Do you use LinkedIn to find new customers and clients? Want to get more value from LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a great platform to find and connect with potential partners, customers, and clients. In this article, you’ll discover how to use LinkedIn to find your target prospects. #1: Create a Buyer Persona A prospect is anyone [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Are you struggling to connect with your audience on social media? Do you feel like social media won’t work for your business? It’s not easy to put every business on social media, but the right approach can help even the most difficult cases reach their customers. In this article, you’ll discover three ways any business [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
You’ve surely heard of Sketch, right? Sketch is one of the premier design programs for user interface developers. It’s an amazing offering, even if only available on macOS. In the last couple of weeks, Sketch has gone from version 3.0 to 40. With SitePoint Premium just releasing a course on Sketch 3, we thought it would be a perfect time to update the course with new lessons on Sketch 4.0. In addition to new features, performance updates, we’d like to share those with you in a live lesson with Adam Rasheed, our instructor for the User Interface Design with Sketch 4 course. By the end of the live lesson, you’ll have learnt how to create a complete mobile-first UI web layout!
Continue reading %UI Designs with Sketch 40 – Live Lesson!%
You can learn a lot from your competition. One way to learn about their designs – and how yours fare in comparison – is to conduct a usability test using your product as well as those of your competitors.
If this sounds intimidating, it shouldn’t. The technique is straightforward; you just need to break it down into steps.
The first step is to decide whether this type of testing would be useful for you. Competitive testing can help you:
The reason my fellow researcher and I decided to conduct a competitive study at iContact several years ago was to prove to our leadership that the message-creation tool was not competitive and needed an overhaul.
It worked. The tool, which had not been on the product roadmap, was made the top priority once stakeholders saw how poorly the current version of it fared against two competitors: Constant Contact and MailChimp.
Our UX team had heard from the customer support team and read in online reviews that users had a lot of difficulty with several aspects of the message creation tool.
For example:
These issues sounded critical, so we sought to better understand what was going on.
First, I conducted a competitive analysis, writing up how important features compared in iContact and its competitors. Second, I conducted an online survey to get quantitative data about the issues affecting customers and what they most wanted to see fixed. Finally, we conducted the competitive study.
If you think competitive testing could be useful to you, ask yourself a few questions:
When planning for the competitive study, we wanted participants who had experience sending email newsletters to audiences for their companies or volunteer organisations. Since we were recruiting through friends and family and Craigslist, we couldn’t be as specific as we liked about what tools they had used, but made sure they represented using a mix of our product, our competitors’ products, and email applications such as Outlook. We recruited 16 participants and gave them each a $100 gift card.
On most measures of the study tasks and ratings, iContact did not measure up to its competitors. This helped make the case for re-designing the tool.
We selected five important tasks for an email marketing tool – including finding a template, editing an image and importing text from MS Word – and had each participant perform them in all three tools. (We did have to sign up for fake accounts in the two external tools)
In the old interface, participants had difficulty finding an iContact template that met their needs – in large part because you couldn’t see multiple thumbnails at once.
Resizing an image was hard to do in this early version of the message creation tool. It was nearly impossible to keep the ratios. Video clips can be very persuasive when presenting results of usability testing.
The test took two hours per participant. We recorded the time it took each person to complete – or give up on – each task; which tasks they completed successfully; and their responses to a few rating questions – such as their satisfaction level with their completed messages and the ease of creating messages in each tool. One interesting finding was that our customers tended to choose us because we were least expensive, not because we were good. This
We analysed all the findings and wrote a report with the results of this study. As we had suspected, it showed that iContact’s tool fared poorly. The presentation to the leadership team really drove home the fact that change was imperative.
iContact’s tagline was “iContact: Email marketing simplified.” After the research, this didn’t seem accurate, so for our presentation, we shared alternate taglines such as this one to make that point. The presentation was called “Living up to the tagline: Insights from studying message composition.”
We started by giving the leaders in attendance seven minutes to work on a specific message in iContact’s tool, to familiarise them with the (frustrating) experience. After this exercise, they were engaged in the results and felt the users’ pain when we showed videos of participants suffering through losing messages after working so hard to create them.
iContact’s redesigned interface. When you open the new Message Builder tool, by default you see thumbnails of all the templates, and you can filter to see fewer options.
Soon after our presentation, the leaders gave the go-ahead for a long-term effort to redesign the tool. This resulted in a much-improved interface that upon release immediately reduced customer service calls and increased conversions to iContact.
As you’re coming up with ideas for researching your product, keep competitive testing in mind. It’s definitely doable and can give you great information about where you stand and how you should proceed with your designs.
The post Know what you’re up against with competitive testing appeared first on UX Mastery.
I am one of those developers who likes to do things from scratch and get to know how everything works. Although I am aware of the (unnecessary) work I get myself into, it definitely helps me appreciate and understand what lies behind a specific framework, library, or module.
Recently, I had one of those moments again and started working on a web application using Redux and nothing else but vanilla JavaScript. In this article I want to outline how I structured my app, examine some of my earlier (and ultimately unsuccessful) iterations, before looking at the solutions I settled on and what I learned along the way.
You might have heard of the popular React.js and Redux combination to build fast and powerful web applications with the latest front-end technologies.
Made by Facebook, React is a component-based, open source library for building user interfaces. While React is only a view layer (not a full framework such as Angular or Ember), Redux manages the state of your application. It functions as a predictable state container, where the entire state is stored in a single object tree and can only be changed by emitting a so called action. If you're completely new to the topic, I recommend checking out this illustrative article.
For the rest of this article it's not required to be an expert on Redux, but it definitely helps to have at least a basic understanding of its concepts.
What makes Redux great is that it forces you to think ahead and get an early picture of your application design. You start to define what should actually be stored, which data can and should change, and which components can access the store. But since Redux is only concerned with state, I found myself a bit confused as to how to structure and connect the rest of my application. React does a good job of guiding you through everything, but without it, it was down to me to figure out what works best.
The application in question is a mobile-first Tetris clone, which has a couple of different views. The actual game logic is done in Redux, while the offline capabilities are provided by localStorage, and custom view handling. The repository can be found on GitHub, though the application is still in active development and I am writing this article as I work on it.
I decided to adopt a file structure commonly found in Redux and React projects. It's a logical structure and is applicable to many different setups. There are many variations on this theme, and most projects do things a little differently, but the overall structure is the same.
actions/
├── game.js
├── score.js
└── ...
components/
├── router.js
├── pageControls.js
├── canvas.js
└── ...
constants/
├── game.js
├── score.js
└── ...
reducers/
├── game.js
├── score.js
└── ...
store/
├── configureStore.js
├── connect.js
└── index.js
utils/
├── serviceWorker.js
├── localStorage.js
├── dom.js
└── ...
index.js
worker.js
My markup is separated into another directory and is ultimately rendered by a single index.html file. The structure is similar to scripts/, so as to maintain a consistent architecture throughout my code base.
layouts/
└── default.html
partials/
├── back-button.html
└── meta.html
pages/
├── about.html
├── settings.html
└── ...
index.html
To access the store, it needs to be created once and passed down to all instances of an application. Most frameworks work with some sort of dependency injection container, so we as a user of the framework don't have to come up with our own solution. But how could I make it accessible to all of my components when rolling my own solution?
Continue reading %Redux without React — State Management in Vanilla JavaScript%