Thomas Edison wasn’t just known for his startup, the Edison Company. He was known as an inventor — and a prolific one at that. He contributed to innovations, including the phonograph, the light bulb, the motion picture camera, and others. In generating ideas and inventions that had a profound and lasting impact on the world, Edison became synonymous with invention. How do we free up the world’s best entrepreneurs to keep inventing today? Silicon Valley isn’t producing new “Edisons” to keep inventing. These days, Silicon Valley has become synonymous with the concept of the
The green highlighting on this clickmap shows where users clicked when they attempted to navigate to the homepage. Since the Koshka logo is centered, many users accidentally clicked the leftmost link Under $29 to get to the homepage. In some cases, users eventually did make it to the homepage — but only after several false starts and mistakes. Comparing the steps taken by users on left-logo sites versus centered-logo sites illustrates how painful this process can become. On Stella and Dot’s website (which had a left-aligned logo), users’ clickpaths to home were clear and
Storytelling and visualization are essential facets of journey mapping because they are effective mechanisms for conveying information in a way that is memorable, concise and that creates a shared vision. Fragmented understanding is chronic in organizations where KPIs are assigned and measured per individual department or group because many organizations do not ever piece together the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. This shared vision is a critical aim of journey mapping, because without it, agreement on how to improve customer experience would never take place. Journey
Brand is a subjective perception of value based on the sum of a person’s experiences with a product or company that ultimately influences that person’s sentiment and decisions in the marketplace. Brand is a tool for influencing choice. Brand is not made of visuals or words alone — it’s not a logo or a slogan. Nor is it a figurehead, such as Steve Jobs. Those things are simply ways to communicate the brand. Although a figurehead such as Elon Musk or a logo such as McDonald’s golden arches can and do serve to effectively deliver the brand message, ultimately, a brand is formulated
One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you think is easy to use — it’s often misleading to rely on such personal preferences. For sure, anybody who works on a design project will have a more accurate and detailed mental model of the user interface than an outsider. If you target a broad consumer audience, you will also have a higher IQ than your average user, higher
Brand is a tool for influencing choice. Brand is not made of visuals or words alone — it’s not a logo or a slogan. Nor is it a figurehead, such as Steve Jobs. Those things are simply ways to communicate the brand. Although a figurehead such as Elon Musk or a logo such as McDonald’s golden
Pre Uber we were all plagued with standing on the corner, possibly in the rain, belongings in hand while attempting to wave down one of the few free taxis. (The worse the rain, the fewer the taxis — that’s a law of nature.) An abundance of unknowns adding further anxiety: how much is it going
Why is it important to understand the components of brand, and to differentiate brand from its common misinterpretation as simply a logo, a figurehead, or a website, among other things? Only when all three brand components — visuals, tone, and behaviors — are present and true to the core brand
Top 5 Industries Providing Massive Returns Over the Next 5 Years
Expect to see massive growth in all areas of the industry — from seed to customer. Also, the recent declassification of CBD from the Schedule 1 drug list will provide research experts and testing authorities a significant source of opportunities to contribute to the wellbeing of individuals
4 Ways to Enter the Blockchain Industry
The Internet combined with the decentralized framework of Blockchain now allows anyone in the world to start a business. Anyone — anywhere — will be able to execute transactions securely. Before the Internet, this kind of powerful encryption was inaccessible to many small business
How Blockchain Can Solve Major Problems for Gig Economy Freelancers
Ongoing payment issues create marketplaces devoid of freelancers, with talent moving away from platforms that have an unbalanced scale of power. Making matters worse, some companies take advantage of independent freelancers and delay processing payments to gain control of their cash flows. This
Slider Design: Rules of Thumb
Use a slider only when the precise value won’t matter to the user, but rather only the approximate range. Make sure that the users can select that range correctly without having to struggle too much to hit a precise value. In addition, any slider labels must be displayed above or beside the
the distribution of users’ computer skills: worse than you think
Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes
An architect in our study who had many years of experience using AutoCAD struggled to understand when she could or couldn’t “dock” various floating panels to keep them pinned to one side of the screen. In the same session, she tried multiple times to get a floating panel to dock to the left
7 Tips for Successful Customization
Users often won’t bother to customize the site, even if the system is clear and simple to use. Because of this, don’t depend on customization to make a good experience. Generic site experiences, with no customization, should be strong enough to support users. You do not want a user staring at
UX Guidelines for Ecommerce Homepages, Category Pages, and Product Listing Pages
While this recommendation may seem straightforward, some of our study participants struggled on homepages that were overly cluttered and failed to showcase items representative of their offerings. The homepage is to a website what a front-window display is to a physical store: the more items
Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
In this step, the team moves through the stickies on the board collaboratively and clusters similar notes that belong to the same quadrant. Name your clusters with themes that represent each group (for example, “validation from others” or “research”). Repeat themes in each quadrant if
Communicating Ecommerce Discounts and Promotions
PotteryBarn.com’s shopping-cart page informed users about a delivery discount next to the product information. This spot is typically a good placement for such offers. However, the information was written in the same font and red color used for other unrelated content displayed at the top of the
Recapping the State of the Word 2018
Mullenweg began the talk by offering the audience a perspective. “With so much going on, I’d like to give WordPress a chance to reintroduce introduce itself,” he said. “WordPress isn’t a physical thing, it’s not a set of code. It’s kind of an idea. It only exists in the space between
the distribution of users’ computer skills: worse than you think
Bringing Array Themes into the WP Engine Family
Sifting through the thousands of themes in existence today is a daunting task, and finding the right one for your website is just part of the challenge. No one wants to trust their portfolio, online magazine, or e-commerce site to just any formulaic theme. Making sure it’s well designed, well
WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner Named as 2019 Great Place to Work For All Leadership Award Honoree
The results clearly showed companies that welcome ideas from all employees have better growth prospects than those with a less-inclusive approach to innovation. In fact, businesses that successfully create an “Innovation By All” culture see revenue growth that is 5.5x greater than others, as
Journey Mapping 101
An example of a simplistic, high-level customer-journey map depicting how the persona “Jumping Jamie” switches her mobile plan. While all comprehensive journey maps should include key components, what the map chooses to prioritize can (and should) depend on the goal of the journey-mapping
Journey Mapping 101
The terms ‘user journey map’ and ‘customer journey map’ can be used interchangeably. Both reference a visualization of a person using your product or service. While the argument can be made that the term ‘customer’ does a disservice to the method (because, especially for certain
What Is Design Thinking, Really? (What Practitioners Say)
The number of words offered by the participants ranged from 0 to 7, with most participants providing 2 words. The average number of words per participant was 2.25; the median was 2. Some participants provided words that were not related to each other and, in some cases, even contradicted each
How IoT has Exposed Business Organizations to Cyber Attacks
Traditional ransomware attacks are typically found on PCs and servers, where they infect the device by encrypting key data than asking you to pay a ransom for it to be unlocked. IoT ransomware attacks are also starting to emerge. Fortunately, you can use data backups to restore your device and save
Microsoft-GitHub Purchase’s Huge Price Tag Belies Big Competitive Worries
And, now Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub repeats the pattern. GitHub is a software company that few people have ever heard of, but on which programmers, developers, and techies depend. The price tag, which is approximately 30 times GitHub’s annual recurring revenue
8 Things Every Business Should Know About Data Recovery
The frequency of backup must be based on data criticality and affordability. And there’s no debate on whether you should create and maintain a regular backup. The point is when and how. You should backup business database nightly. But in case some data is lost in between the backup cycle, use
Why Your Business Needs Copyrights
While anyone can technically find the forms on theU.S. Copyright Office website and submit the application themselves, the process for registration of a copyright is usually handled by experienced IP attorneys, given the complexities of the registration process with the U.S. Copyright Office, part
the distribution of users’ computer skills: worse than you think
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Finally, Hathaway sees this as a unique opportunity for the United States to work with countries around the world, and with organizations on an extremely local level. “We cannot succeed if our government works in isolation,” she added. It requires “leading from the top” from
Building a Workplace for the Next 100 Years
How can companies manage a seamless flow of data to synchronize the work performed by humans and robots? Employees need one efficient tool and not a pile of fragmented, inflexible applications. This single tool is required in order to manage whatever kind of work that comes their way, both
Sam Plecic secrets on Internet Business | Effective Use of Style Sheets
Effective Use of Style Sheets
Cascading style sheets (CSS) are an elegantly designed extension to the Web and one of the greatest hopes for recapturing the Web's ideal of separation of presentation and content. The Web is the ultimate cross-platform system, and your content will be presented on such a huge variety of devices
Marginalia of Web Design
Scaling reduces the image so much that pictures with extensive detail wash out and become too crowded to be meaningful. Cropping preserves those details that are within the new viewport, but at the cost of losing the context of the image as a whole. My recommendation is to use a combination of
Official Olympic Website: UI Silver - but UX DQ
Another example is even more grotesque: The site's homepage features a promotion to buy the official souvenir program for £10. So if you click this link, what would you expect? A page about the souvenir program, with a button to add it to your cart. After all, the web's one fundamental rule is
