Google Maps adds indoor tracking: http://goo.gl/61Cb7
I can’t tell – is it android only or will the service work on an iOS device?
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What are the three keys to effective mobile social marketing?
With more consumers using their mobile devices to access social networks, brands need to start thinking differently in terms of their social media strategy.
Consumers are using their mobile devices as the main way of connecting to social media sites, leaving an opportunity for mobile marketers to tap into. In particular, marketers need to pay especially high attention to time and focus on short messages when marrying mobile and social media marketing this holiday season.
“We are just beginning to think about the customer experience across mobile and non-mobile channels,” said Erika Brookes, vice president of marketing at Vitrue, Salem, NH.
“Marketers need to understand how each channel varies in terms of user engagement, user experience and the benefit for the end user,” she said.
Key punctuation
According to data collected from Virtue, punctuation and grammar are vital to targeting the right group of mobile consumers.
Short, targeted messages that point across quickly are key.
For example, Facebook posts with question marks in them received 4.8 percent less likes than posts without them, and posts with an exclamation point generated 13.7 percent less likes than those used without an exclamation point.
Additionally, across all pages sizes – including Web and mobile – social media posts with less than 70 characters received more likes and comments.
For mobile devices specifically, engagement increased by 4.3 percent when messages were less than 70 characters long.
Virtue’s data is proof that when planning a social media marketing initiative on mobile devices, it is better to be short and sweet because consumers have less attention on mobile than they do on desktop experiences.
via What are the three keys to effective mobile social marketing? – Mobile Marketer – Social networks.
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greg
An Extensive Guide To Web Form Usability
The ISO 9241 standard defines website usability as the “effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments.” When using a website, users have a particular goal. If designed well, the website will meet that goal and align it with the goals of the organization behind the website. Standing between the user’s goal and the organization’s goals is very often a form, because, despite the advances in human-computer interaction, forms remain the predominant form of interaction for users on the Web. In fact, forms are often considered to be the last and most important stage of the journey to the completion of goals.
check out the full Extensive Guide To Web Form Usability @ Smashing UX Design.
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An article published in Science Magazine in June…
An article published in Science Magazine in June provides evidence that the Internet has become an “external part” of our memory systems. Rather than remembering information, we seem to have “outsourced” this effortful task to an entity other than ourselves.
On the face of it, this is not an astounding finding in that psychologists have demonstrated for over 30 years that we use outside sources, such as family or team members, to supplement our less-than-perfect memories. What makes this research remarkable, and of interest to the UX community, is that the researchers found that when we expect to be able to access information in the future, we tend to have reduced memory for the actual information, but enhanced memory for where to find the information. Thus, while we do measurably worse at remembering that the capital of Vermont is Montpellier, we apparently remember with greater accuracy, where on the bookshelf the atlas is located. These findings suggest that making sites memorable as the repository of information may be the key to gaining return visitors.
There are some excellent points further into the article that speak to single purpose sites and credibility.
read more @ Metamemory and the User Experience | UX Magazine.
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Modal Windows In Modern Web Design – Smashing Magazine
In user interface design, a modal window is a child window that requires users to interact with it before they can return to operating the parent application, thus preventing the workflow on the application main window. Modal windows are often called heavy windows or modal dialogs because the window is often used to display a dialog box.
Modal windows are commonly used in GUI systems to command user awareness and to display emergency states. On the Web, they are often used to show images in detail.
Use cases
Frequent uses of modal windows include:
- Drawing attention to vital pieces of information. This use has been criticised as ineffective because users are bombarded with too many dialog boxes, and habituate to simply clicking “Close”, “Cancel”, or “OK” without reading or understanding the message.
- Blocking the application flow until information required to continue is entered, as for example a password in a login process. Another example are file dialogs to open and save files in an application.
- Collecting application configuration options in a centralized dialog. In such cases, typically the changes are applied upon closing the dialog, and access to the application is disabled while the edits are being made.
- Warning that the effects of the current action are not reversible. This is a frequent interaction pattern for modal dialogs, but it is also criticised by usability experts as being ineffective for its intended use (protection against errors in destructive actions) due to habituation. Actually making the action reversible (providing an “undo” option) is recommended instead.
check out a nice set of modals @ Modal Windows In Modern Web Design – Smashing Magazine.
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Responsive Web Design: 50 Examples and Best Practices – DesignModo
Responsive web design term is related to the concept of developing a website design in a manner, that helps the lay out to get changed according to the user’s computer screen resolution. To say more precisely, the designing the concepts enables the users to avail an advanced 4 column lay out, with the width of 1292 pixels, on a 1025 pixel width screen, that auto simplifies into 2 columns. Also it suitably fixes on the screen of smartphone and computer tablets. This particular designing technique is termed as “responsive web designing”.
Responsive web designing is a completely different designing version than the traditional web designing, and developers especially fresher must know about the pros and cons of responsive web designing. This blog is a mighty approach to reveal a few facts about the uses of responsive web designing. Your basic designing ideas will insist you to choose media queries to develop responsive designing site. However, the hassle that you face while using the media queries is, every moment a new queries pops up, your first designing style starts to change from the old one within a very short gap of time. What experts suggest is to use some CSS transitions to ease the jump.
check out the complete list @ Responsive Web Design: 50 Examples and Best Practices – DesignModo.
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Periodic Table of the Elements
Periodic Table of the Elements by Josh Duck.
Fun interactive table showing the 106 elements currently in the HTML5 working draft and two proposed elements (marked with an asterisk).
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LukeW on What Impacts Web Form Conversion?
There are many things we can do to improve the design of Web forms. But what can we do to really boost conversion? Here’s a few case studies that illustrate how the removal, clarity, and even indication of requirements can have a real impact on form conversion.
check out What Impacts Web Form Conversion? from LukeW.
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Quick Amazon Silk thoughts – QuirksBlog
So Amazon has announced its Kindle Fire tablet, and it will not be an iPad killer. It runs Android, but not the standard Android, but rather a special Amazon port that does not include any standard Google apps. Notably, Amazon will have its own app store.
The Kindle Fire will also sport its own browser: Silk. Kudos to Amazon for actually giving their browser a name. That helps a lot.
Yesterday I was surprised at the fact that so many people were surprised that Amazon would use its own browser. What else would they have done? Copy Android WebKit, the most disappointing mobile browser right now? Android WebKit is hardly progressing, and if you want a state-of-the-art browser you’d better build something yourself.
On the positive side, Amazon actually created a blog about the new browser — something you rarely see in the mobile world. On the negative side, it’s bloody vague:
Amazon Silk deploys a split-architecture. All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely. In short, Amazon Silk extends the boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of your local device with the massive computing power, memory, and network connectivity of our cloud.
Some tantalising hints, but mostly marketing speak. Let’s deconstruct it. See also this article and this one.
Silk uses WebKit. That’s good.
Right now the Kindle Fire lacks a 3G model. However, I feel the browser has been made ready for 3G. (Why? Forward compatibility to next-gen Kindles, and see also below.)
Silk seems to be an Opera Mini-like proxy browser, where the client asks the server to fetch and render the page, and then receives what’s basically a bitmap image. This makes for very fast browsing and little data traffic. (See however update below.)
They call it “split-architecture.” Whatever.
An engineer describes it as a store for accessing your files — which reside in the Amazon cloud. That’s a good way of explaining cloud-caching.
Still, cloud-caching won’t cut it on a 3G network. The problem there is not the connection between the Amazon cloud and the website, but between the Kindle and the Amazon network.
Michael Mace discusses the Kindle, and makes an interesting remark:
Amazon could tie the browser to its own content services and distribute it to other hardware vendors. Basically, it could try to make Silk the content layer on Android that Google wants to be. This could be a good business move for Amazon, since it’s not making money from the hardware anyway.
Technically I’m not quite sure how a browser could be a content layer, but that’s mostly because I lack technical information. Of course the browser could tie in with, say, the e-reader so that it can access your ebooks and other content. We’ll have to see whether that is the case, though.
If that is the case I wonder if Silk can run on a regular Android device. Now that would piss off Google: Amazon would take over their entire content layer in one fell swoop.
And why stop at Android? Thin Silk client offering a gate to your Amazon content on other OSs? Say, on iOS? The main problem I’m seeing here is that it would need caching on the device itself. The cloud won’t cut it if you’re on a lousy mobile connection and want to read your e-book.
I could be completely wrong here; I’m arguing from severely incomplete information. But the ramifications of a thin Amazon client are intriguing.
Update: Some say that Silk is a hybrid browser: it can function either as a proxy browser or as a full browser. Now this could be true. In fact, it was what I originally thought, but I changed my mind after watching the Amazon video, which basically talks only about proxy aspects.
If Silk is indeed a hybrid browser Amazon is doing its best to confuse the world.
And if Amazon ever wants to expand its browser (and thus its content) to other platforms, a proxy browser is what they need. It’s much easier to write a thin proxy client for dozens of platforms that a hybrid browser that also contains a rendering engine.
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Mobile Frameworks Comparison Chart
Looking for the right mobile Framework? Compare all major Frameworks and choose the one that fits best.
check out Mobile Frameworks Comparison Chart.
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greg
A Roundup of Valuable Facebook Tools
Even with Google+ on the virtual horizon, Facebook remains a major social media platform that many users never foresee leaving. So for designers and developers compiling tools for making the most of Facebook will never go out of style.
check out this Roundup of Valuable Facebook Tools.
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http://www.drawastickman.com/
This fun little adventure uses the Raphael Javascript library – Raphael is a vector graphics library, done using SVG (not bitmap like HTML5 canvas) -
greg
Do users change their settings?
Back in the early days of PC computing, we were interested in how people used all those options, controls, and settings that software designers put into their applications. How much do users customize their applications?
We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.
We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.
What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.
This was particularly curious because some of the program’s defaults were notable. For example, the program had a feature that would automatically save your work as edited a document, to prevent losing anything in case of a system or program failure. In the default settings for the version we analyzed, this feature was disabled. Users had to explicitly turn it on to make it work.
Of course, this mean that 95% of the users were running with autosave turned off. When we interviewed a sample of them, they all told us the same thing: They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore who were they to set it otherwise. “Microsoft must know what they are doing,” several of the participants told us.
We thought about that and wondered what the rationale was for keeping such an important feature turned off. We thought that maybe they were concerned about people running off floppies or those who had slow or small disks. Autosave does have performance implications, so maybe they were optimizing the behavior for the worst case, assuming that users who had the luxury to use the feature would turn it on.
We had friends in the Microsoft Office group, so we asked them about the choice of delivering the feature disabled. We explained our hypothesis about optimizing for performance. They asked around and told us our hypothesis was incorrect.
It turns out the reason the feature was disabled in that release was not because they had thought about the user’s needs. Instead, it was because a programmer had made a decision to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes. Making a file filled with zeroes is a quick little program, so that’s what he wrote, assuming that, at some point later, someone would tell him what the “real defaults” should be. Nobody ever got around to telling him.
Since zero in binary means off, the autosave setting, along with a lot of other settings, were automatically disabled. The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case.
We also asked our participants for background information, like age and occupation, to see if that made a difference. It didn’t, except one category of people who almost always changed their settings: programmers and designers. They often had changed more than 40% (and some had changed as much as 80%) of the options in the program.
It seems programmers and designers like to customize their environment. Who would’ve guessed? Could that be why they chose their profession?
(Big takeaway: If you’re a programmer or designer, then you’re not like most people. Just because you change your settings in apps you use doesn’t mean that your users will, unless they are also programmers and designers.)
We’ve repeated this experiment in various forms over the years. We’ve found it to be consistently true: users rarely change their settings.
If your application has settings, have you looked to see what your users do? How many have changed them? Are the defaults the optimal choice? Does your settings screen explain the implications of each setting and give your users a good reason for mucking with the defaults?
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23 horizontal scrolling emails from Style Campaign
Horizontal emails inspire strong feelings among designers. Depending which side you come down on, horizontal emails are either cutting edge and artistic or counter-intuitive and pretentious.
Horizontal emails tend to be image based, favored by B2C rather than B2B. The side scrolling layout breaks convention, so navigational cues and intuitive design will determine if your email frustrates or delights.
Here’s twenty-three rare, outside-of-the-box, experimental horizontal emails.
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Posting to Facebook: Truth About Third Party Applications | DigitalNext: A Blog on Emerging Media and Technology – Advertising Age
A service called EdgeRank Checker revealed data this week that showed how using a third-party application — like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck — to update your Facebook Page decreases your engagement per fan (on average) by about 70%.
As you can imagine, the data was reported widely, tweeted, shared and taken by many as gospel. This post aims to shed more light on what’s really going on.
The EdgeRank Checker study looked at 1 million status updates on 50,000 pages that influence more than 1 billion fans, and concluded that third-party tools hurt your EdgeRank score.
EdgeRank is Facebook’s algorithm that tries to separate the signal from the noise to present each user with the most interesting content. It uses engagement as a primary factor in its weighting. A post that receives little or no engagement does not get through to the feed. High engagement increases the post’s visibility in users’ feeds and increases the Page’s EdgeRank score. For more on EdgeRank, check out this great post on Econsultancy from last month.
The company behind the data speculated that there are four potential reasons for the lower engagement:
- Facebook penalizes third-party API’s EdgeRank
- Facebook collapses third-party API updates
- Scheduled or automated posts have potential for lower engagement
- The content is not optimized for Facebook
Read more @ Posting to Facebook: Truth About Third Party Applications | Advertising Age.
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greg
Win This Fantasy League, Get $50K Worth of Agency Time!
Very unique idea to promote new business and frame it with a full football seasons worth of relationship building.
Are you ready for some football? Are you ready for some free client services? Then maybe you want to sign up for Young & Laramore’s 2nd Annual Fantasy Client Fantasy Football League. The Indianapolis agency has sent an invitation, along with a copy of ESPN Fantasy Football magazine, to a “select group of ‘fantasy’ client prospects.”
Not among the invited? Don’t worry. The shop has left two open slots.So far, Skullcandy and Late July have signed up. Since this is a relationship-building exercise, Y&L will not only crown the winner, but will interact with all of the contestants throughout the season. According to Tom Denari, agency president, Small Agency Diary blogger, and a fantasy football champ, after an autodraft is complete, an agency employee will be assigned to each marketer. The agency runs its own 24-team league for employees and is in the process of drafting players. UPDATE: See comments for clarification of this.
We attempted to reach out to last year’s winner, but found this on the FAQ page. “Was there a First Annual Fantasy Client Fantasy Football League? No.”
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10 Excellent Tools for Responsive Web Design
So, you’ve decided to venture into the creation of responsive web designs. Wonderful! With the browsing landscape diversifying into mobile devices, netbooks, desktops and so forth, responsive web designs allow web designers to provide different layouts for specific devices (based on screen size and browser features) giving site visitors an optimal user experience.
So now, you’ve determined that it would be beneficial to create responsive web designs. What tools can help you get the job done?
Tools have started to spring up to provide us with shortcuts and helpers for common responsive web design tasks. Let’s take a look at just few that I find the most useful.
read more at 10 Excellent Tools for Responsive Web Design.
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greg
Special Entities of HTML
When you type text into any reasonably modern word processing program, even though your keyboard key shows that ubiquitous ASCII double quote symbol, you see nice “curly” opening and closing punctuation marks when you hit it.
These special quotes can’t be found on your keyboard. But word processing programs understand that when you put something in quotes, you want nice left and right quotes, and it replaces the characters you typed in with the correct ones. The same goes with apostrophes. Have you ever seen an ASCII apostrophe like the one on your keyboard in a book or brochure? Of course not. What we usually see in printed material is a closing single quote. In fact, there exists a vast array of characters that aren’t represented on a standard keyboard, though these characters show up on web pages and in printed material.
Now, that’s all well and good for people using word processors. But for those of us typing text into an HTML document, there’s no system to automatically replace the characters from our keyboards with their grammatically correct equivalents. Depending on which type of character encoding your web site uses, when you paste these characters directly into an HTML document, you may see a bunch of gibberish on the rendered page. Also, the inclusion in text of characters that are used by HTML, like < and >, will wreak havoc in your page, as they cause the beginning or ending of HTML code.
For these reasons, a series of special codes or entities has been created — we type these into our HTML documents to produce correct punctuation marks and just about any special character that we could need. The examples in the table below are just a sample of the many HTML character codes that exist.
The code on the far left is known as an entity name or keyword. For instance, to produce a copyright symbol in your document, enter copy directly into your HTML; you’ll see a © in the rendered page. Each of these entities also has a numerical equivalent; the numerical equivalent of copy is #169 which produces the same symbol.
Sample list of HTML character entity references
Entity Character Description < < Less than > > Greater than & & Ampersand ‘ ‘ Left single quote ’ ’ Right single quote “ “ Left double quote ” ” Right double quote « « Left angle quote » » Right angle quote ® ® Registered trademark ™ ™ Trademark © © Copyright ¢ ¢ Cent £ £ Pound € € Euro ¥ ¥ Yen ¼ ¼ One quarter ½ ½ One half ¾ ¾ Three quarters For a more complete list of codes and their alternative entity numbers, check out W3Schools’ HTML Entities page.
via Special Entities of HTML » Typography » Design Festival.
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