Mobile design: It’s user experience, stupid, and here are 4 ways it fails This is a guest post by mobile design consultant Mariya Yao People downloaded over 30 billion apps in 2012, yet the average smartphone owner only uses about 15 of them every week. Even worse, a study by Localytics estimated that 22 percent of apps are only opened once. With all the money and effort being poured into mobile right now, why is engagement so low? While the answer to that question is certainly complicated, a number of common mistakes companies are repeatedly made in the app on-boarding process. Above: Can you guess what any of these apps actually do? Mistake 1: Forcing registration before demonstrating value When you demand that users go through a sign-up process or hand over their social credentials before you’ve offered them any clear benefit, you risk losing them right off the bat. Above: Pheed (left) and Tumblr. Consider two apps: Pheed and Tumblr. Mistake 2: Overly detailed tutorials Tutorials are quite common in mobile apps. Above: The new Flickr app gets it right Wrong.
Essential tools for every web designer Every web designer requires the right tools to do their job. To create well crafted original designs you certainly need to be inspired to do so. Getting to that point is sometimes the hardest challenge in the field of web design. Luckily enough for us and our fellow design community there are tools available to assist in completing the job quicker and more efficiently. Below, I have outlined a list of tools I recommend for any web designer. Be sure to bookmark these pages so you can utilize them to your advantage like I have! Color Adobe Kuler (free) A great tool offered by Adobe which allows members to upload, create, and edit color schemes of their choice. Pictaculous (free) From the creators of Mailchimp comes a color palette generator different to any other. Colorzilla (free) Dribbble.com (free) Many designers turn to dribbble.com for great inspiration. Hues ($2.99) Interested in native apps rather than web apps? Typography Google Webfonts (free) Font Squirrel (free) Lost Type (from $1)
Want Press Coverage for Your Startup? Master Your Media Pitch. Welcome to our fifth blog on DIY public relations. So far, we’ve talked about creating stellar media plans, media lists, press releases, and press kits. Each of these blogs is important, as one builds on the next. But, I’ll let you in on a little secret: this particular article is really critical! If you don’t master proper pitch protocol, you will have a difficult time getting media coverage. Press Release vs. You really do need a compelling pitch. I had a colleague tell me (and I think he even believed it himself when he said this) that he has never written a pitch—and that all of his media coverage was secured simply by distributing a press release. Say My Name The most important step is also the first one, which is to be sure you pitch the right reporter. Get Personal, But Stay Professional It is important that you walk the line between being friendly and formal when pitching. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the one size fits all, cut-and-paste pitch. The Main Event
How to Approach a Responsive Design | Upstatement So I’ve got a confession to make: When we started working on the new Boston Globe website, we had never designed a responsive site before. This shouldn’t come as some huge shock. I mean, raise your hand if you’d built a full responsive site back in November 2010. (You can put your hand down now, Mr. Marcotte, that was rhetorical.) Since so few had done it — and certainly not on this scale — we kind’ve made things up as we went along. Here at Upstatement, we experimented with how to solve design and layout problems within a responsive framework. Ready? Choose Your Weapon Before laying down a single pixel, there was an important decision to make: What design program to use? Eventually design would be done directly in the browser — there’s no better tool for interactive design, especially when you’re working with fluid layouts (more on all that later). So we lined up the usual suspects from Adobe. Hands down, the answer was InDesign. InDesign stylesheets InDesign’s master pages palette 960px
How Online Comments Are Becoming A Big Business They almost seem like an afterthought, the comments attached to Internet content. These scribblings may seem like the anonymous musings of the masses, but many corporations are viewing them as a high-powered vehicle to drive lead generation and community building, and funding trends for commenting vendors suggests that this is not afterthought: Comments are a very valuable Web business. Chances are you've used Livefyre and not known it. So when Livefyre announced a $15 million funding round last month to ramp up their mobile and moderating features, people took note. If Livefyre is the new kid on the block flexing its muscles, then the tried and true veteran is Disqus, which has raised more than $10.5 million in VC investment. That's a lot of choices for publishers, because there's value in giving customers varied options as to how they interact online. Let Them Comment Users crave both more options from comments and more ways to engage with other readers and writers. Real Value?
Media Queries Sleepers (1996 Multi-Device Layout Patterns Through fluid grids and media query adjustments, responsive design enables Web page layouts to adapt to a variety of screen sizes. As more designers embrace this technique, we're not only seeing a lot of innovation but the emergence of clear patterns as well. I cataloged what seem to be the most popular of these patterns for adaptable multi-device layouts. To get a sense of emerging responsive design layout patterns, I combed through all the examples curated on the Media Queries gallery site several times. I looked for what high-level patterns showed up most frequently and tried to avoid defining separate patterns where there were only small differences. Mostly Fluid The most popular pattern was perhaps surprisingly simple: a multi-column layout that introduces larger margins on big screens, relies on fluid grids and images to scale from large screens down to small screen sizes, and stacks columns vertically in its narrowest incarnations (illustrated below). Column Drop Layout Shifter
5 Awesome Resources for College Entrepreneurs Who said college was a time for sitting in class? Go start a company instead! It’s odd that so many people think college students can’t start kickass companies: they can and they have! What even cooler is this: Universities are now starting to actively promote and encourage entrepreneurship in its students! If you’re a college student, the number of free resources available to you is second to none. …but they’re out there, just ripe for the picking, just waiting for you to find them. Here’s some specs on 5 awesome resources available to university entrepreneurs. I wish I knew about these when I was in college, and seriously, if you don’t take advantage of these and then complain later (“there’s no resources to help me become an entrepreneur! 1. Universities all over the nation are offering extremely kickass resources to student entrepreneurs, including funding, incubators and accelerators. 2. Easy, my friend! 3. There’s tons of startup Meetup groups, too (even in small cities!). 4. 5.
Responsive Web Design Demystified Tutorial by Matt Doyle | Level: Intermediate | Published on 30 September 2011 Categories: What exactly is responsive design, and how do you create a responsive website? This tutorial explains the concepts, and walks you through the basic steps for creating a responsive website layout. Responsive web design is a hot topic these days, especially as websites need to adapt to the growing number of mobile devices with their relatively small screens. Many designers and developers want to create new websites with responsive layouts, or modify their existing sites to incorporate responsive elements. However, the whole topic can be somewhat bewildering at first glance. In this article, you get a gentle introduction to the world of responsive web design. Ready to explore the world of responsive design? Responsive design in a nutshell The basic idea of responsive web design is that a website should "respond" to the device it's being viewed on. The www.elated.com layout is fixed-width. min-width:
If You Want to Start Something You’re Passionate About, You Just Need 10 Minutes “Got ten minutes? Go.” This was the subject line of an email that Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia sent Jamie Wong several years ago. At the time, Wong hadn’t yet founded Vayable—she already had the idea for the online travel marketplace, but she was still reluctant to execute it. “I felt for some reason like I wasn’t ready,” she says. When Wong, then an Airbnb host, encountered Gebbia at a meetup, she talked to him about how she really wanted to start her own company. She was impressed (and shocked) by how Airbnb had since grown from its first version. Getting It Out Naturally, it took Wong more than ten minutes to create Vayable. “When I moved back to San Francisco (where I grew up), I knew that I wanted to start this company,” Wong says. It turned out that Wong’s “irrationality” would spell major entrepreneurial success. Vayable has also been backed by Y Combinator. Today, Wong is no longer reluctant about executing on her own vision, which is to make Vayable the way people travel.
Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It Advertisement Almost every new client these days wants a mobile version of their website. It’s practically essential after all: one design for the BlackBerry, another for the iPhone, the iPad, netbook, Kindle — and all screen resolutions must be compatible, too. In the next five years, we’ll likely need to design for a number of additional inventions. When will the madness stop? It won’t, of course. In the field of Web design and development, we’re quickly getting to the point of being unable to keep up with the endless new resolutions and devices. Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. The Concept Of Responsive Web Design Ethan Marcotte wrote an introductory article about the approach, “Responsive Web Design,” for A List Apart. Transplant this discipline onto Web design, and we have a similar yet whole new idea. Adjusting Screen Resolution
3 Free Apps to Help You Network Like a Pro As the saying goes, it's not what you know but who you know that can get you ahead in the world of business. While it also helps if you're amazing at what you do, there's no question that networking can help you get further faster. If you're working on building your startup but need a professional connection or two to take it to the next level, these three networking apps can help you collect new contacts and keep track of the ones you have. The designers of this app believe that talented people are all connected by no more than two degrees of separation. The app uses your LinkedIn and Facebook connections to find new people with the same interests then it automatically sends you an introduction card that you can accept or decline. INTRO is free for iPhone and Android. 2. This app gathers all of your contacts from your phone, your email address book, LinkedIn and Facebook and merges them into one searchable address book. 3. Source: ENTREPRENEUR