Brin began the talk by looking down at his phone, and commenting that, like many, this is how he spends most of his time. “We often question if this is the way you want to connect with the people in your life,” Brin said. “I feel it’s kind of emasculating. You’re just rubbing this featureless piece of glass.”
While some may complain that we’re taking cool advice from a guy who wears Crocs, I don’t think Sergey’s wrong. Just count how many times you’re out with friends and have a split second of down-time. Chances are you instinctively reach for your phone.
LukeW’s “Data Monday” blog series is just the best. Not only because it gives you a slew of data on a regular basis, but it’s also a great way to find out about non-tech sources of tech news.
Ranked around the 600th most popular website on the Internet, when Time.com wants to change something as fundamental as the bones of their website, it makes news.
But what’s particularly interesting about their most recent change is that they are now on a completely responsive framework: ads and all. From the article on magazine.com:
One thing that we took as a given was that the advertising in a Responsive context is pretty far behind. We were not only one of the first major news sites to go Responsive, but also one of the first major consumer facing publishing sites in terms of the scale of our site and the extent to which we were rolling out the redesign. We’ve been developing the expertise for very complex ad delivery internally, but we didn’t have a perfect solution right out of the box. That would have added a significant amount of time upfront in terms of trying to understand the potential solutions that the ad community could deliver.
What we ended up doing was making sure there was a 1:1 correspondence between the various breakpoints that we were delivering. We design for six different breakpoints across devices, from desktop down to tablet, all the way down to mobile. So we asked ourselves, if we’re delivering leaderboard and rectangle on desktop, what would the corresponding units be on tablet, on both portrait and landscape mode, and then down to smartphone? What happened was at a couple of the breakpoints we realized there wasn’t a perfect fit. For example, 7 inch tablet devices in portrait mode didn’t have an analog to a 728×90 leaderboard, so we elected not to serve a leaderboard for that scenario, and instead serve only the rectangle ad. We’re working with our desktop ad server, DFP, for most devices, and we use our mobile ad server on smartphone devices, switching between both depending on the user agent. This allows us to provide advertisers a highly effective responsive program. Advertisers get the great Time.com branded user experience and their ads fall into place properly.
The end result? Mobile and tablet traffic are up and now make close to 25% of all traffic. Mobile pageviews are up 23%. Homepage uniques are up 15%. Most importantly, the mobile bounce rate is down 26%.
I’m currently working on wireframing a new user account page for ATK, so I’ve been researching how others across the web do it.
Presented below (in no particular order, and without comment) are 15 user account page examples from across the Internet. This is the page that’s presented by these various companies when you click on “My Account”, “Account”, or similar.
A Domino’s employee throws pizza dough in the air at a newly designed Domino’s restaurant in Ann Arbor, MI. Alternate caption: A Domino’s employee fends off attack from rogue pizza dough. (AnnArbor.com)
Growing up in Oklahoma, Pizza Hut was our pizza chain of choice, I spent the obligatory high school years working at a pizza shop called Simple Simon’s. After I went to college, we turned to Little Caesar’s $5 pizzas to cure us of our Friday night “sickness”. And now, in Boston, if we’re not visiting one of the local pizza/sandwich/deli/froyo/salad shops around here (which are great), we’re going to Naked Pizza.
Pizza Hut, Little Caesar’s and Naked Pizza all have the same decor: they’re small, cramped, had maybe a single table and a couple of chairs. It was oddly lit (and I’m pretty sure everyone in there was high and under 20 years old).
The truth is, more than 60% of pizza customers order for delivery. But that still leaves 40% (give or take, obviously) that walk into the store to pick up their pizza.
“The fact is, better than one in three of our customers come into our stores for carryout,” Doyle explained. “We just haven’t been very welcoming to those folks in the past.”
“What our customers told us they want is to be able to see us make the pizza,” he continued.
The newly designed stores feature open kitchens so customers can see employees spinning dough in the air and prepping pizzas. It includes interactive features such as a chalkboard for customers to write comments.
Customer experience matters, and Domino’s is using customer feedback to help make a seemingly mundane customer experience better.
Filed under “Never trust a skinny chef”, the former CEO of a failing airline gives us insight into where the retail experience is headed:
Merchants need to quickly learn the lessons that airlines have over the last 30 years: Deal with a shopper’s lust for price-parity, and compete on a new level based on providing the features that customers value and are unique to brick-and-mortar retailers.
He then goes on to suggest best prices in-store and offering special bottled water in the dressing room. All for a fee, of course.
The nickel-and-diming is begrudgingly accepted in the airline industry because there are only a handful of ways you can fly from point-A to point-B. But as the Southwest and JetBlue airline model proves, you don’t achieve profitable growth by up-charging for everything – you do it by treating your customers like humans. And (normal) humans don’t like getting screwed at every turn.
“Culturally, a watch is very tricky,” Poupyrev says. “A watch is not a functional device, no one carries a watch for functionality. You carry a watch as a status symbol, because you’re a snowboarder or a diver or you want to impress someone.”
Everyone likes to ‘be creative,’ to get involved with what we do. But you often find out that what they really want is control. If you can show people that you are still listening to them and what they do, no one gets freaked out.
LukeW with his notes from Jeremy Keith’s In his Spirit of the Web talk at AEA Atlanta. Included is a great tip about building a mobile lab and using it as a way to network with your surrounding web community:
You don’t have to optimize for every device but you might want to test on different devices. Starting a community device lab will give you access to more devices and help others with testing. Open it up to the community to share their devices.
The DBA Design Effectiveness Awards has a great case study about The Mail Online, and how the “rules” of web design don’t matter if you’re meeting the goals of your business and it’s customers.
Some key points made in the 12-page report:
They utilized heat-mapping and a 2-month beta period to see how users actually used the site. The results showed that readers didn’t mind scrolling, and would continue to scroll until they were bored. In response, The Mail Online created a homepage almost 3 times as tall as an average male.
In a nod towards existing readers, they removed all advertising from the homepage, but doubled up on advertising on the rest of the site. Results were an increase in impressions, resulting in an increase in ad buys from £4.5 million to £25 million over 4 years.
They noticed that their readers kept reading if they were offered something to read, so they created over 200 highly-optimizes SEO landing pages to help prevent dead-end stories.
Generic “web design rules” would point out that too much of the homepage is “below the fold” and “too busy”. But The Mail Online (and the agency contracted to do the redesign, Brand42) researched their readers, and the way they actually used the product, to create something that keeps them coming back – and made them the #1 visited news website in the world. Design bloggers be damned.
From Co.Design’s writeup:
So there aren’t any truly new tricks beneath the Mail Online’s hood–these are all tried-and-true online publishing strategies, just scaled up a few orders of magnitude. The Mail takes what we already know about attracting clicks and drives those principles to the breaking point.
There are a number of reasons you’d want to rename your Rails 3 app. To do so quickly, search and replace the following files of a standard Rails 3 application:
config/application.rb
config/environment.rb
config/environments/development.rb
config/environments/test.rb
config/environments/production.rb
config/routes.rb
config.ru
config/initializers/secret_token.rb
config/initializers/secret_store.rb
Obviously, if you referenced your app in any other files, you’ll want to change them there, too.
From StackOverflow:
In Rails 3, it’s a little different. Rails 3 projects are name-spaced to a module defined inconfig/application.rb. This application module is used to house your app, and you’ll see it referenced by your config.ru, config/routes.rb, config/environment.rb and all the environments defined in config/environments/.
If you were to open a terminal session and run the command rails new myapp, yourconfig/application.rb file would define the module Myapp, inside which will be defined an Application class, which extends Rails::Application. All the other files will referenceMyapp::Application.
In both Rails 2 and 3, you will find a string key for your session defined inconfig/initializers/session_store.rb, which takes the default value of ‘_<myapp>_session’. It’s not really tied to the “name” of your application, though you should try to keep it in sync to prevent any accidental session key name conflicts with other apps.
