Mobile Web Strategies Blog

I have been very busy end of the year with a lot of projects including a thesis for Information Business degree at Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences. Besides all the ups and downs of study, family and work I have decided that I will commit myself to write at least 1000 words per day in order to have all my projects including the blog taken care. Let’s see how it comes up. The topic of the day is the title of the post that is: What to consider when designing or purchasing a mobile site or app? 1. Who will use your site or app? Without knowing who is your target group and knowing basic things about them you won’t go too far.  That is what in UX (User Experience) term means building PERSONAS. Personas should be real users with their complete profiles. Ok, now you might think – you lost me in this one, how do I do that? Well, that is easy. You have the mobile app and site idea.  Who is the first person that comes to your mind that you see using your app...

For those who don't know who is Eric Ries and have never hear of his book "The Lean Startup", wake up people,  and go get his book! I am so fan of the Lean movement that I have not only read Eric's book (that is the founder of the Lean Movement), I actually got all the lean books out there and have eaten them (ok, not literary, but you probably have understood me!). Do not be full by the named, it is not only for entrepreneurs. It can be applied to manufacture, software development and literally anything you wanna do. The principles are easy to follow, but this blog post is not about the book or the lean movement, it is about quality and Eric says it beautifully in his post in LinkedIn. I can get back on a summary of his book later on. The title as always seems to be aimed at entrepreneurs, however as I have already mentioned, it can be applied to everything. He say that "quality is really in the eye of the beholder".  The only way to really get ...

This time I am sharing with a practical example of the power of UX and the user-centered-design when re-inventing from the ground up a website that resulted in increase of knowledge about cancer and its prevention. It describes in details the goal for the Norwegian cancer society online, its strategy, what were the primarily questions it should answer and how the campaings should be organized. The results were the impressive make over of the website with + 20% more people contacting the cancer line. The one time donations increase + 70%, donations total +73% and montly donations + 88%. That is the power of UX and the user-centered-design, so before think twice if is worthing investing on UX, think if is worthing knowing well your customers and what they need to know and do on your site before you build extremely fancy sites that don't pay off. Take you time and see Ida Aalen's presentation on the Content Against Cancer.  

Today I am sharing a slideshare presentation of the Norwegian designer Ida Aalen because many of the topics she speaks on her presentation I have already been talking of the last months on other articles of this same blog. Topics such as: 1. User-centered design and that whoever shout the most win and it is often the user. 2. Mobile first and that design for mobile should come first. (See earlier articles on this subject in this same blog). I specially like her analogy when she mention the book Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski " If it's not important enough to put on mobile, is it important to put on the desktop?" 3. Responsive Design and that browser landscape becomes bigger and smaller at the same time with same content on all platforms and the need for adaptative presentation that are future-friendly. From the book on Responsive Design by Ethan Marcotte. I highly recommend Ida's presentation and to make it easy to see I am making it very user-friendly and embe...

How are we persuaded and how to persuade? It is a mistake to think people consider all the available information when they need to decide if they purchase something. This is an ideal situation that rarely happens. Marketing information is everywhere and nowadays with the digital world in addition to physical we have social and digital marketing overwhelming our lives with millions of choices which makes impossible for a single human being decide considering all the possible situations and available products and services. This means that without some clear marketing rules digital and normal marketers are not going to get far on the art of persuasion. There is a research done by Robert Cialdini & Steve Martin on the Science of Persuasion that reveal 6 universal shortcuts that guide human behavior that is worth knowing from both perspectives: The user – to know how we are manipulated The Digital Business marketer – it can guide our marketing strategies as business people. ...

I have seen a Steven Johnson's sketch video presentation with the title "Where Good Ideas Come From" last year and it makes so much sense to me that I was wondering how can we possibly do things without consciously knowing what we are doing however know in our guts that it is what we should be doing. If you think it is complicated watch the video below and you will understand what I mean. I love technology, business development, leadership and management and I am constantly picking things here and there to make something else happens. Well, this short video presentation will show you how we all connect the dots on our own ideas and the insights we get from others to be original, creative and innovative. I assure you the short presentation is more than worth watching.

User experience is the science and art of designing a product no matter if it's a digital or physical product which it's easy to use. The important thing is that it meet the expectation of the user but at the same time also meet business goals. Here is an animated video Dr. Susan Weinschenk demonstrates how user centered design results in significant return on investment (ROI). Here is the poster of the presentation:

Marketing and UX together make your company boom and optimize your product, service and sales exponentially. How? Marketing research determines who is the user and look for way to sell more to these users . Marketing hopes the user is satisfied enough to come back for more, but as long as sales people sell (even if they sell for the lack of better solutions in the market) everything seems to be ok. What sales people do not realize in this case is that the customer might not be ok, they user the service or product just for lack of better solutions and will jump to the first provider that can serve them better as soon as the market presents to them.  Marketing is worried about how to sell, to whom, who are the average customers, how much of the market share we have, benchmark competitors and so on. UX in the other hand   focuses on research what motivates the same marketing user to use and continue to do business with us taking care to let the customer so addicted t...

User Experience reside in the intersection between business needs and user needs This video in youtube tells visually what sometime is hard to explain in words.

This article was the result a response to an article I have published in a LinkedIn group I belong Linked In Front End Developers group User Experience is the heart for any product or service because without a customer to purchase the product or service nobody will manufacture or build a product or service in the first place. This is a fact but it does not mean that clean code and security is less important.  E-commerce example from a security perspective Let's imagine that a customer have an e-commerce site that is the most easy to use and to make customers purchase a breeze, and it has the best conversion rate possible, but it has a terrible security and the site constantly breaks?  How long do you think the e-commerce owner is going to keep in business that way if his customers do not trust to use his wonderful easy to use e-commerce? Not for long however in this case the reason is clear - everybody knows that the problem is in the security and that the code...

Here is a youtube video where Ozzy literally fights with the custom tv-house control remote while the developers think it is the easiest product ever. Here you can see how important to pay attention to UX before build any software or physical product.

"It's helpful to ask who has the most skin in the game when it comes to solving the congestion caused by rapidly-increasing video traffic on mobile networks: the content publishers who are pushing high-bandwidth video out? Or the mobile operators themselves, whose users instinctively blame them when video fails to start, or buffers and stops?"

Most of IT companies don’t see UX (User Experience) should be at the heart of everything they do which leads to their inability to present and sell UX as the starting point of any project. UX in most case is sold as an “extra” service while they should be seen as the starting point of any IT business strategy. UX is everything - it starts with the customers, go deeper to their customers and it should end with them in mind! What UX really is? UX is a business and digital field in itself. The misconception here is that most people think of UX as just usability. Usability though is simply how easy to use and simple the website functionalities are to the end user. For usability we have plenty of best practices already in place and even standardized. Bear  in mind that usability is only part of UX! UX is a continuous work that starts by what customers want to accomplish with their site, and not how they want the site to be , unless they are the ultimate end user of the site...

HTML5 MISCONCEPTION Nowadays any new browser capability or web application technique found across the web is labeled as HTML5 and that is not true. Michael Mahemoff said that HTML5 has become a brand that represents a new type of web application rather than the specification itself. In order to learn HTML5 is very important to understand what really HTML5 is. It is common nowadays hear CSS transitions, web sockets, geolocation, SVG, CSS @font-face all mentioned under the HTML5 banner and label all under HTML5 "brand".  In the specification none of those mentioned are found for the simple reason that they either belong to the CSS3 specification or other API specification within the WWW Consortium. Websites are and will be built with a combination of HTML5, next-generation APIs, JavaScript and CSS3, which means that as a designer or developer the difference between those technologies must be clear and how they fit together should be understood. What is really HTML5? ...

Lessons To Be Learned From Facebook Mobile User Growth To 54% From Last Year Today one of the headlines in the -> Online Media Daily was that advertisement on Facebook social network's mobile business rose to 30% of its sales this year compared to almost nothing last year which was responsible for the 39% overall raise of Facebook revenues . The lesson to be learned here is clear MOBILE USE is rising significantly and Facebook knows that because their monthly active mobile users is 751 million in the end of March. What that means? It means that Facebook mobile monthly active users have grew 54% from last year. Let's compare a bit The numbers above show how mobile users has double this year compared to the last one, but the same Facebook has announced that their monthly active users grew 23% compared to last year. This is  a real bomb news for the Mobile World It means that mobile is growing so fast that any company that try to blind itself...

I found this week a web site that has very interesting information about technology trend jobs. This information is vital in order to have a very good idea about how the IT market is consuming those technologies. I really worth to see those charts below and reflect on it. The information cames from Indeed and Simply Hired they have much more if you want to look at, but I have chosen to embbed in in the blog what has to do with HTML5, jQuery, Mobile Apps, iOS, and Android. Indeed and Simply Hired searches millions of jobs from thousands of job sites. This job trends graph shows the percentage of jobs people find that contain the search terms. 1. Mobile App Trends Mobile-app jobs 2. HTML5 Job Trends HTML5 Job Trends 3. jQuery Job Trends jQuery Job Trends 4. iOS Job Trends iOS Job Trends 5. Android Job Trends Iphone, Ipad, Ios, Android, Wp7, "Windows Phone", Blackberry, Webos, Cordova, Ph...

REAL USABILITY MATTERS - Usability is one of the single most important thing you can do to ensure success and money. Any design should have the user in mind, however when we talk about small screens this is a must. The Google presentations  What is a mobile site and why do you need one?  try to give business people and even developers the awareness that mobile sites nowadays is a must - but if they are build without the user in mind there is not use to have it. Their case studies are interesting. Mobile-friendly web apps help businesses: To connect with their customers Increase Revenues Reduce Costs because when sites are optimised and user-friendly you give your customers means to get what they want instead of wonder around, get tired and go to your competitor. The catch is that the only way to accomplish that is to invest in Usability. IT IS ALL ABOUT USABILITY. Improved usability makes you INCREASE YOUR MARKET SHARE - the like effect...