In this article, Steve Benjamins shows you what he discovered after asking the owners of several websites built with e-commerce software, if they’d recommend a particular software. Typically, they’d reply and I’d record their response in a spreadsheet (and personally thank them). Occasionally, I would even go on the phone to speak with them directly (although I quickly found out that this took too much time). Steve created a guide to help others find the e-commerce software that suits them best.
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As with any major project, a content hub should not be taken lightly. A hub acts as a tool to reinforce your brand. This is an opportunity to show your expertise in your field, providing knowledge and insight to your visitors. You’ll quickly learn the most popular subjects and gain an understanding of your key audience. Being prepared is key, and that means digging deep into your website to understand both the scale of the task at hand and what will be required to achieve your goals. This rigor and depth of understanding are not reserved for massive hubs, though — any website that relies on content would benefit from all or part of the methods discussed.
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Will the resources spent implementing app indexing for Google search be a boon or a bust for your app’s traffic? If your resources are limited and you’re wondering if app indexing would deliver enough traffic and installations to justify the effort, our experience would suggest you should focus on web content instead. In this article, Bryson Meunier will take you through a case study for app indexing at our company, the results of which may surprise you.
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You can facilitate kickoff meetings to improve shared understanding of a project’s goals and potential challenges. You can facilitate presentations to elicit more productive questions and feedback. Even impromptu discussions and group whiteboard sessions would benefit from better facilitation. In this article Brian Frank focuses on developing the soft skills to feel more comfortable facilitating UX design, research and strategy sessions. You don’t need to be a full-time facilitator or leader, or even a designer. These skills can be used by anyone in any role to inject more productive collaboration throughout their design process.
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There are several actions you should take when improving an app engagement, but one of the most crucial is to get up close and personal with users. If you don’t segment and personalize your users’ journeys, then you should expect lower rates of conversion and retention. Understanding the individual user’s journey and how they are using the app overall is key to personalizing your mobile app experience. Mobile users have high expectations of the mobile experience and brief attention spans, so careful personalization and in-context awareness are crucial for effective communication and engagement with them.
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Every $92 the average company spends attracting customers, a meager $1 is spent converting them. Real conversion optimization is rooted deeply in psychology. In this article, John Stevens will analyze seven psychology studies that date as far back as 1961. Each experiment raises principles that will help you boost conversions on your website. Effective conversion optimization goes beyond simply changing a button’s color or making a few tweaks here and there. The trick is knowing the fundamental principles that make people act the way they do. Hopefully, the psychology studies reviewed in this article will provide you with some practical insight to boost your conversion rates.
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Andy Budd is a firm believer in cross-functional pairing and thinks that some of the best usability solutions emanate from the tech team. However, at some point the experience needs to be owned, and it shouldn’t be owned by the last person to open the HTML file and “touch the truck”. If designers are happy for developers to “own the code”, why not show a similar amount of respect and let designers “own the experience”? After all, collaboration goes both ways. So if you don’t want designers to start “optimizing” your code on the live server, outside your version control processes, please stop doing the same to their design.
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In today’s burgeoning digital market, every company stands to lose by avoiding alignment with digital policies. By the same token, you have even more to gain by incorporating those policies into an overall long-range strategic plan for your digital enterprise. By complying, you’ve ensured that your home on the web remains secure.When creativity is balanced with guidance — the real goal of these policies — then digital workers are freer to innovate and work more efficiently than in other organizations. Digital workers, especially web designers and developers, need to recognize that policy influences their products online much as it does offline.
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In the unforgiving world of SaaS, delaying a critical feature will mean losing clients. A solid agile workflow can make all the difference. The development process needs to run smoothly and up to a standard, with delays reduced to a bare minimum. Before any change makes its way to the end user, it goes through five crucial phases: feedback, design, development, quality assurance and deployment. In this article, Vanja Mimic will share what he’s learned about each of the stages from over eight years in the business.
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When talking to potential clients, be aware that many will have never solicited a professional design service and likely have little understanding of the design process itself, or they have had a poor experience in the past. For many clients, it can be an anxious jump into the deep unknown, a big financial investment steeped in risk. Our knowledge and experience shouldn’t be seen as a free commodity. However, at times, a little patience and empathy are required on our part. Many designers will agree that clients, for the most part, need us to guide them through the design process, to ask the difficult questions and ultimately to reassure them by delivering measurable results.
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