insight Article

At age 17, Meghan has several hundred friends on Facebook and MySpace. She shares "vids" and "pics" through YouTube and Flikr and often studies with friends over AIM. Meghan reads Shakespeare on SparkNotes and keeps a blog on her second MySpace account, which she hides from mom and dad. If it’s out there, she StumbledUpon it, Reddit and Digg(ed) it. If it was del.icio.us, she added it to her Super Wall. Meghan Twitters and desperately wants an iPhone. She “hearts” iLike, hates e-mail and loves to "txt."

Meghan is a .teen.

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Graziella Jackson

March 1st, 2008

Insight Article

A social network is a structure comprised of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, affinities, etc. The resulting structures are often complex.

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Shivani Aneja

February 1st, 2008

Insight Article

Agile development refers to a methodology for building software that promotes development iterations throughout a project. Rather than defining a very specific scope during the project’s planning phase, agile development advocates rapid and incremental feature releases to production. The process is highly collaborative and emphasizes working software as the primary measure of progress.

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Caroline Trudeau

January 1st, 2008

Insight Article

Wikis, blogs, comments, questions, reviews, and discussions are threaded throughout the Web, and not just on the usual suspects dedicated to community building and networking. This growth of collaboration and participation is typically included in definitions of "Web 2.0" and is the reason why Time magazine declared you, the user, the person of the year in 2006. It is not surprising that executives and web teams everywhere are now wondering: do I need user-generated content on my site?

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Cindy Blue

December 1st, 2007

Insight Article

1. Social networking glut gets cleaned up.

The pretenders will be separated from the contenders when some social networking sites deliver ROI, and many others do not. This saturated marketplace will contract, but the sites that remain will have staying power.

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Kristin Hodgson

November 1st, 2007

Insight Article

Consider an upscale boutique for women’s shoes in New York City. In order to attract the right clientele, the boutique needs to build a good reputation and provide a pleasant (or cool, or funky, or exclusive) shopping experience. Thousands of dollars may be spent on interior designers, stylists, and architects who will perfect the boutique’s appearance. Thousands more may be spent on marketing and advertising to attract the crowds. After all this investment in the brand and the infrastructure, the most critical consideration remains. The shop must provide access to incredible shoes – shoes that cannot be found elsewhere. If the boutique does not have shoes the savvy shoppers are seeking, customers will leave empty handed. After all, the shoppers have no shortage of stores to visit and ways to spend their money.

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Jessie Collins

October 1st, 2007

Insight Article

Arthur C. Clarke isn’t credited with creating the first search engine; that honor goes to a student at McGill University during the infancy of the Internet. Clarke, however, certainly had a handle on what we’re still looking for in his HAL 9000 creation—perhaps the most famous example of artificial intelligence of its era. If you’ll pardon the quick trip back in movie history, HAL 9000 was the spaceship Discovery’s paranoid central computer that attempted to kill the crew in the movie classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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Dustin Collis

October 1st, 2007

Insight Article

Seven common mistakes of corporate Web sites

Considering how important the Web is to most businesses, and how much time, effort, and money most companies spend on their Web channel, it is amazing that so many corporate Web sites serve their sponsoring organizations so poorly. The Internet has been an important tool for business communication for almost a decade, and many corporate Web sites are on their fourth or fifth incarnation, yet most fail to deliver measurable business results. Here now, in no particular order, are the seven common mistakes made by corporate Web sites:

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Justin Borntraeger

June 1st, 2007

Insight Article

Since the late 1990s, political campaign Web sites have lagged behind entertainment, eCommerce, and other Web uses, particularly in the areas of usability and interaction. Indeed, until only a few years ago, campaign Web sites were in a stage of Web site infancy—the electronic brochure. They featured text addressing platform issues, touted accomplishments, and perhaps included a donation process and chat and forum technology. Of marginal importance in a candidate’s strategy for victory, campaign Web sites were not expected to craft a strong image, build a support base, or raise funds.

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John Sutton

April 1st, 2007

Insight Article

When companies create the software behind their Web sites and Web applications, they often fail to develop a proper architecture for the user interface (UI) layer. Many in the software and Web development industries consider the UI layer pitfalls from the 1990s as the norm; they do not realize that a more progressive, structured, and thought-out UI layer is not only possible, but will interact much more effectively with backend software. Simplified connections between the UI and backend software layers are one of the primary benefits of a properly-architected UI layer—one developed using Web standards-based techniques that separate content and structure from presentation and behavior. This article will first introduce persistent UI pitfalls of the 1990s, then outline the benefits of Web standards-based Web site development.

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Rob Cherny

March 1st, 2007

Insight Article

Why do beautifully architected, well-designed Web sites, especially those with content management systems (CMS), so often fall into disrepair within a year of their launch? CMS projects are enticing and sales pitches are full of promises. A CMS is designed to empower different groups and agents within the organization to manage their own content, remove IT bottlenecks, streamline and formalize workflows, and give business units complete control over what content appears online. So what goes wrong?

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Jessie Collins

February 1st, 2007

Insight Article

The “mobile Web,” or more appropriately any Web site as viewed on a small screen, is a frequent topic of conversation with our clients. Fueled in part by device consolidation and increasing mobile Web speeds, U.S. mobile Web usage is at twenty percent of mobile users ¹ and climbing, particularly among younger consumers. Content providers, grasping the potential of a mobile audience, are understandably eager to disseminate their text, images, and interactive and multimedia content to this emerging market (more…)

Douglas Brashear

December 1st, 2006

Insight Article

We’re often asked by our clients to help them get their arms around selecting a content management system (CMS) to fit their needs. After you decide to integrate a CMS for your Web enterprise, understanding your specific needs through the development of Web content management requirements greatly improves the selection process. We commonly hear our clients needing a CMS to resolve the following points of pain:

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Natalie Buda