I can’t tell you how many times it’s happened to me: I’m checking my iPhone at red lights and on the side of the street. I enter my destination in a map or web search, and bam – they’ve got a website. I anxiously click the link, eager to learn the missing piece of information, and I am rewarded with a blank screen with a small blue Lego block in the center... nothing else! What? How can this be? Did the designer/developer of this site, really develop the ENTIRE site in Flash? Come on…even the navigation?

Today, more than ever, it’s become vital for businesses to adhere to some of the most basic web strategies, to ensure this doesn’t happen to every customer who has the luxury of looking you up on the iPhone. It’s part of the reason we advocate for developing two separate sites: One for desktop users, and another for your mobile users. Why not spend a portion of your web budget to ensure an optimal browsing experience regardless of how someone chooses to view your site? There’s no need to download huge images and rich media if you are in a car and just need basic contact information. On the flip side, the desktop/home user would prefer to see the large, beautiful photography and a more complex user experience.

We need to recognize our audiences, and many of them are beginning to rely heavily on mobile browsing. Not providing a mobile-friendly version of your website is making a conscious choice to ignore the fastest growing web browsing audience in the world. If you're interested in our mobile website development services, you can learn more here, or visit m.keenfootwear.com to see a mobile commerce site in action. 

In the world of web design, we’ve thankfully moved beyond the days of having to use a 256 “web-safe” color palette. These days I can help our clients develop visual experiences on the web that are more full-featured and visually rich. With broadband becoming the norm, load times are almost a thing of the past. Transparency effects are a cinch with PNGs, and Flash will let us get away with almost anything.

So what’s left to worry about in the design department? My biggest challenge is the environment in which you view my design.

I know exactly what my layout looks like on my 20” high-definition flat panel monitor in an office illuminated with incandescent lighting. But how does that same layout translate to a 19” CRT monitor under fluorescent lights?

Because of the differences in our visual environments we’re finding that it’s still important to consider all the basic design elements to develop a successful layout that can succeed in different viewing environments for me and my client. Not to mention my client’s customers.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I own a web development agency, and I am lucky if I check my Facebook account once a month. I feel ashamed. Because when I do check my page, I find myself being an avid consumer of everyone else’s updates and photos, but then I’m too busy to put anything new up about myself. I’ll toss a photo or two up every month or so, but I enjoy seeing what all my other friends are up to, and where they’ve been. I guess in that way I am quite voyeuristic.

In the micro-blogging world, Twitter has become a competitive environment where I feel challenged to be as creative or funny as many of the people I follow. It’s quicker and easier to contribute. I read tweets from people like Shaquille O’Neal (who is actually really funny!) and it feels so strange that he’s telling me what an NBA superstar is doing in his regular day-to-day life. It feels like I’m being a Peeping Tom, but it’s okay. We’ve all signed up for it. I never rooted for the guy as a basketball player, but I love hearing him chat about random stuff. It’s my glimpse behind the magic curtain.

We’ve begun to advise the majority of our clients to do the same thing: embrace Twitter as a way to give real information to customers in an easy-to-digest format. It’s an easy way to share behind-the-scenes information: stuff that will excite and entice people. So why not jump out there and direct some of the traffic yourself? It only takes 140 characters.

I once listened to a world-renowned game developer discuss the importance of happiness in our daily lives. She predicted that within the next 5 years, the ability to provide products and services that promote happiness and well-being would be the primary metric for measuring success.

A lot of the work we’ve been doing with KEEN Footwear recently has reminded me just how important happiness can be to the process of completing a purchase online. The custom shopping experience we created for KEEN has an array of features that aren’t “necessary” to each purchase, but they go a long way in building a unique experience for each customer. With each customer account comes a KEEN Closet: a visual representation of a closet full of outdoor gear and the products purchased by that customer. “See with Jeans” is another interactive feature allowing customers to see what shoes will look like with a pair of light or dark jeans.

We developed the features to help KEEN stand out from the crowd, and have received great feedback on these extra bells and whistles. With the number of online shopping outlets exploding, it’s vital that our clients’ sites shine and provide an extra splash of “happiness” even when completing an otherwise ordinary task. I believe interactive games and entertainment really are spilling over into the traditional online marketing space, and it’s our job to keep finding new ways to provide unexpected happiness where we can.

By the time I had sat through my third panel discussion at this year’s SXSW Interactive festival moderated or participated in by someone listed as “John Smith, Director of UX,” I was like “OK, does UX stand for what I think it does?” Yup. UX = User Experience.

As the web evolves and becomes a media-rich environment with so many ways to interact, we’re not looking at UI (User Interface) experts or IA (Information Architecture) folks anymore to tell us how our sites should work to benefit our users. The overall user experience has become king. Interface, architecture, design, programming: toss them all in a bowl, mix well, and you’ll end up with the User Experience.

Jared Spool’s talk on the “Journey to the Center of Design” provided me three core UX attributes that ensure good product development:

• Good Vision
• Good Feedback
• Good Culture

1. Can everyone on the project team describe the experience of using your design five years from now? That’s vision, and it provides a way to measure understanding.
2. In the last six weeks, have you ACTUALLY watched people use your product, or a competitor’s product? That’s feedback, and guarantees you don’t lose the forest for the trees.
3. In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure? When you reward certain failures, you give employees a chance to LEARN without fear.  This is good culture and ensures you always thinking critically, not just cranking out the same old stuff.

When building an online product, it’s important to take the time to gauge yourself on the core attributes of UX design, to gain better understand of the experience you're creating. To learn more about these components, you can check out Spool’s presentation here.