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Why Functionality is Important in Skeuomorphic Design

Skeuomorphism is a fancy word and technique that’s often used in the world of user interface design. However, many designers misuse skeuomorphism when they use it only for aesthetic appeal, and not to enhance functionality. When designers apply skeuomorphism to an interface, and the interface only mimics a real-world object’s appearance, it doesn’t add anything useful to the user experience. A skeuomorphic interface needs to also mimic a real-world object’s function, otherwise skeuomorphism has no place for being.

Skeuomorphism is a design technique that’s best used to enhance the functional experience of an interface. This is because a user interface doesn’t need to adapt a real-world object metaphor in order for users to understand what it does. For example, a calculator interface doesn’t need to look like a real-world calculator for users to know how to use it. Users will still be able to use a non-skeuomorphic calculator just as effectively without the fancy textures. The only difference is that one was more aesthetically difficult to design than the other. Yet the amount of time and effort the designer spent on the skeuomorphic calculator doesn’t even amount to the little gain it has on the user experience.

Skeuomorphic design is useful when the functionality of an interface mimics a real-world object. It is only then that skeuomorphism has a place in design to make the functionality rich and real. For example, this eBook reader interface allows users to turn pages by swiping the screen. The skeuomorph that adds to this function is the page curl. When users swipe the screen, the page curls up from the corner and flips like a real book. Skeuomorphism wasn’t just used for appearance, but rather it was used to enhance the functional experience of the interface.

Another good use of skeuomorphism is this piano interface. Users tap the screen to play the piano. This interface’s function matches the real-world object of the keys on a piano. The size, shape, color, texture and physics of real piano keys are felt when users tap the piano keys on the interface. When a user taps the piano key, the interface displays a shadow on the key that gives users the feeling that they are pressing down on the piano key. The interface’s functionality matches the real-world object of a piano, and the skeuomorphic design enhances the functional experience.

Poor uses of skeuomorphism are found on interfaces that only look like, but do not function like the real-world object it’s mimicking. Some users find these type of interfaces tacky and visually disruptive. These two skeuomorphic interfaces mimic paper found on notepads and green felt found on poker tables. The skeuomorphic textures lend nothing useful to the functional experience of the interface. They’re not necessary for users to understand how the user interface works. Without the skeuomorphic textures, the user gets a clearer view of the content without getting distracted by the visual noise.

Functionality is important in skeuomorphic design. Skeuomorphism can only enhance the user experience when an interface actually functions like a real-world object. Not all interfaces will have functions that merit the use of skeuomorphism. Designers should never use skeuomorphism as a crutch for creativity or an opportunity to flex their design skills. A skeuomorphic interface may seem appealing at first, but if it doesn’t add to any type of interface function, its appeal won’t last. Instead, it’ll look fake, tacky and visually disruptive to users who can see through the glitz after using the interface for a while.

via UX Movement http://uxmovement.com/mobile/why-functionality-is-important-in-skeuomorphic-design/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+uxmovement+%28UX+Movement%29

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UX Is Not A Verb

July 1, 2013

"Okay, so how long to UX it?"

This question is asked of me in just about every estimating meeting we have.

Sure it's a joke, and I laugh. But I also cry just a little each time because, like any good joke, it has an element of truth to it.

UX has become ubiquitous. A search for "UX" on LinkedIn returns almost 200,000 results. But even with UX being everywhere you turn, it seems that many people, especially those not "in the industry" (i.e. clients), don't have a solid grasp of what UX actually means. Even those of us in the industry don't have a clear definition of what a UX designer is or does.

Look at any handful of UX Designer job descriptions out there and you'll come up with dozens of different descriptions and requirements: from wireframing/prototyping, to...read more By Tim R. Todish

via UX Magazine http://bit.ly/12zpMNn

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8 Google Docs Tips You May Not Have Known About

Like many web professionals, I use Google Docs every day to create and share information. It’s a fantastic suite of tools that’s perfect for collaborating with your coworkers and interacting with clients. In fact, I think mastering Google Docs has become an essential professional skill.

At Treehouse, we use Google Docs documents and spreadsheets for everything from writing video scripts to analyzing data and statistics. I’m always looking for new tips and exploring the menus, because in a tool that I use every day, small efficiencies can add up to big time savings. In this post, I’ll share a few uncommon Google Docs tips I’ve learned over the last few years that will make you into a document-wrangling, cowboy-ninja, spreadsheet-wizard… person.

1. Show all keyboard shortcuts.

Using the mouse to click on things may feel easy, but it’s slow. Keyboard shortcuts are one of the fastest ways to get better at any piece of software (especially StarCraft). Whether you’re viewing a spreadsheet, a doc, or you’re in the list of documents, you can bring up a full list of shortcut keys. Just use the following (you guessed it) keyboard shortcut:

On Mac, press ⌘ + /

On Windows, press Ctrl + /

When you hit these keys, you should get a contextual overlay that gives you the hotkeys for the current view; they’re different for each app. It looks something like this:

2. Use Gmail shortcuts in the list view.

If you’ve mastered the shortcuts in either Gmail or the Google Docs list view, then you’ve actually mastered both. When you’re traversing lots of documents, it’s often helpful to make some bulk edits or star some documents to find them quickly later.

Here are the most important keys for navigating the list view:

J  Navigate to the next item in the list

K  Navigate to the previous item in the list

X  Select/unselect an item

S  Star/unstar an item

3. Free yourself from distraction and edit fullscreen.

If you need to stay hyper-focused on a document in a distraction free environment, this is for you. In a document, go to the View menu and select the Full screen option.

The controls will disappear so that you can focus on your content. I recommend setting your browser to full screen for maximum effect. To get out of fullscreen mode, simply press the Esc key.

4. Hack the custom header styles to quickly add formatting.

When you’re editing a Google document, it’s helpful to create headings so that each section of your writing is clearly defined. The default headings are good for most purposes, but if you frequently need to apply special formatting, you can make your own “headings” and apply them to any inline text. For example, I use the special headings to highlight parts of Treehouse video scripts that include motion graphics, special camera moves, blocking, and computer code.

To create a new header style, simply format your text how you’d like and highlight it. Then go to the Title menu, click one of the right facing arrows next to a header, and select Update ‘heading X’ to match with X being the header number.

Then, when you need to apply the same formatting, you can simply set the text to one of the title styles in the menu as you would normally.

Note: This will only apply to one document at a time, so don’t worry about ‘messing up’ the default styles for other documents or other people in your organization.

5. Get started with a template.

Google maintains a directory of templates that you can use to get a jump start on your next document. There’s a pretty huge selection and it’s easy to filter and sort. Whether you’re setting up a personal finance spreadsheet or writing a resume and cover letter, there’s probably a template in there that can seriously cut down on your setup time.

6. Automagically create a table of contents.

When I create outlines for new courses on Treehouse, the documents tend to get pretty lengthy. Fortunately, if you structure your document using the various header levels in the Title menu, Google Docs can automatically generate a table of contents for you. This TOC allows you to jump to any part of the document, making navigation quick and easy for long documents.

In a document with several headings, place your insertion point at the top of the document. Then, go to the Insert menu and click Table of contents to add a TOC. Here’s a picture of the finished result:

Note: This probably won’t work properly if you use the header hack in tip 4 to format inline text. I only use TOCs for creating outlines and not scripting videos.

7. Use conditional formatting to color spreadsheets.

Maybe you’re not surprised that spreadsheets in Google Docs are capable of coloring cells based on conditional formatting. Yet for some reason, very few people know about this feature when I tell them. If you’re working with numerical data or dates, coloring cells can help you quickly distill and comprehend large datasets.

I created an example data set that represents a traditional classroom with test scores (and in the process, I also learned about the random number generators in the function list). Let’s say you’re a teacher, and you want to visually identify students that scored 75 or below on a test. To do this, hover over the column header and click the arrow icon that appears to bring up a menu. Then click the Conditional formatting… option towards the bottom.

Note: In the image below, there are numbers in column B that are covered by the menu.

When the conditional formatting modal appears, you can add rules that will color the cells. In the image below, you can see what these rules look like for our example. Any numbers at 75 or below will be highlighted in yellow. Everything else will be green.

Here’s what the data looks like with the added color. Even better, when we sort Column B, we’ll see a visual that depicts the ratio between low scores and high scores. The block of yellow cells will be set against the block of green cells. Conditional formatting is like a grappling hook for climbing the DIKW Pyramid. It’s a tool that can help you make the leap from data to useful information.

8. Extrapolate sets of related terms.

Are you ready for some magic? Google spreadsheets allows you to take two cells and find other related terms. First, fill two cells with related items and highlight them, like so:

Now we need to drag out the set. On a Mac, hold down option. On a PC, hold down Ctrl. While holding down the modifier key, click on the small blue box in the bottom right corner of the highlighted cells, and drag downwards.

Google will fill in other related terms. In this case, Google magically filled in the remaining cells with other Star Wars characters. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well for most things. From what I understand, this technology is what’s left of Google Sets, a defunct Google Labs project.

It’s hard for me to say exactly how you can use this one, but it’s definitely a fun curiosity that’s helped me brainstorm related ideas in sort of a fuzzy mind-mapping fashion. I’m hoping to see some clever ideas in the comments!

The post 8 Google Docs Tips You May Not Have Known About appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

via Treehouse Blog http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/8-google-docs-tips-you-may-not-have-known-about?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+teamtreehouse+%28Treehouse+Blog%29

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Why Getting Feedback is Vital for Freelance Web Designers

Freelance designers often have to take on more types of responsibilities than those of us who work as part of a larger design agency or design team. Freelance designers don’t always get the benefits of being able to delegate a portion of their design projects to another, or to lean on other individuals when it comes to administrative and managerial duties like invoicing/billing, project planning, taxes, sales, etc.

Because freelancers have so much on our plates, we need all the help we can get, regardless of where this help comes from, or what part of our creative process we can get it on.

Which is why, while generally helpful to all web professionals, feedback is very crucial to freelance workers in the web design industry.

One need not even be a freelance web designer to see and understand how much weight feedback carries in our work.

In this article, I’ll discuss my main reasons for why I think feedback matters so much to freelancers.

Feedback Makes You a Better Designer

Feedback gives us an avenue for sharpening our skills and honing our craft. When engage with the users we are building our designs for, we gain insights and viewpoints that help us improve our current and future products and services.

Many of us in the industry hand off a design, and then move on to our next contract without giving the previous one much of a second thought.

Out of sight and out of touch with the client, then certainly out of mind. However, is that really helping us move forward with our creative and professional abilities?

I can understand the view that once we have handed off our deliverables, technically and legally, our work is done.

But, to me, until a web design has real people using it, our duties aren’t complete yet. That final step of having real users interacting with our product is very important in allowing us to develop our skills further.

Once the design is actually in use, we can then garner important insights as to what we did well in the project. And what we didn’t.

We can harvest this valuable resource of information through the implementation of feedback-gathering tools, by reading comments on social media with the use of social media monitoring tools, teasing out trends indirectly via website analytics, and so on.

In addition to getting feedback from our users, we can also get feedback from our peers. Doing so also helps us improve our design work too.

Getting feedback from other designers in the industry isn’t difficult these days. There are many places to turn to, to get that to happen. From community sites like Dribbble to dedicated online critiquing sites and forums such as Please Critique Me and Reddit’s r/design_critiques subreddit (which has over 9,700 readers), we have a lot of opportunities in our grasps for obtaining peer-feedback on our work.

Feedback Keeps You Humble

Receiving feedback from our clients, our users, and our peers can be humbling. That’s a good thing.

Staying humble helps keep us on a dedicated and continual path towards improving and learning our craft with unending drive and passion.

If we become complacent with our creative processes, or if we start to believe that we have pretty much advanced to the top of the game, then we grow stagnant in our abilities and we stop pushing ourselves to innovate.

Idleness and passivity, being fine with the status quo, is dangerous ground to tread on for anyone in any professional field; but this is even more true in a competitive and fast-moving profession like the web design industry.

Feedback from our users does not pull any punches whatsoever. None at all. There is no sugar coating. Or any attempt at gently and politely giving feedback from a constructive place.

You will often get feedback from a user who is already frustrated about something in your web design that’s broken or that’s preventing them from getting the thing they want done.

That type of user feedback can brutal and raw, but what it is also, is that it is honest. It will contain things you need to hear about your work that other people in other situations will be too polite or too unconcerned to tell you.

True, this type of feedback I’m talking about will more than likely contain some things that you probably don’t need to hear too, but that’s where our work lies: In deconstructing feedback to draw out that which we need to take away from it.

Feedback Can Help with Your Business Process

Let me share a story with you, about how user-contributed feedback has helped my freelance design business.

After learning (in a particularly frustrating way) from a client of mine that trying to handle the domain registration and hosting setup for my clients can become a major headache, I ended up deciding to drop that service as part of my web design packages.

Dropping the service of registering my clients’ domain names and setting up their website’s hosting for them didn’t seem like a big deal at first.

However, you should also know that many of my clients are small businesses who have no employees or resources to route towards website administration and management.

So, initially, after this decision was made, we had a lot of problems because our clients were having a tough time with web hosting.

What would happen was they would be overwhelmed with how to find the right web hosting solution for their specific needs.

Or worse.

They would bargain basement shop on web hosting services — thinking that hosting companies were all equal and that the price was the most important distinguishing factor between them — without having a look at what people were saying about the web hosting service they would get. Which, as almost anyone with even basic experience in website administration can tell you, doesn’t always produce the best results.

Oftentimes, my clients would end up with a bad hosting solution on an oversold shared hosting service because all they could see was the price of the service, without knowing to consider the other factors that also matter in choosing web hosts, such as reliability, reputation, features like disk space and bandwidth, and so forth.

So I started directing my clients to helpful online resources like Web Hosting Geeks (a web hosting review site) to help them pick their web hosts.

Reading user-contributed feedback and reviews from other people gave my clients true, unbiased insights about the web hosting solutions they were considering.

Feedback in the form of reviews from actual people or third-party organizations is more reliable and impartial compared to reading about a web hosting company through the company’s own website and marketing team.

Think of how often we turn to user-contributed reviews these days for making purchasing decisions (e.g. via social commerce or our social networks). How many times have you ordered a product off Amazon or downloaded an app on your smartphone without first reading through what some of the existing customers have had to say about it?

I now have fewer clients having trouble with their web hosting because of user-contributed feedback.

User-generated feedback and reviews can relieve freelancers from some burdens in our business processes, and all we have to do is take advantage of them when we can.

Feedback Gives You a Different Perspective

The value in receiving feedback lies in its fundamental nature, which is that feedback comes through a different set of lenses.

Trying to see a design of ours without the tinted lens we lovingly tend to view them through is not easy to do.

Users, clients, friends, colleagues, and other people come to look at our designs with a unique set of lenses, and it’s those lenses that will expose the things we may be overlooking in our work.

Let me share another story with you. I once had a user contact me about a navigability issue he was having with a web design I created.

The feedback completely floored me.

Having developed the design, I couldn’t imagine anyone being unclear about how the site’s navigation worked.

But that was because I had put the whole design together, and I knew exactly what to expect and do to move around it. I made the design, and I made it in a way that made sense to me.

I forgot that other people would not be viewing the design through the same lens as I was.

That was a wake-up call.

I had failed to consider another person’s perspective, and it cost me more time to go back in and make the correction.

And that will happen. We will make those sorts of mistakes, and we will fail to consider other people’s perspectives at some point in our design process.

Listening to feedback from others effectively helps us avoid or remedy these types of situations.

What About You?

Have you ever had moments where getting feedback made all the difference in your web design career? Share it with us in the comments below!

Related Content

Feedback. The Creativity Killer.

How to Start a Freelance Company

6 Essential Things All Freelancers Should Be Doing

Related categories: Freelance and Project Management

Rob Bowen is half of the dynamic duo behind Arbenting and Dead Wings Designs. He is a freelance designer, writer, and videographer with a focus on the Web. Rob’s new Twitter account is @ArbentMedia.

The post Why Getting Feedback is Vital for Freelance Web Designers appeared first on Six Revisions.

via Six Revisions http://sixrevisions.com/freelance/feedback-for-designers/

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Ultimate Free Icon Set: 1000 Free Icons

This design resource freebie — containing 1,000 free vector icons — is the biggest free icon set that Six Revisions has ever released.

This freebie comes in three formats:

PNG – a popular web format that’s ready to use (read about the PNG image format here)

EPS – an editable graphics vector file that you can open and edit in vector-editing software like Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW

AI – the original vector file that you can open and edit in Adobe Illustrator

This freebie was created exclusively for the Six Revisions readers to enjoy by Freepik.com — a search engine that helps graphic and web designers find high quality photos, vectors, illustrations, and PSD files for their creative projects.

Preview

Download

ultimate_free_icon_set (ZIP, 10.7 MB)

Related Content

Free Icon Font: Pictonic Cube

Free Icons (with PSDs): 30 E-Commerce Icons

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Related categories: Freebies and Resources

About the Author

Freepik.com is a search engine that helps graphic and web designers locate high quality photos, vectors, illustrations and PSD files for their creative projects. Born in early 2011, it tracks and locates free graphic content on the Internet and displays the results in an orderly layout for easy access. Freepik.com is on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

The post Ultimate Free Icon Set: 1000 Free Icons appeared first on Six Revisions.

via Six Revisions http://bit.ly/17NhjuV

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Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: July 2013

   We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd.

This creativity mission has been going on for over five years now, and we are very thankful to all the designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for July 2013. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!

Please note that:

All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper,

You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

Only one

Designed by Elise Vanoorbeek from Belgium

preview

with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Sweet summer

Designed by Yuliia Bahniuk from Ukraine

preview

with calendar: 640×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

without calendar: 640×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Mason Jar

“Make the days count this summer!” — Designed by Meghan Pascarella from USA

preview

with calendar: 1280×800, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440, 2880×1800

without calendar: 1280×800, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440, 2880×1800

Love is caring

“Love is caring.” — Designed by Zanetine Web Design from India

preview

with calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

The Highest

Designed by Bogdan Zinchenko from Ukraine

preview

with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

World Ufo Day

“The holiday dedicated to those who study the phenomena that have no logical explanation, and the objects, which is attributed to an extraterrestrial origin.” — Designed by cheloveche.ru from Russia

preview

with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Cute Birds

“Vector illustration of cute birds” — Designed by Brykova Yuliia from Ukraine

preview

with calendar: 1024×768, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

without calendar: 1024×768, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

Hola Quintilis

Designed by Logan Holy from Indonesia

preview

with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×720, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×720, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

Hot Air Balloon

Designed by Studcréa from France

preview

with calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

without calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1440×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

Wimbledon 2013 RF

“Inspired by Roger Federer and the most famous tennis grand slam. I created this wallpaper to pay homage to one of the greatest tennis players and what he may achieve this year.” — Designed by Jeremiah Selengia from U.S.A

preview

with calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

without calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Canada Day

“July 1st is Canada Day!” — Designed by Jen Riehle from USA/Canada

preview

with calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

without calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Aurora diamond globe

“Left overs from some ideas that did not made it into projects. My debut here in monthly wallpapers.” — Designed by Henning Stein from Germany

preview

with calendar: 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1366×768, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

without calendar: 1024×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1136×640, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

Summer Butterfly

“Summer Brings Happiness!” — Designed by Safeunlockcode from United Kingdom

preview

with calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

Kite

Designed by Katerina Bobkova from Ukraine

preview

with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080

without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080

Walk in the sun

Designed by Justyna Dominika from Poland

preview

with calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1280×720, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Join In Next Month!

Please note that we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves.

A big thank you to all the designers for their participation. Join in next month!

What’s Your Favorite?

What’s your favorite theme or wallpaper for this month? Please let us know in the comment section below.

© The Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

via Smashing Magazine Feed http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/06/30/desktop-wallpaper-calendar-july-2013/

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Student Success Stories: Alexey Laduda

This is a guest post from Alexey Laduda about his experiences using Treehouse to build out his project, Urban Time Lapse.

It all started in the wonderful city of San Francisco, where creative ideas seem to float in the air as thick as the sea breeze. I’d just walked out of SF City College with a sound design certificate in my hand when I realized there simply was no work in my field available that could suit my creative thirst. I started searching for a new challenge.

Of course, because it’s San Francisco, there was plenty to be heard about the wonders of the internet. The idea of turning an inspiration into a functioning, usable thing intrigued me. Everywhere I went, it seemed that folks around me were constantly excited about what projects they’ve got going on, about the apps they’re designing, and how they plan to change the world. I wanted in! Web design seemed like the best possible option for a career; high in demand, extremely creative, and always evolving, with new trends coming out nearly every day.

But starting out was not easy. After a few hyped up weeks of watching tutorials and reading a ton of ebooks, I realized what a broad set of skills I would actually need to start making my dreams into reality. Just before freaking out, having no idea where to turn, I spoke to some friends about my dilemma. I was advised to start from the very bottom and build my way up. That meant I had to get the dirty work done (html/scc/design) before moving on to any of the cooler, more exciting stuff like frameworks. My buddies help me put together a whole new list of forums, podcasts, and books, but most importantly, Teamtreehouse.com came in to the picture.

Frustrated by hearing about how to do things, but never having any guidance doing them, I dug deeper into the tools my new discovery had to offer. Turns out, I’d come across a true diamond in the rough! The site was intuitively organized, the videos were highly informative (but in simple, everyday English!), and I found myself able to follow along the courses with a little practice of my own at the same time! The teachers are amazing and courses built in a very unique way, with each lesson being a kind of adventure with a neat twist at the end. With each new thing I learned with Treehouse, I felt very inspired and motivated. What impressed me most about the folks at Treehouse was their willingness to respond to regular users like me. I mean, getting email from a founder to answer my questions was pretty amazing. It’s little things like these that make you feel like you are part of family where everyone cares and wants to help.

Treehouse Facebook group was another great source. The hundreds of people reaching out and helping to solve each other’s problems together as a community was amazing. Seeing people talking about their projects made me realize that it’s time to really get my feet wet with my own website.

UrbanTimelapse.com is made to fulfill one’s desire to discover the world, one city at a time. The idea came at the very moment when I finished watching a time­lapse video of my hometown. Seeing my city through the lens of time­lapse photography felt mind blowing. Hundreds of memories were brought up instantly. I discovered a beautiful tool to help me show where I am from and discover places I wanted to go. Digging deeper, I found an enormous community behind the videos. I thought, there’s a wonderful chance to bring curious and creators together in one place and I’d like to give it a shot.

UrbanTimelapse.com is built with Twitter Bootstrap on Backbone.js framework, with Parse.com as a database, and is hosted atHeroku.com It took me a great amount of time to build the prototype that you can see now, and not without help from my mentors. It is thanks to the folks over at Treehouse that I overcame the fear of getting started on this wild online adventure. Without them I don’t know how long it would take me to get going.

So far I’ve only gotten a positive feedback and I’d really like to continue developing the project. Seeing all the time­lapse videos scattered around the web and not being noticed only urges me to continue evolving. I want to implement search functionality by city or country, make user accounts where photographers can share their own videos and follow other photographers they like, add more information about cities, and more. I’ve got plenty of ideas for which I’d be more than happy to team up with a Treehouse student who’s interested in and would like on the development side or give some advice.

Cheers and thanks for reading! See you in cyberspace.

The post Student Success Stories: Alexey Laduda appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

via Treehouse Blog http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/student-success?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+teamtreehouse+%28Treehouse+Blog%29

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How To Launch Anything

   Launching a new product — especially your first — can be incredibly daunting. Even knowing where to turn for help can be hard. So many blog posts are full of free advice on how to successfully launch that I almost didn’t write another one. But many of the posts I read for my first product launch didn’t help me very much. The material was too fluffy, the marketing ideas were vague, or the advice didn’t apply to my tiny business.

Having launched five new products in fewer than nine months, I’ve turned product launches into a science. And while they never go perfectly, these ideas have helped me generate over $200,000 in revenue from online products, starting from scratch.

Let’s jump in.

Starting From Scratch

In July 2012, my blog had 100 subscribers. Two months later, I made $12,500 in sales in just one day. It turns out that you can start without an audience and still find success. I’ll assume you are starting from scratch, like I did.

A Product

The first thing you’ll need is a product or, rather, an idea of what your product will be. Waiting until your product is finished before marketing it is a terrible plan. For most products, the marketing should start as — or even before — the product is being developed.

Defining the product, with a tentative title, enables you to start identifying your target audience and putting together a marketing plan, which we’ll cover in a minute.

Expertise

For a year, I wrote a meandering blog about nothing in particular. There were a few posts about design, some more on productivity, and the rest were random thoughts that didn’t fit any category. That year of posting was basically wasted because I came out of it with only 100 regular readers.

I was just a designer writing about random topics.

Then, in July 2012, I announced my first book, The App Design Handbook, and something changed. Just by announcing the book with a landing page, I suddenly had a purpose to my writing — to teach iOS app design. More importantly, everyone else’s perception of me changed as well. I wasn’t just another designer writing about anything that came to mind; I was an expert in designing iOS apps, writing a book to teach others to do the same.

My skill level hadn’t changed; I’d been a pretty good designer all along. But just announcing that I was writing a book completely changed the perception of my skill level and expertise.

Take Inventory: What Do You Have?

When my brother-in-law Daniel was 13 or 14, I would often find him walking out of a random room in the house. Confused as to why he was in there, I would ask him what he was doing. He would casually shrug and reply, “Just taking inventory.”

And he was. Later during a dinner conversation, someone would mention that they were looking for batteries, and Daniel would jump in and say, “Oh, you have some. They are on the top shelf of the closet.”

It was a strange habit, but also very helpful at times.

You need to take inventory of everyone and everything that could help you with this product launch: friends with popular blogs, an existing following in social media, and forums or communities you are a part of.

I may have felt like I was starting from nothing, but when I really took inventory, I saw that I had a few things going for me: 100 blog readers, 400 to 500 Twitter followers and a few influential acquaintances.

Start Teaching

When I learned about marketing in college, there was always one question I never got a good answer to: How do you get potential customers to pay attention to you? I knew about buying ads, building brand loyalty and running focus groups, but what if you didn’t have the time or budget for any of that?

Another Way

Back in 2006 I was spending all of my time getting better at Web design — particularly CSS. I was pretty good at coding cross-browser layouts, and I considered myself an intermediate Web designer.

At the same time, Chris Coyier started writing CSS-Tricks. I remember reading his first articles and thinking, “Oh, I know that already. What qualifies Chris to teach when he doesn’t know any more than I do?”

I was a bit arrogant.

But Chris kept putting out CSS tutorials, and I kept patting myself on the back for already knowing the skills he was teaching. But then, as my friends started asking me questions about CSS, I found myself linking to Chris’ articles, not just because they saved me the effort of having to explain myself, but also because they were really well written.

Fast forward another year or two, and I was consulting his articles myself, sometimes just for reference, but other times to learn new skills. While we started at the same level, Chris had improved much more quickly than I did. The difference was that he was teaching.

None of that shocked me. The real surprise didn’t come until July 2012, when Chris decided to redesign CSS-Tricks. In order to take some time off to work on the redesign, Chris launched a Kickstarter project, in which his fans could donate to the project and, in return, get exclusive access to a series of tutorials that he planned to record throughout the redesign process. His goal was to raise $3,500.

When the project closed, he had raised $89,697.

How Were Chris and I Different?

Chris and I started at the same skill level. Sure, he got a bit better at CSS over time, but what was it that gave him the ability to flip a switch and raise $89,697, when I couldn’t?

Clearly it had nothing to do with skill in CSS.

It had everything to do with the fact that he taught everything he knew, and I kept my knowledge to myself. Through teaching, Chris built an audience that benefited from his work and that was eager to pay him the moment he gave them an opportunity.

Teach Everything You Know

Teaching is how you get people to pay attention to you and your product without spending money on advertising. By giving away useful information, you will attract potential customers — and get them to trust you — because you’ve helped them so much.

Then, when it comes time to ask for a purchase, you will have become a trusted advisor, not a random company selling something on the Internet.

Announce Your Product

It’s now time to announce your product to the world. If you have a rough idea of the product and a working name, then you have everything you need. The second biggest mistake I see with product announcements is that the creator has waited too long to start generating interest.

A Landing Page

In order to announce your product, you’ll need a landing page. You can make this with LaunchRock, a WordPress plugin, some simple HTML code, or ConvertKit (my own product). Either purchase a new domain name (yourproductname.com) or use a subdirectory, like I do for my books (nathanbarry.com/authority). Either works. Just decide and move on.

Landing Page Elements

The page should lead off with a headline, preferably something that speaks to the pain you are trying to solve (CopyHackers has a guide on this). Beyond this, I like to include a paragraph or two that goes into detail, and then a screenshot or graphic that quickly gives the viewer an idea of the product. For books, I have a 3-D mockup of the book cover, a screenshot inside an iPhone (to represent an iOS app), and a screenshot inside a browser (for a Web application).

The Most Important Element

I mentioned earlier that launching late is the second biggest mistake I see on landing pages. What’s the first biggest mistake? Not using email.

It’s common to see landing pages that don’t offer a way to follow along with the progress. Sometimes the best option a visitor has is to follow the product on Twitter or Facebook.

Compared to email, Twitter and Facebook perform very poorly. Getting open rates over 50% on email is quite possible, whereas engagement on Facebook is often well below 15%. Most people deal with every message in their inbox, but they’ll miss your message on Twitter if they don’t sign in at the right time.

The most important element on your landing page is the email opt-in form. Your message could just say, “Enter your email address to follow the progress and be the first to hear when [product name] launches.”

Plenty of tools will help you capture email addresses. AWeber, MailChimp and Constant Contact all work just fine, but I created ConvertKit for exactly this process.

Start Sharing

Once your page is live, you can start promoting it. Start by sharing in social media and in any relevant communities you are a part of. Ask friends to share, introduce yourself to authors of relevant blogs, and ask for a link in relevant email newsletters.

The Blog Posts

A well-done landing page will get shared on its own if the product is engaging, but landing pages typically aren’t educational.

To get people in your industry to really advertise your upcoming product, you need to teach. Blog posts are a great way to do that. But don’t write posts like “Five Ways to Do X” or “13 Reasons You Should Care About Y.” Those fluffy list posts don’t convey expertise.

Instead, write a few definitive, in-depth posts on your topic. Each should stand by itself by including all necessary information. Could each article be a chapter in a book? If not, rewrite it until it is of that quality.

That’s the kind of content that will be shared and that will build an audience. This is the time for quality over quantity if you want your industry to really take notice.

Capture Email Addresses

In each post, make sure to link to and talk about your upcoming product. I like to do this briefly at both the beginning and end of the post, and in between wherever it makes sense. Just remember that you are teaching, not selling.

Then, at the bottom of every post, include an email opt-in form so that readers can hear more about your upcoming product. This will put the subscriber on the same email list as your landing page form.

Three Posts

I think three posts is the minimum to establish expertise and to maintain a good relationship with your subscribers. Many more and you probably aren’t putting enough effort into each one. Fewer than three and you won’t have enough content to build an email list.

Keep in mind that the goal is to get people who are interested in your product to sign up for the email list. Don’t worry about selling up front. Always start by teaching.

Stay In Touch

A visitor will come across your landing page soon after it is published, sign up and then move on with their life. When you email them in three months to say that your product is ready, do you think they’ll remember who you are?

Probably not.

Not only that, but they’ll wonder how you got their email address and will be tempted to hit the “Mark as spam” button. You don’t want to find yourself in that situation.

How Not to Kill Your Email List

Email lists don’t last forever. Any subscribers who haven’t been contacted in the last month start to go cold. After three to six months, your list is nearly dead.

Of all the assets in my business, my email list of 7,000+ engaged users is the most valuable. Letting anything bad happen to it would be foolish. Just never let the list go cold in the first place.

The easiest strategy is to provide valuable information on a regular basis. Luckily for you, those blog posts you’ve been writing are great content.

Let’s say you are able to get 50 subscribers just from your landing page being shared around the Web. (Don’t forget to ask your friends to share!) Send your first blog post to that list. Because they are interested in your product, they will be interested in your post as well. In that email, include a quick update on your progress with the product. Also, ask your subscribers to share this latest post.

Rinse and Repeat

That new post should get you more subscribers because you will have an opt-in form at the bottom. Now it’s time to write a second post. Let’s say you now have 100 subscribers, 50 from the landing page and another 50 from the new blog post. Send out the second blog post to all 100 subscribers, along with two things: a quick update on the product and a request to share the post with their friends and network.

Can you guess what’s next? Yep, repeat the process again. Write another detailed blog post, send it out to your now longer email list, update them on your progress, and ask them to share the post.

Other Sources

Sharing on social media isn’t the only way to draw attention to a product. Your landing page and each blog post can be shared on Hacker News, Reddit, Inbound.org, Designer News and StumbleUpon and in email newsletters (especially the ones that just aggregate links). These sources can all drive a lot of traffic.

Hitting the home page on Hacker News alone, which is not too hard with good, relevant content, can bring over 10,000 visits. These visits could turn into hundreds of email subscribers.

Make sure to share each post and your landing page individually with every relevant source.

Launch Sequence

Did you know you could do everything right up until this point and still have a failed launch?

I once launched a new workshop to a list of 5,000 designers and didn’t sell a single seat, all because I sprang it on them suddenly. There wasn’t any build-up or sequence to build desire or demand.

Remember how we sent blog posts to the email list as they were published, each with an update on the product? That’s part of the launch sequence, and it is insanely important. But that’s only part of it. You also need to communicate all of the dates and product details well in advance.

Communicate Every Detail

While talking a few months ago with a friend who was about to launch a product, I asked one important question, “Does everyone on your email list know that your product is launching tomorrow?”

He’d actually had a great launch sequence up until that point — a large email list and regular updates — but he had failed to mention the exact launch date. The next day his subscribers were going to get an email that they weren’t expecting, an email that asked them to hand over their hard-earned cash.

I always send a pitch email the day before a big launch. I want potential customers to have all the information they need to make a decision the day before they have an opportunity to buy. Then, on launch day, I send a simple announcement email. Most of those who received the launch email decided the day before whether to buy. Then, it is just a matter of getting out their credit cards to complete the purchase.

Whenever I receive an unexpected sales pitch, I try to decide right then whether I am interested. Even if I am interested, I may put off the purchase for a bit (maybe my credit card isn’t handy right then) or do some more research. Soon, I’ll have forgotten, moved on with work and never come back to buy.

That’s why sending all of the details, including the exact launch time, the day before is so important. Do that well and people will be actively refreshing your page to be the first to make a purchase!

Friendly Advice

So, that’s what my friend did to complete his launch sequence. Right after we finished speaking, he wrote an email to his list saying that the product would be available the following morning at a specific time. It would have been better had his readers been able to look forward to a launch date for a few weeks, but I’m sure announcing the day before had a big impact on sales.

Launch Day

We’ve been talking about product launches for about 3,000 words now, but we’re just now getting to the actual launch. Does that tell you anything?

I hope you’ve learned that the most important aspects of a launch happen long before launch day.

A Simple Email

Once the scheduled launch time rolls around, hit “Publish” on your sales page. Ideally, this will just replace the landing page that has been up for the last few months. Then, send the announcement email. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. Aim for clarity above all else: “The product is live — get it here.” Include a short testimonial or two if you feel inclined.

The goal is to get your audience from the email to the sales page.

If the whole launch process has been done properly, you should get at least a few sales immediately. All three of my books had over $1,000 in sales within the first 10 minutes of the announcement email going out.

Contact Everyone

Now, spend some time looking beyond your email list. Contact every person who has helped you with the product. Thank them for their help, give them free access to the product, and ask them to share the sales page. Many will.

Then, submit your website to any news aggregators or blogs that write about you, and post in any communities that you’ve been a part of. Tweet, post to Facebook, and ask all of your friends to do the same.

Did anyone ask about your product in the last few months? (I hope so!) Email them to let them know it is now ready and waiting for their credit card number.

Then, take a break from the computer. You’ll need it.

One More Email

This last email is optional, but it tends to print money, so you may want to incorporate it.

I like to run a 20%-off launch day sale, first, to reward my early buyers for trusting me and being so eager, and secondly, to have a reason to send a reminder email at the end of the day saying that the sale is ending. A lot of people had intended to buy upon receiving the first email but, for whatever reason, didn’t. Looking at the sales hour by hour, can you tell when the second email was sent?

My second spike is pretty obvious. Sending that email made me at least an extra $4,000.

Let’s Review

Your sales will die down. Nothing will be as big as a proper launch, but just know that you went out with a bang and hopefully made some money in the process.

As a short review, here’s what you are going to do to launch your next product:

Figure out what you can teach potential customers.

Announce your product, with a landing page, as early as possible.

Ask visitors to subscribe to an email list to stay up to date.

Share the landing page everywhere possible online.

Write an excellent blog post, and ask people to subscribe to hear about your product.

Send this blog post to your email list, along with a product update.

Share the post everywhere and with anyone who would find it relevant.

Repeat steps 5 to 7 with two more blog posts, each time sending the latest post to the larger email list.

Announce the launch date and other details as early as possible.

Send an email the day before telling all subscribers to expect the launch the next day and telling them everything they need to know to make their decision.

Send a simple announcement email.

Work like crazy to promote your newly launched product.

Send a follow-up email near the end of launch day telling your subscribers that the sale is ending and that they should purchase right away.

That’s it! You can do plenty more for an even more successful launch, such as write guest posts or form partnerships, but if you cover the basics outlined above, you are most of the way there.

A Free Course on Product Launches

I don’t want your launch education to end here, so I’ve put together a free three-week course called “Mastering Product Launches.” There will be some overlap between that content and this post, but the email course will walk you through each aspect of launching a product.

(al)

© Nathan Barry for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

via Smashing Magazine Feed http://bit.ly/1al2r6V

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Why Social Commerce is a High Priority

Social commerce is crucial towards entrepreneurial success on the Web. If this is the first time you have come across this term, then you are at the right place. In this article, I discuss the importance of social commerce, as well as a few fundamental tips for your social commerce strategy.

What is Social Commerce?

The term social commerce first appeared in Yahoo!’s search blog in 2005. The Internet company used the phrase to describe tools and products that make online shopping more social by means of leveraging social networks and facilitating user-driven content.

(In Yahoo!’s inceptive blog post, they were talking about a new product they launched, Shoposphere and its Pick List feature–a sort of product wish list that your friends can see.)

Examples of social commerce:

Social-sharing features on product pages such as a Facebook Like button

Rating and customer review systems like with Amazon’s customer review and rating system

Community-driven sections on e-commerce sites such as forums

Customized online shopping experiences like tailoring what gets displayed on a web page based on information derived from a user’s open social graph

An example of Amazon’s customer review system on the book "HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites"

Social Commerce is Dangerously Undervalued

In small businesses, there’s still a lack of awareness over the power of social commerce and social media in increasing profits, retaining current customers, as well as gaining new customers.

In a survey of small-sized companies, only 37% believed that social media marketing was the best way to get new customers.

In the study, social media marketing ranked only fourth on the list. Daily deal sites, online advertising, and business directory listing sites were the chart-toppers.

Why Social Commerce is Important

The opportunities are ripe for social commerce, and they have been for a while. Let me tell you why.

Social Commerce Improves Visibility

The average user of social media services spends up to 11 hours per day connected to the Internet. He follows an average of about 10 companies and brands at any given time.

These social media consumers can provide you with a solid base for building up a good brand image.

In addition, 42% of social media users exclusively do research of the products they want to buy, in social sites. So, a brand without good social commerce features in place can lose a lot of visibility within this segment of their customer base.

Social Commerce Can Produce Value

For a company, the monetary value of a Facebook fan is $174, at least according to social media marketing firm Syncapse. So a rudimentary, back-of-the-napkin calculation suggests that a Facebook Page with 5,000 fans is conceivably a $870,000 asset (of course, the research study shows that the value of a Facebook fan for a particular company varies). Social commerce, then, becomes crucial in this regard because it is one of the few ways available to you for increasing the size of your social networks.

Social Commerce Could Increase Site Traffic

The click-through rate on Facebook walls is an astounding 6.5% whereas many other forms of online marketing efforts such as banner ads would already be considered extremely successful at only a 2% click-through rate.

And, in the same Syncapse research findings referenced above, it was observed that 66% of a company’s Facebook fan base believed that sharing information with others is important in social media. This indicates that your Facebook fans play a decisive role in expanding your reach towards new people who are not yet fans. This, in turn, means more traffic to your Facebook page and, indirectly, to your website.

Social Commerce Strategy

Following are tips that can help you improve social commerce implementations.

Share Your Identity

When starting a social commerce implementation strategy, keep these three things in mind:

Identity

Conversation

Community

In this social design, identity is what you communicate through conversation with the community. It’s imperative to create a social commerce plan that involves conveying the identity of your brand properly and effectively.

Provide Ways Your Customers Can Interact with Each Other

Social media services are designed in a way that encourages the free exchange of information between its users. You can incorporate this same idea within your site. An e-commerce website should embrace additional means for fostering interaction between their users. That’s where social commerce steps in, in the form of forums, your commenting system, through conversational threads on your Facebook page, and so forth.

Analyze Your Existing Social Network

Reviewing the conversations occuring in your social network can give you great insights about the perceptions people have about you. Your social network is a key data point for your social commerce strategy.

Some Parting Thoughts from Social Commerce Proponents

Let me end this article with some opinions from two social commerce champions.

"Social commerce gives us the ability to reach more customers, in ways that are becoming an expected norm in the e-commerce industry. Attracting consumers though reviews, blogs, recommendations and other content is something that is part of e-commerce now. It fits in the objective of our company to increase revenue and target."

- Martin Keane , SVP of e-commerce at Bluefly

"Social networks are great places for the people to have conversation and share information. But their effect on ecommerce is increasing as prospective buyers are able to share authentic and honest information among them."

- Jeremiah Owyang , Web Strategist and Senior Analyst at Forrester Research

Related Content

A Look at Popular Open Source E-commerce Software

Tips for Creating an Excellent E-Commerce Website

Essential E-Commerce Website Features: Tips and Examples

Related categories: E-commerce and Web Technology

About the Author

Brian Taylor is VP of Business Development at Forix, a web design agency in Portland, Oregon. Forix specializes in the design and development of company websites, e-commerce systems, and mobile apps. Connect with him on Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

The post Why Social Commerce is a High Priority appeared first on Six Revisions.

via Six Revisions http://sixrevisions.com/ecommerce/social-commerce/

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How to Fund Your Startup

Are you starting a new business and wondering what your financing options are? Treehouse Business teacher Pasan explains the various kinds of business financing available to you, including equity financing, debt financing, and angel investors, as well as each of their pros and cons.

The post How to Fund Your Startup appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

via Treehouse Blog http://bit.ly/11LP2jD

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The UX Magazine Jobs Board is at Your Service

June 27, 2013

While UX Magazine remains focused on publishing high-value content throughout each week, our goal is to be something greater. We're always looking for ways to deepen our existence as a free and growing resource for the user-centered community.

With the recent update of our site to a responsive theme running on a newer version of Drupal we took opportunity to rethink our jobs board. We’re pleased to announce that along with being easier to use, that jobs board is now free.

Companies and organizations with openings can post user-centered jobs to our board free of charge. UX professionals looking for employment are encouraged to check the board often and apply.

You’ll notice a number of vacancies posted by Didus, the niche UX staffing and career...read more By UX Magazine Staff

via UX Magazine http://bit.ly/18iNIZG

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Making Time to Learn with Side Projects – Interview with Dave Rupert

Dave Rupert, Lead Developer at Paravel, talks with Treehouse Teacher, Randy Hoyt, about new HTML5 Tags, accessibility, British websites, and the importance of side projects.

Treehouse Gold Members can watch the interview in its entirety here: http://bit.ly/11PGMfc

The post Making Time to Learn with Side Projects – Interview with Dave Rupert appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

via Treehouse Blog http://bit.ly/13a8D00

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Announcing the Treehouse Careers Project

If you’re considering a career in design or development, it will take more than learning how to code to find success. Through a series of lessons and interviews with industry experts and the entire teaching team, Treehouse’s Dan Gorgone and Pasan Premaratne share their expertise on how to focus your passions, set your career path, identify opportunities, and prepare yourself to get the job you want in the tech industry.

The Treehouse Careers Project will be launching early July, and will be available to Treehouse Members.

The post Announcing the Treehouse Careers Project appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

via Treehouse Blog http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/treehouse-careers-project?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+teamtreehouse+%28Treehouse+Blog%29

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The Strategic and Tactical Aspects of UX Leadership

June 26, 2013

User experience leaders face unique challenges based on the relative newness and breadth of our field. However, the importance of our work makes it crucial for UX leaders to find balance in the tactical and strategic work before us.

But what is strategic leadership and what is tactical leadership?

The difference between strategic and tactical can be illustrated by looking at the words’ military roots. A lieutenant on a hill planning a mission exemplifies the strategic view. A sergeant working with troops on the ground to execute the mission exemplifies the tactical.

Strategic UX Leadership

Senior managers, directors, and above, may find themselves cast in a more strategic role within their company (if they have the good fortune to have other leadership partners focused on the tactical). In UX terms, strategic leadership means looking at long-range plans, your UX department’s position in the company, funding...read more By John McGloon

via UX Magazine http://bit.ly/1cmIsRY

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How to Determine if your Marketing Campaigns are Profitable

Are your marketing campaigns profitable? In this post I’m going to show you a simple and reliable way to calculate marketing campaign profitability. This will allow you to crank up your spending on profitable campaigns and kill the poor performers.

Calculate your LifeTime Value

The first thing you need to do is figure out the average amount of revenue that your customers pay you over their entire lifetime. You can do these calculations in a simple Google Spreadsheet, any database or Excel. I’ve created a free example Excel spreadsheet here for you to download.

Assign each customer a unique ID. This could be their email address or a unique integer.

Each time a customer pays you, attach the payment to their unique ID.

The customer’s Life Time Value or LTV is a simple calculation: Add up all their purchases with you. It’s easy to do this because you’ve associated each purchase with a unique Customer ID.

Calculate the average LTV for all your customers.

Record your campaign data

You’ve got to keep careful records on your marketing spending in order to determine profitability. Initially this can be done in a spreadsheet but I’d highly recommend that you build an automatic system that records all of this data automatically to a database and crunches and reports all the data.

Assign each campaign a unique ID.

Record the amount you spent on the campaign.

Use a unique URL for the landing page, so the unique clicks from each campaign can be recorded in Google Analytics. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to create advanced segments in Google Analytics. For example, just attach the campaign ID to the URL like this: http://bit.ly/14XsP2V. See the screenshot below for how I’d capture the number of unique clicks for that campaign.

Record the number of conversions (new customers) who came from each campaign. You can also do this in Google Analytics with Goals. Here’s a tutorial on how to setup Goals in Google Analytics.

You can then view the Goal report in Google Analytics and use the Advanced Segment you created, to see the number of conversions on a specific campaign.

The above process will be time consuming if you are doing this manually. This is why you should invest the money and time, at some point, to build a system that records all of this data automatically for you. Collecting it manually at first will  help you understand the data, but it will become too time consuming long term.

Calculate your Cost per Acquisition (CPA) and Profitability

Once you know the number of clicks and conversions for each campaign, you can calculate the Cost per Acquisition or CPA. To calculate a campaign’s CPA, just divide the total cost of the campaign by the number of conversions.

Determine the profitability of each campaign by comparing the CPA to the average Lifetime Value or LTV. If it’s profitable, then you should consider increasing your budget. If it’s not, then you should consider discontinuing the campaign.

Be warned: just because a campaign is profitable now doesn’t mean it’ll always be profitable. There will be a point where you’ve saturated a channel and you either need to refresh your ads or find a new mareket/channel to advertise to.

We’ve created an in-depth workshop at Treehouse called Measuring Company Performance with MRR, Churn and Lifetime Values that should also be very helpful.

Please share your tips on measuring campaign profitability below in the comments. I’d love to hear from you!

The post How to Determine if your Marketing Campaigns are Profitable appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

via Treehouse Blog http://bit.ly/16zpFSh

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When Editors Design: Controlling Presentation In Structured Content

   Thanks to the skyrocketing popularity of mobile devices, a new generation of designers and CMS developers has found the religion of Structured Content. Once the domain of semantic markup purists and information architects, structured content models are at the heart of most multi-channel and multi-device Web projects.

At Lullabot, we often work with media, publishing and enterprise clients. Those businesses produce so much content and manage so many publishing channels that keeping presentation and design-specific markup out of their content is an absolute requirement. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that editors and writers are content with rigid, predictable designs for the material they publish.

This challenging requirement — providing editors and writers with more control over the presentation of their content — is where many well-intentioned content models break down. In this article, I’ll share five techniques we’ve used on recent projects to solve these problems. These approaches work particularly well in Drupal but can be used any time that editors need more control over design.

The Easy (But Problematic) Answers

Sadly, a common response in projects on a deadline is to give up on well-structured, reusable content. If the editors want control, let them jam HTML blobs into their stories — they can sort out the details!

To avoid that chaos, some teams go to the opposite extreme. They pile dozens of custom fields onto each content type to capture every possible presentation option, or they give editors a menu of carefully tailored visual templates to choose from for each post. For indexes and landing pages, these teams often build visual layout tools to manage the position and visual style of each post, duplicating familiar page-layout mechanisms.

Both of these extremes can make cross-channel reuse more difficult because they all treat design-dependent information as an integral part of the content. In addition, they often confuse content creators with monstrously complicated input forms, and they force writers and editors to play the role of visual designers. This last point is a big one for fast-moving news organizations: Every minute an editor spends managing presentational tweaks is one they can’t spend on critical stories.

Principles That Work

Working with our clients and talking to other experts, we’ve identified a handful of useful tactics that will take the edge off these problems. They won’t solve every problem, but they address these issues without crippling editorial control or compromising our structured-content ideals.

Use Grouping and Priority, Not Manual Layout

When we started talking to the editorial team at a major news website, we learned that they wanted to control where articles appeared on the home page — and all of the website’s topical landing pages as well. When we dug deeper and presented simple prototypes, however, we discovered that they meant something different. What the editors really needed were ways to prioritize and organize content on the home page. On their old website, direct manipulation of each page’s layout was the only tool they had, and they were afraid to lose it.

Instead of building complex layout tools or tossing them into a tangle of raw HTML, we built three complementary tools: a simple “Priority” field for each article, several sets of issue- and section-related tags to organize content, and a set of reusable queues, such as “Breaking news” and “Front-page slideshow.” This allowed writers and editors to make simple decisions about each article, like setting the priority of a post to “Major news” or assigning it to the “Politics” section. Editors were given permission to manage the special-purposes queues.

The website draws on these different collections in a variety of ways. News tickers can display headlines of breaking stories across the top of every page, the home page can divide news by issue, and topical landing pages can display the most important stories first. On timeline-oriented archive pages, the “Priority” field can be used to emphasize rather than reorder important articles. All of the results are based on simple filtering and sorting rules, and editors are given control of the “levers” that drive those designs, but they never interact directly with the layout.

The Nodequeue module for Drupal lets editors control multiple curated lists of content for use on complex landing pages. (Large view)

The advantage of this arm’s-length approach to editorial control is subtle but important. Editorial choices about priority and purpose can carry meaning even when the stories aren’t featured on the home page. Responsive designs can easily translate these collections to vertically stacked layouts, and dedicated mobile apps can push alerts on breaking stories to users. Even when new designs eliminate or add new page regions, the meaningful data in each article will still retain its value.

Capture Emphasis Rather Than Appearance

This same design team wanted to keep the website fresh by providing several templates for each type of article. Naturally, the editors wanted to choose the precise design template used for each post. Giving them a drop-down menu to switch between templates was easy with our preferred CMS, but the list of choices only made sense for the desktop design. Tightly coupling that design choice to each article raised some troubling issues: Content feeds for partners and the client’s own mobile apps would be using completely different visual designs. Would the layout choices made by editors be respected there?

The solution was simpler than we expected. We presented the editors with a simple drop-down list, which, instead of offering a selection of templates, gives them a choice of article elements to prioritize. Stories with a particularly dramatic visual component might receive the “Image” or “Video” emphasis, lightweight stories meant to spark discussion would get the “Community” emphasis, and so on.

A simple content type that gives editors a choice of fields to emphasize. (Large view)

Why does this distinction matter? First, it becomes much easier to preserve emphasis when the content moves from one publication channel to the next. Custom-tailored HTML can be generated when the story is sent via email; simple CSS rules can be used to vary the article’s appearance in a responsive Web design; and a content syndication API passes along the emphasis information without assumption. In addition, emphasis will evolve more gracefully than explicit layout decisions. As the primary website’s appearance changes (and visual templates come and go), designers can decide how to best communicate the emphasis that the editors have chosen.

Use Embedding Codes to Complement Chunky Fields

Life gets pretty complicated when videos, slideshows, dynamic widgets and other complex media are used in a piece of content. If the precise position of these embedded elements isn’t important, then we use custom fields to indicate the fact that they’re related to the article, and let design templates handle the rest. Editors enter the key information that’s needed (the URL of a YouTube video and the desired size, for example, or the unique ID of a related piece of content). Then, theming and templating functions control how the custom fields are displayed.

In a recent corporate intranet project, however, that relationship approach wasn’t enough. The company’s HR team needed to embed rich media and widgets, such as insurance calculators, into policy documents for their employees. These embedded elements were part of the narrative flow of the articles and couldn’t simply be listed as “Related resources.”

Rather than throwing up our hands and letting them paste chunks of raw HTML, we used custom placeholder tags, like [slideshow:2], inside the body copy. When the content is displayed, output filters replace those placeholders with the rich content. Content editors never have to deal with the complexities of iframe-based embedding codes or third-party JavaScript snippets, and changes to the design or CMS platform become much easier. When those complex widgets inevitably change, the placeholders in each article remain the same; only the centralized code for replacing them needs to be updated.

Shortcodes and placeholders can be used to embed rich media without manual markup. (Large view)

In WordPress, this style of placeholder replacement can be implemented using custom shortcodes. Smashing Magazine covered this approach last year, and the Post Snippets plugin allows you to set them up without writing custom code. In Drupal, a number of modules, including Token Insert Entity and Custom Tokens, do the same thing.

Put the WYSIWYG Editor on a Diet

WYSIWYG editors are popular, with good reason. They simplify editing, prevent most simple HTML errors and give authors a quick idea of how text will look when published. In a world of multi-channel publishing and complex designs, though, WYSIWYG editors carry significant drawbacks. They work fine for simple markup, such as emphasis, block quotes and bullet lists, and they help with attribute-rich elements such as images. However, they often add complexity when editors have to input specific structured HTML to match a website’s design.

On the corporate intranet mentioned earlier, content editors faced this problem in a big way. Common article elements such as call-out warnings and captioned images were too complex for the WYSIWYG editor’s built-in array of buttons and styles. Conscientious editors tried to duplicate the precise markup used by the website’s CSS but often made errors. Others gave up and tried to duplicate the appearance of those styles with the WYSIWYG editor’s table, font-color and image-embedding tools.

The underlying problem is simple: Most WYSIWYG tools are configured as training wheels for HTML. What most content editors really need are shortcuts for the semantic markup patterns that are specific to their websites. Rather than activating editor buttons for every HTML tag, we stripped the list of built-in features down to a bare minimum: links, lists, emphasis tags, heading tags and similarly unambiguous markup elements. Then, we identified common patterns in the website’s HTML and turned them into custom plugins for the WYSIWYG editor.

The Post Snippets plugin for WordPress simplifies complex markup, such as for captioned figures. (Large view)

One simple example is a button that inserts an attributed quotation, complete with the author’s name and a link to the article it appears in. The initial version inserted the markup with placeholder text for writers to change themselves. Subsequent refinements added a popup editing window with fill-in-the-blank fields for the quote, attribution and link. Capturing that design element in a single-click button made it simpler for content authors, and it ensured that the same semantic structure was used across the website.

The best news is that standard WYSIWYG editors for most CMSes are extremely customizable. With a few lines of PHP, administrators can strip unwanted options from WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor; define new buttons that insert custom markup structure; and add style options that apply website-specific CSS rules for editors. Drupal’s popular WYSIWYG API module offers similar flexibility: Options may be removed, new buttons and drop-downs added, and house styles applied without throwing content authors into the deep end of HTML.

Don’t Sweat the Oddball Pages

After all this talk about avoiding raw HTML markup, it’s easy to believe that everything on the website would be carefully planned, modeled and templated. Sadly, almost every website has a number of exceptions that refuse to fit the platonic ideal of structured content. Infrequently updated edge cases — such as terms of service, frequently asked questions and temporary landing pages for marketing campaigns — all tend to break the mold.

One of our client’s websites had several dozen pages like that. We’d used many of the techniques above to streamline their blog posts, news articles, celebrity biographies and photo galleries to good effect. Still, a frustrating mix of exceptions remained on the table. Creating dedicated content types to model the structure of each special case felt like a poor investment: Those pages were seldom reused, and once created, they rarely changed.

Rather than twist the more common content types to fit those uncommon (and often unpredictable) needs, we carved out a compromise: the generic “Blob” content type. It offers a simple title and a classic HTML blob field. Editors and marketing team members could insert arbitrary markup, even attaching custom CSS and JavaScript if necessary.

Isolating these uncommon but inevitable blobs protects your long-lived content assets from messy hacks. Ensuring that everything doesn’t eventually become a special case is also important. In the organization above, only a small number of users were given access to the “Blob” content type. A senior editor also kept a close watch to ensure that any common patterns eventually became dedicated, cleanly modeled content types.

Putting The Pieces Together

Taken together, the following set of techniques has served us well in a number of large thorny projects:

Allow editors to decide about prioritization and emphasis, rather than about explicit visual styling and positioning. This makes cross-channel reuse much easier and allows a website or app’s design system to do its job.

Complement structured fields with embedding tags when rich content is part of an article’s narrative flow. This enables editors to reuse content more efficiently across the website and to avoid ugly HTML blobs in body text.

Pare down the HTML features of the WYSIWYG editor. Configure the editor and leverage CMS add-ons to give content creators shortcuts to the website’s commonly used markup patterns.

Finally, use a dedicated “grab bag” content type when oddball pages need special handling. This will keep the core content types clean and structured, while still accounting for one-off blobs of markup.

Obviously, these approaches won’t solve all of the crazy collisions between structured content and editorial design tweaks. Each website brings unique challenges, and the needs of each content team ensure that we’ll never run out of new requirements. They’re a strong starting point and can quickly be implemented in most modern CMSes. If you have any war stories or useful solutions to similar problems, speak up!

Source of image on front page: opensourceway

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© Jeff Eaton for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

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What are those random shooting pains in my prostate?

Sometimes I will get these very random shooting pains in what I’m guessing is my prostate. I can’t exactly pinpoint the pain but I assume it is my prostate because sometimes the pain will travel or to my penis. These pains only last for a split second. It’s like a quick electrical shock, comparable to biting tin foil if you have a filling. I would say they are a 9 on the pain scale, enough for me to tense up, but the pain itself only lasts for a second and does not recur very often.

The frequency is totally random. Sometimes I’ll go months without it happening, sometimes it will happen 5 times in a day. Relatively infrequent. Happens whether I’m sitting, standing, laying down. I am a healthy 21 year old with no other health ailments whatsoever. I have researched prostatitis but have gathered that it mostly effects older men and I don’t have any other symptoms besides the shooting pains. Another thing I have heard of is a prostate growing pain. Does anybody have any insight of what this may be? I’m more curious than concerned.

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