Category: Topics
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What problems are we solving with UX design?
“What problem are we trying to solve?” As User Experience (UX) practitioners, we’re constantly asking this question of our team, our clients, and our work. UX design is pivotal in making decisions about the way product experiences come to life and in ensuring those products are serving the user needs. Successful products solve problems. That…
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Changing how we think about cybersecurity: Creating the attacker’s dilemma
I was at a conference recently at which Tim Crothers delivered the keynote. Tim has worked as a breach investigator for the better part of his career. He joined Target after their 2013 breach and currently leads their cyber security team. I got to hear him flip an information security paradigm on its head. “The defender’s…
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Why use WordPress?
When it comes to building a new website or migrating an existing website, you have a lot of options. From the content management system to the hosting platform to larger technology decisions about integrations and plugins. And on top of that, who to work with to get it all done right. We’re here to help.…
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Technology isn’t forever, but your digital partnership can be
(featured image: Me wearing Google Glass, a much-hyped but now defunct technology.) Last year, we made the decision to discontinue the Active Media Manager (AMM), our proprietary CMS that we have been developing for over 15 years. By February 2019, we will be terminating the platform altogether. A number of clients are currently using the…
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Understanding meltdown and spectre
You’ve probably heard or seen at least a few news stories about the most recent technology vulnerabilities, Meltdown and Spectre. These newly discovered hardware issues are pervasive, complex, and very technical. While specifics continue to be finalized, we wanted to provide two explanations that audiences across the board — from tech pros to non-techs —…
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Quick research & planning tasks to tackle during your downtime
As we know, business never stops, so the documents and reports we use to direct and track that business should be living documents. Yet often, we focus on immediate tasks at hand rather than our guiding documentation. The time between Thanksgiving and the new year seems to be either a mad scramble or an eerily…
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Seven steps to learning a new technology
Have you ever had a client say something like, “I love that idea, but can you write it in Ruby?” Your gut drops, and your blood pressure rises. Outside of hearing the Ruby referenced all the time, you know little about it. And you’re supposed to be the tech expert in the room! At the same time,…
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The one thing you always get from user testing
Often, getting clients to commit to user testing is a hard sell. Clients get excited about the product, the output, the thing they’re building. That’s understandable: we get excited about that, too. But even with thorough user personas and empathy maps, what you think you should build and design for your customers doesn’t always align with what…
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Businesses, it’s our turn to make a difference
This isn’t political. Really. I know that, at this moment in time, it’s hard for people on both sides of the aisle to set aside blame and emotions and frustration. But commerce, in one form or another, is universal — we all need it, we all want it, and we all participate in it. The…
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How to make (and keep) digital accessibility a priority
For some businesses, accessibility is a requirement, for some it’s not, but one thing has been made strikingly clear in recent years: digital accessibility standards are best practices for everyone. They are really human standards. And yet they are often ignored or overlooked once digital projects get going because in most cases there isn’t a…