Susa Ventures

A seed-stage VC fund investing in founders building value & defensibility through data, network effects, & economies of scale.
by via Awwwards - Sites of the day

10 Top On-Page Tips To Improve Social Media Marketing Results

The best social media marketing campaigns are those that combine both off-page and on-page elements. Creating great content on Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube can help create a buzz, but unless this ties in with effective on-site content that has been optimized to convert, it won’t generate the kind of conversions that your great quality social content deserves.

by Guest Author via Digital Information World

The Harmony of Teams: A considered approach to making meaningful work collaboratively

At the end of 2012 Jo and I were professionally stuck. We were faced with a stark question about Apogee’s consulting work and the direction of the business going forward; What if UX was not really our intention in the work that we do?

It was a hard question to answer. We had invested so much time and energy into the way we do things, and we were finding it hard to slow down and seek alternative directions.

So we took a trip to Chengdu, mainland China, with our friends and advisors Bas and Geke from STBY. It was a deliberate space to enjoy relaxed conversations about our work, vent our shared frustrations, connect related topics and perspectives from thinking outside the field of design, and to touch on our toolkits and where we thought our practice was going.

Project inspection and flow

The natural flow of our conversations allowed us to share stories, reflect on and make sense of what our new thinking meant for our respective practices, and to better understand how each of us wanted to help our clients, now and in the future, with meaningful work.

We began to move away from our habitual ways of looking at our work and let go of the language that we had been using. 

We gave ourselves permission to pursue the freedom of thought that would enable us to see things anew.

We started talking about how teams work together. In our experience, the good energies a team brings to a new project can quickly get derailed if people don’t feel they have a clear understanding of why they’re working on something.

Opinion wars escalate when there is no customer involvement that could let us better understand their needs—both now and over time.

What’s the best way teams can create meaningful work together?

Teams create additional features to support their own egos and opinions, without grounding their justification in evidence of what customers actually need. Sometimes, during a project, people create conflicts that serve only to get in the way of making meaningful work together.

Unnecessary and petty battles suck the fun out of work and prevent it from being productive.

Why do people create this conflict?

You’ve probably experienced at least one of these scenarios in a project you’ve been part of:

• The team did not collect, or clearly understand, the requirements
• The team did not properly define the core of the offering
• There was too much distance between the customer and the project goals
• The organisation had already invested too much in the project to allow it to fail
• The team simply did not know how to get along.

These factors all contribute to creating an environment of fear and uncertainty that prevents people from working together to create wonderful products and services.

So, what are the elements of a project we need to be thinking about to help bring people together to make meaningful things as a team?

1. Define the core of what you make

It’s important for everyone on a team—independent of their discipline—to have a clear idea of the core features and value proposition of the product or service they’re creating.

What is the primary reason a customer would want to buy, rent, or subscribe to a product or service? How would customers go about completing their goals? How could a product or service better serve customers and the business over time?

2. Inform design through customer stories, and engage in sense-making with your team

Create a regular routine for learning about and understanding your customers so your team can make sense of customer insights together.

Transforming customer stories into valuable, accurate information, and using sense-making techniques, enables a team to engage in well-informed product or service design rather than relying on random, inaccurate assumptions.

Staying close to your customers, rather than making assumptions, keeps your project on track.

You could do this through asking questions, looking at data through the lenses of various disciplines, and having multidisciplinary conversations. Collecting this data helps you to map product and service features and solutions to customers’ actual needs and desires.

3. Share observations in a shared context

Don’t underestimate the importance of sharing, as a group, your individual and collective observations about customer and stakeholder behaviours. This enables teams to identify surprising or deeply memorable situations that deserve further analysis.

Sharing stories with other team members and groups makes way for a broader interpretation of the stories, which can help to make sense of everyone’s observations and determine what artefacts would give their observations and insights life.

Once your team develops a routine for sharing these stories, you can start to list assumptions, discuss the sources and the evidence available to support them. You can then either challenge or accept particular assumptions, or sets of assumptions, depending on the insights gained from sharing customer observations. As a team, this helps to prioritise particular features by determining those that deserve more of the team’s time, focus, and attention, and identifying which features require more research or further design iterations.

Using customer data to inform design decisions through sense-making is not a one-off activity. Nor is it just the responsibility of the user researcher or UX lead. It should be a constant activity that is integral to conducting business. Without this kind of research and sense-making, a business simply won’t be able to innovate over time.

4. Give people time to think

Delivering projects against a static set of requirements without taking a break to reflect on the project and get a clear outlook is a sure way to lose perspective and stifle innovation.

People need time and space so they can look beyond the current work in progress and reflect on how a product or service could look in the future. Allow people to get away from their desk and computer. Encourage conversations outside the project. Give people time to think so they have an opportunity to tackle problems with a fresh mind.

Let’s answer a question together

How can we (UXers) make routines to contribute to the intention of wellness for people, work, projects, communities and economies for an enlightened future society?

We need your help to answer: how can we make meaningful work?

What if you…

• Possess all the social permission you need to change personal habits?
• Spent an hour of everyday examining the potential for significance of a project?
• Began listening to and imploring others for their motives rather than their threats?
• Replace “what do I stand to lose?” with “what might we all need to gain?”
• Openly discussed the projects you work on mattered and where the best work felt like play and the best play felt like work?
• Welcomed all disciplines to create a broader ‘community of aspiration’ and signed an implicit contract to make meaningful work for every project we put our hands to?

It is the ability of teams to come together and intentionally create something great that enables organisations to achieve stellar results. With the help of integrated approaches. and the practices that guide them, we’ll not only become better at working well together but also, hopefully, get more enjoyment from our work.

What makes work meaningful work for you? Share your thoughts in the forums.

The post The Harmony of Teams: A considered approach to making meaningful work collaboratively appeared first on UX Mastery.

by Dan Szuc and Josephine Wong via UX Mastery

9 Google Analytics Tips to Improve Your Marketing

Do you use Google Analytics? Are you leveraging the many apps that work with Google Analytics? Integrating data from third-party tools, plugins and platforms with Google Analytics helps you gain insight about your online marketing efforts. In this article I’ll share nine tips to help you get more out of Google Analytics. Listen to this article: You can [...]

This post 9 Google Analytics Tips to Improve Your Marketing first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

by Kristi Hines via

The Beginners Guide to WordPress SEO

WordPress is used by millions of people right around the world to setup websites for a variety of applications. While it’s popular because it’s easy to get up and running and use, it still requires proper optimization in order to really improve your overall search engine rankings.

This guide will give WordPress beginners a basic overview of WordPress SEO to help your website get found online.

This article will cover:

• Title Tags
• Meta Descriptions
• Permalinks
• Keyword Phrases
• Alt Text
• Internal Linking
• The Yoast SEO Plugin
• Basic Keyword Research
• WordPress Tweaks

So let’s get started!

Your Guide to WordPress Search Engine Optimization

Title Tags

Title tags are used in the head section of a web page to communicate your page title better to both search engines and visitors. WordPress generally features a number of different pages which include just to name a few:

• Home page
• Individual pages
• Archived post views
• Single post views
• Category archives
• Date-based archives
• Author archives
• 404 error pages
• Tag archives
• Search results
• Category archives
• Archived post views

Title tags help to boost SEO efforts which in-turn can help to boost your overall rankings. The title tag will tell your visitors what the post is about before they click into it. The title tag is generally seen in search engine results as shown below:

Meta Descriptions

In WordPress, if you’ve installed the Yoast SEO plugin (which we'll cover later), you’ll see an area for the meta description and keyword to be implemented. For optimal SEO, the meta description should include the relevant keyword that’s going to be used for the overall post. The title of your post should also feature the relevant keyword for optimal impact. It's important to make your content clear for users, not just search engines.

Continue reading %The Beginners Guide to WordPress SEO%

by Aaron Gray via SitePoint

How to Translate from DOM to SVG Coordinates and Back Again

All the cool kids are using Scalable Vector Graphics. SVGs are great until you want to mix DOM and vector interactions -- then life becomes more complicated.

SVGs have their own coordinate system. It is defined via the viewbox attribute, e.g. viewbox="0 0 800 600" which sets a width of 800 units and a height of 600 units starting at (0, 0). If you position this SVG in an 800x600 pixel area, each SVG unit maps directly to a screen pixel.

However, the beauty of vector images is they can be scaled to any size. Your SVG could be scaled in a 400x300 space or even stretched beyond recognition in a 100x1200 space. Adding further elements to an SVG becomes difficult if you don't know where to put them.

(SVG coordinate systems can be confusing - Sara Soueidan's viewport, viewBox and preserveAspectRatio article describes the options.)

Simple Separated SVG Synergy

You may be able to avoid translating between coordinate systems entirely.

SVGs embedded in the page (rather than an image or CSS background) become part of the DOM and can be manipulated in a similar way to other elements. For example, given a basic SVG with a single circle:

[code language="html"]
<svg id="mysvg" xmlns="http://ift.tt/nvqhV5" viewBox="0 0 800 600" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet">
<circle id="mycircle" cx="400" cy="300" r="50" />
<svg>
[/code]

we can apply CSS effects:

[code language="css"]
circle {
stroke-width: 5;
stroke: #f00;
fill: #ff0;
}

circle:hover {
stroke: #090;
fill: #fff;
}
[/code]

and attach event handlers to modify their attributes:

[code language="javascript"]
var mycircle = document.getElementById('mycircle');

mycircle.addEventListener('click', function(e) {
console.log('circle clicked - enlarging');
mycircle.setAttributeNS(null, 'r', 60);
}, false);
[/code]

The following example adds thirty random circles to an SVG image, applies a hover effect in CSS and uses JavaScript to increase the radius by ten units when a circle is clicked:

See the Pen SVG interaction by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

SVG to DOM Coordinate Translation

What if we want to overlay a DOM element on top of an SVG item, e.g. a menu or information box on a map? Again, because our HTML-embedded SVG elements form part of the DOM we can use the fabulous getBoundingClientRect() method to return all dimensions in a single call. Open the console in the example above to reveal the clicked circle's new attributes following a radius increase.

Element.getBoundingClientRect() is supported in all browsers and returns an DOMrect object with the following properties in pixel dimensions:

• .x and .left - x-coordinate, relative to the viewport origin, of the left side of the element
• .right - x-coordinate, relative to the viewport origin, of the right side of the element
• .y and .top - y-coordinate, relative to the viewport origin, of the top side of the element
• .bottom - y-coordinate, relative to the viewport origin, of the bottom side of the element
• .width - width of the element (not supported in IE8 and below but is identical to .right minus .left)
• .height - height of the element (not supported in IE8 and below but is identical to .bottom minus .top)

Continue reading %How to Translate from DOM to SVG Coordinates and Back Again%

by Craig Buckler via SitePoint

Using ViewPager to Create a Sliding Screen UI in Android

Android provides many UI controls to create beautiful UI screens for your apps. One common UI requirement is sliding between multiple screens. For example, a photo slideshow. Android provides a UI control for creating sliding screens called the ViewPager. This tutorial will explain using ViewPager to create a sliding screen UI in your Android apps.

Continue reading %Using ViewPager to Create a Sliding Screen UI in Android%

by Abbas Suterwala via SitePoint