PixelMEDIA

ARTICLE:  When Netcordia sought to solidify and grow its market leadership with a significant upgrade of its flagship Network Configuration and Change Management (NCCM) solution, NetMRI, they looked to us for a complete redesign of the user interface. We provided a comprehensive user-centered design strategy along with design and development services that helped Netcordia improve usability and provide a more streamlined experience for new and existing users.

Since its release in January, 2009, NetMRI 3.0 has been well received by customers. Jay Ennis, Executive VP of Product Development at Netcordia, points to the user interface designed in partnership with PixelMEDIA. “… the new UI has helped us connect with customers,” says Ennis, “Wow” is a common reaction…” At the same time, Netcordia is solidifying its position in the competitive software industry and is capturing the attention of key media leaders like Red Herring, which recently named Netcordia to its annual Red Herring 100 list of America’s most promising technology companies. (more…)

Last week, I had the opportunity to listen to a panel assembled by the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX) discuss what they define as “user experience” and how it is evolving. Even though my days are filled with the development of user experiences, I felt I needed a fresh perspective – someone else’s perspective. I also wanted to see if we, user experience designers, truly speak in a similar vernacular outside the confines of our own workspace.

In all, each member of the board had a slightly different definition but it was evident that each description was cut from a similar cloth. Surprised? Not really. Comforted? Yes.

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PixelMEDIA veteran and Art Director Eric Wyman takes a wry look at the realities of mobile design and how mobility expands our ability to be productive in (nearly) any setting. (more…)

We get it. You don’t need a website, social community, content management system, brand redesign, or flash demo. You need customers, loyal fans, email from people who want your products, and inquiries about the services you offer. You want to connect with people.

Last night PixelMEDIA hosted the monthly meeting of the NH Usability Professional Association (NH UPA). The meetings are an opportunity for user experience professionals to connect with each other. Talks included our own Luke Michel (watch his crowd-pleasing discussion about punctuation) as well as John Herman, a local media maker in his own right. As a newcomer to the NH UPA gatherings, John said two things that made me think about the way we communicate. The first:

I have no idea what you’ve been saying for the last 45 minutes but you sound like smart people and I think we do about the same thing.

As people engrained in what we do every day, we can all get hung up on industry vernacular, catch phrases, and tech-speak that the audience we’re trying to reach may not understand. And while one may say that it was a gathering of peers—so we can use our language—even within our own networks we can improve understanding by avoiding terms that mean different things to different people.

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In today’s economy, we all want to make sure that our businesses are spending money wisely and effectively.  The websites we invest in are no exception.  With all of the planning, design, development, and user testing that we do based on our business drivers, how can we be certain that our time was spent wisely, and that our CEO will give us a pat on the back instead of a pink slip once the project is complete?  The answer: Analytics.

The practice of web analytics has been around for quite some time, and has evolved over the years to offer more and more insight into the user behavior on our websites.  Major players in today’s analytics market include Google Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture, and Urchin.  They allow us to measure the traffic to our site, user demographics, and browser statistics, as well as to track specific campaigns and their impact on lead generation and ultimately, our bottom line.
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Recently, I was asked what to do when a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign has been running for a few months with no hiccups. In other words, what optimizations do you make to the campaign when it is running smoothly and providing good results? My reply was to continually test new things as your campaign can always perform better. Here are a few items I like to try:

• Vary the letter cases
• Try different calls to action (CTA)
• Add more keywords throughout the campaign
• Test different variations of landing pages

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At PixelMEDIA, we’re starting to see more of our clients inquiring about how to get started on the mobile web. I thought I’d share some of the lessons we’ve learned. These are five things to keep in mind when starting a new mobile project.

1) Decide which content to put on your mobile site

One of the first challenges when starting a new mobile project is deciding exactly what content to offer your mobile visitors. There are a few differing opinions in the industry right now; some people strongly believe in the One Web, while others believe that the experience should be re-shaped for the medium. This could mean a new website, new content, and a new information architecture as well as a design optimized for mobile.

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Recently, we had a situation that required us to pull in some content from one server to another using an iframe. Generally, this is something we would try to avoid, but we needed to pull some data from a new .NET application into a legacy ColdFusion application.

Unfortunately, the height of the page being pulled in would vary wildly. This led to a fairly disappointing experience where the page was either far too long, or content in the iframe was cut off and the user had to scroll within the iframe to see everything.

We came up with what we thought might be an interesting solution. If the page loading inside of the iframe (the child page) could calculate its height, and somehow let the parent page know, the parent page should be able to reset the height of the iframe.

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Clearly, the biggest challenge that we face in creating any successful mobile experience from a visual design perspective is the display and hierarchy of content. You’re dealing with a drastically smaller resolution so it’s painfully obvious that we can’t just re-engineer existing content and expect great results. There need to be tradeoffs. How do we begin to determine them? Mobile users have different needs and motivations than desktop users. What pieces of information will they be trying to access given the fact that they are in a mobile environment? Can we prioritize information based on the conclusions there?

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Mobile users tend to be focused on quickly finding answers to burning questions as opposed to simply ’surfing’ the Web as they do on a PC or laptop. Given the smaller resolution and disparate browser capabilities across mobile devices, designing the navigation becomes more difficult.

Not everyone has an iPhone or Blackberry Storm. A lot of users have simple smart phones, requiring careful thought into how deep content lies within the Mobile Experience and how many clicks it takes to get to it. (more…)