We don’t know how to use LinkedIN according to it’s founder, Reid Hoffman. In the article “Reid Hoffman: The Network Philosopher” in the April 2012 Wired Magazine issue , Reid Hoffman recently said: “is the vast majority of people don’t understand what it’s a platform for. Ask the average person, they think it’s a place they keep their CV online, and maybe have some connections with people they know professionally. They don’t think of it as a place they can get business intelligence, establish an online presence where other people in the network can find them, research problems. We’re a screwdriver when people don’t really realize what screws are. If the light bulb went off in their head on how to use LinkedIn, it would raise the country’s GDP. The vast majority of people don’t really have all the synapses connected about what it is...
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Designing for Humans: Good Content is Good SEO
Oh SEO, how you like to scare people and make them write robot friendly content and not people friendly content. As a user experience practitioner, I champion the user, the user often get’s lost in unfounded fears about SEO best practices. In my work most where I often encounter the greatest friction between human design and computer design demands is with search engine optimization. SEO is not some demi-god that should be allowed to strike fear into website owners, the refrain is all to common, “we can’t design that way we will loose some SEO traffic/Google Page Rank.” Good SEO standards should free you to design as you need. Want AJAX menus? Find a way. Want readable product descriptions and not keyword strings? Find a way. Want a Flash hero image, write content to support it. People read your website. People are your customers. People...
Read more Comments are closed Selecting New Interactive Clients: A Homage to David Ogilvy
Just finished “Confessions Of An Advertising Man” by David Ogilvy, again. Since we started IJHANA six years ago I find myself reading this book about every year and every time I find a new piece of wisdom that seems a little more relevant than before. This time it was the chapter Rules for Selecting New Clients. The chapter sparked the thought: “What should we, IJHANA, look for when selecting new interactive clients” and vice versa, “What should new clients look for?”. From the beginning IJHANA has set itself apart from most interactive agencies by being very selective about the clients we select to work with. We agreed as a company to never take on a client just for the money, never take on a project where client expectations can not be met or exceed and never to take on project that is under funded. There...
Read more Comments are closed Magento Enterprise Scalibliity
Want a Magneto Enterprise Edition site with the ability to scale to over 7.5 Million Unique Monthly Visitors and 15,000 orders a day? So did we! Attention to details during the planning, deploying, and configuration phase of the Magento Enterprise Edition environment was critical if we want to get the best performance out of the eco-system. It required not only optimizing Magneto, but also optimizing the Network, Hardware, Database and Image Serving. During this process we learned many tricks and tips by constantly looking for optimization improvements and performance testing. Getting into exactly what we did over the 2 year period would take volumes, but below are a few tricks and tips to get you started. Tricks and Tips When it comes to the hardware, RAM, RAM and more RAM. If you are expecting a large number of concurrent users Multi-core CPUs are a must...
Read more Comments are closed Top 5 Information Architecture Standards
Twelve years of information architecture best practices have now become proven standards. These Top 5 IA standards still hold true in an A/B split test and rapid iteration world. 1. Test, Test, Test There is no room for romance in building efficient site navigation and high converting landing pages. You must test your designs and prototypes with seed member online users, focus groups, one on ones and/or paper tests. 2. You are NOT the user You are not building for yourself. You must know and represent the needs of your user – be that a target customer or an application user. 3. Golden Triangle Eye heat tracking studies have shown time and time again the areas on website that users eyes first read. If you want a user take an action place the “button” in those areas. Branding and logo are import yes, but consider...
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