Mobile Web Strategies Blog

I am constantly updating myself and my skills to match the new technology advancements and business tendencies. It is nothing new the amount of information nowadays is so overwhelming that is sometimes difficult to know what to pursuit. One very exciting and interesting tool I have leaned when doing a course of user experience last year is called Experience Map. If you know what is affinity map diagram, you could say that it is the affinity map inflated with steroids. I have written in this blog and in my linkedIn group  http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=4862097  about how important is to get to know our customers in order to build a proper digital strategy that will work properly for the business in question. Experience Map is a tool that help to build a proper digital marketing based on the customer-centric design approach and it is simple enough to be learned and used by everyone. Experience Map can only be build with data in hands. It means that we a...

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...

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.

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...