The days when print design principles guided digital design are over. The web and online media have come into their own as communications venues – and as such have broken free from print conventions like “below the fold” and the idea that fewer words are better. In fact, digital design often takes a dramatic departure from print because of the way people use it, which is exactly what drives the latest digital design trends. But it isn’t just about looks as you’ll see in our latest white paper. Function, hardware, and user expectations are also big components. [Read more…]
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Branding from the Inside Out
When cattlemen first started branding cattle, they chose a mark that was uniquely theirs and easy to recognize – hence how the idea of the logo made it to modern-day marketing. But the more important thing to know about those very first cattle brands was that they were deeply personal to the ranches they represented. And that’s a lesson that applies to modern-day branding as well. Your company’s brand isn’t just a logo – it’s everything you stand for – every interaction you have internally and with your customers. It’s every piece of marketing material. It’s your internal training program. It’s the slogan on the company field day t-shirt.
Wellient launches their new web site at www.Wellient.com
Wellient empowers you to take a proactive role in your daily health routine. Working for you around the clock with personalized medication reminders, adverse interaction alerts, automatic prescription renewal counts, daily follow-up upon hospital discharge, health test monitoring, portable health records, emergency response in case of accident, medication price comparisons and traditional and non-traditional medical information tailored to what you say is important to you. Stay on track, be healthier, feel better, stress less and save time and money. Wellient is easy and low-tech for you to use, but high-tech and robust behind the scenes.
By launching a comprehensive new platform of health management and information services, they are transforming your medical history into usable and potentially life-saving information. It is no secret that a bewildering and fast-growing amount of data is available on the Web. A filtering service focused on the most reliable sources of information is needed. A service that is built around your specific needs. We are out to help change attitudes and behavior in a friendly, private and easy way.
What exactly constitutes good web site design, and why should you care?
Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web site.
Since the visitor to the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.
Most users search for something interesting (or useful) and clickable; as soon as some promising candidates are found, users click. If the new page doesn’t meet users’ expectations, the Back button is clicked and the search process is continued.
- Users appreciate quality and credibility. If a page provides users with high-quality content, they are willing to compromise the content with advertisements and the design of the site. This is the reason why not-that-well-designed web-sites with high-quality content gain a lot of traffic over years. Content is more important than the design which supports it.
- Users don’t read, they scan. Analyzing a web-page, users search for some fixed points or anchors which would guide them through the content of the page.
- Web users are impatient and insist on instant gratification. Very simple principle: If a web-site isn’t able to meet users’ expectations, then designer failed to get his job done properly and the company loses money. The higher the cognitive load and the less intuitive the navigation, the more willing users are to leave the web-site and search for alternatives.
- Users don’t make optimal choices. Users don’t search for the quickest way to find the information they’re looking for. Neither do they scan web-pages in a linear fashion, going sequentially from one site section to another one. Instead users scan; they choose the first reasonable option. As soon as they find a link that seems like it might lead to the goal, there is a very good chance that it will be immediately clicked. Optimizing is hard, and it takes a long time. Scanning is more efficient.
- Users follow their intuition. In most cases users muddle through instead of reading the information a designer has provided. Users act like “If we find something that works, we stick to it. It doesn’t matter to us if we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. If your audience is going to act like you’re designing billboards, then design great billboards.”
- Users want to have control. Users want to be able to control their browser and rely on the consistent data presentation throughout the site. E.g. they don’t want new windows popping up unexpectedly and they want to be able to get back with a “Back”-button to the site they’ve visited before: therefore it’s a good practice to never open links in new browser windows.