Posts Tagged: Design

Generally, companies decide they require a chat icon on their website to improve customer relations and/or consumer confidence. The chat icon should be visible on the website within seconds. Statistics have revealed that regardless if a consumer uses the live chat or not, it will increase website sales by almost 29%.

Here are a few tips to consider when implementing a chat icon on your company website:

• Place the icon in a consistent location. If a visitor is in need of assistance, they know precisely where to locate the live chat.

• Don’t make the design of the live chat button too overwhelming. People are on your site to obtain information; not firmly to live chat

• You don’t want the button to blend too much with the site. Even though the design scheme may be to design the button with the pattern of the site, it may camouflage too well and become lost.

• Keep in mind a section on the site the user will always find the chat icon. If you position it merely on a single page, the user may forget where they found the button, thus the sale being lost.

• Users should not have to adjust their experience on the site such as substituting to a different browser to find the chat icon. Test the button on your site before implementation.

It may take a bit of time to discover where the best place to situate the icon is but it will be well worth the time and effort. It should not be the main focus of the site but be familiar enough to users to locate if they require instant online communication.

Last week, a student from Hong Kong is now feeling speechless about the volume of publicity he is receiving. Johnathan Mak, a university graphic design student designed the Apple logo to substitute the area with the apple part being bitten into a silhouette of Steve Jobs. Initially, Mak designed this as a memento to Steve Jobs after his resignation in August but it was only when Steve Jobs had passed away that the design went viral.

Mak has already received thousands of emails and messages on Twitter about his creation. Companies from different countries have contacted Mak striving to buy the copyright of his design. There still may be some copyright issues since the design is based on Apple’s logo. He has even been contacted with hundreds of job proposals but Mak has kindly declined them since he would like to finish school first.

Since Steven Jobs died from pancreatic cancer, Mak has decided that any earnings he receives from the logo will go directly towards cancer research.

One of Mak’s main inspirations of his designs comes from Steve Jobs. Jobs was a courageous man who strongly believed in his concepts and designs and continued to advance forward no matter what the repercussions or what people criticized him about.

Did you spot all of the differences? Not all were obvious and there were certainly a few tricky ones! Here’s my break down for all the changes I made to the form and why.

1. Change Sub title from “Registration” to “RSVP”
One of the main rules of thumb for creating an effective InviteRight form is to always consider who will be using your event’s form. In this case, since it is a party, your users will expect to RSVP rather than to Register. The term “register” is typically reserved for conventions or seminars. It is a slight semantic difference to be sure but if your hope to guide your users through the forms without confusion then these are the types of considerations you must keep in mind.

2. Include a Deadline / Name the deadline “RSVP Deadline”
It is easy to forget to add in the “Response Deadline” in the Create stage of your forms, but including it and placing it at the top of your forms gives your guests urgency for making their decision.

3. Change “Personal Information” to “Attendee Details”
My very first blog post addressed this very issue of titling your headers in a way in which your users will not feel as though they are revealing sensitive “Personal Information.” Again, all of the wording of your forms should consider the context – Attendee Details and even RSVP Details is more effective than Personal Information.

4. Capitalize the “N” in First & Last names
It’s a small change but one I always try to remember to do this for aesthetic and consistency sake.

5. Remove the Address information
We default the Address question to appear for all of our forms but there are certainly events – such as party RSVPs (among family and friends) where you would hardly require the need to obtain that information. If you don’t need it, get rid of it! Extraneous questions will only clutter your form.

6. Remove the heading from “Additional Information”
This heading, as a information separator, does not provide any particular usefulness in the context of this form and only serves to take up more vertical real estate. By removing it you can “chunk” together very succinctly all the questions you want your guests to answer in the Attendee Details section. Keep in mind this notion of “chunking” information or questions to make it easy and logical for for your users to work through your forms.

7. Personalize the event details text
You don’t need to settle on our the default text! Personalizing the event details is your chance to speak directly to your audience. You want to have people come to your party? Jazz it up then! Providing a personal touch to the events details gives your guests context and emphasizes the importance of their registration or RSVP.

8. Provide the exact location address for the Google Maps link
By providing the exact location (during the create status) your forms will have a direct location link to Google Maps that appears in both the registration and confirmation pages. This makes it easy for your guests to get Google’s step by step directions to your event whenever they need them.

Now you’re on your way to becoming an expert forms creator!

To be a Forms Design “guru” at EventIQ one must have a keen eye for detail. Subtle adjustments can make a world of difference in making your registration forms concise, look great, and that much easier for your guests to fill out.

See you if you can spot the differences between the two following RSVP forms. I would urge all of you Free Trial Users to consider making similar edits to help tighten up your RSVP forms. The answers will be provided in an upcoming post along with explanations for all of the changes.

Happy hunting!

OLD

NEW

It’s been a while since InviteRight has acquired a new appearance. Over the past few months, we have worked attentively at the design of the application and always considered users on how confortable and enjoyable it is to create new events and view and extract all the data gathered from the system. Some of the changes have been drastic while others are very subtle. The new design will be implemented in the next few weeks so in the meantime; I will provide a sneak peak at some of the new look and feel.

Administration Area
You may notice that our mascot “Dwight” will be emerging more in our system. He is here to aid and direct you through any problems that you may stumble upon. When you first log into the system, you may spot Dwight at the top of the screen. This new administration bar Dwight sits in extends across the screen allowing you to easily see your login information, sign out button, help button and the capability to jump to any of your events instantly.

Buttons
The buttons on the site are now rounder and colourful. In sharp glance, all of the action buttons are more visible and invoke a more gratifying feeling.

Event List
The data in the event list is now simpler to read. The heading of the columns are bold and data is separated within a table. Subtle shades of grey and white are alternated between each row for ease of viewing large amounts of data.

These are just some of the alterations we have implemented. We hope you enjoyed this sneak peak of the design changes we have implemented just for you! Stayed tuned for the system update!

I was motivated recently to pick up a book (actually it was handed to me by The Boss so naturally I started turning pages) titled ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ written by software developer Steve Krug. Even though the book is about a common sense approach to web design, it occurred to me the lessons in this book can also be applied to other processes besides web site design.

Krug suggests web designers sometimes let their design innovation overtake and overwhelm how sites function. and they can be too innovative with their designs while forgetting about how the site functions. He emphasizes that you should change up your web page design only if the new product is:

A) changes are self-explanatory and do not require a learning curve.

B) changes add so much value that it’s worth a small learning curve.

From my time here at EventIQ, I think this philosophy also applies to the registration and ticket sales process. Certainly there’s many different methods for selling tickets and registering people for big events, but I believe InviteRight, our flagship software product, is worth investing a bit of time to learn because it adds immense value to the process of getting people to your event.

Changing Your Ways

But I’ve learned that some people cling to their processes like Linus does to his blanket. We tend to stick to things that work and seldom look for a better way, Krug says, especially when you cannot see the value of making a change. Why bother investing the time in climbing the learning curve when you are unsure of what the outcome will be?

There’s lots of reasons not to change, but I would hope that event organizers would be open to change. That means recognizing when there is value in change and suppressing the impulse to just stay the course. When it comes to events why continue to muddle through a process which is more time consuming and by extension more expensive?  The professional event planners tell us that they have enough to do in their day with ludicrous deadlines, flocks of customers and committee members  with conflicting needs and interests, etc.; a great reason to look for better ways to streamline their day.

Try It (for free)

I get that people are naturally skeptical, but I take to heart the one comment I hear time after time when doing a demonstration:  “Wow.”  And I love sharing Wows. I could write a book about all the steps involved in a manual process for selling tickets to a graduation banquet and how your time can be better used. Instead I would rather you see for yourself how InviteRight can improve your process; go to our website where you can experiment and test out the features with InviteRight for free.  Yes, you will receive a follow up email, but, no you won’t be inundated by phone calls or emails afterward.  But I love talking, so feel free to email me too!

Luke Wroblewski is the head design officer, Entrepreneur at Benchmark Capital and the next speaker who talks about mobile web design. During the last day of the convention, Wroblewski also provided a full day seminar dedicated to the vast amount of knowledge related to mobile web design.

Why is mobile web design so significant? The number of people using their phones to surf through the internet is enormously rising. Users visiting Gmail on the web declined 7% and users accessing Gmail from their phones increased by 36%. In 2010, the number of people using the internet on their phone increased by 600%.

Reasons why we should be considering designing/developing for mobile devices:

• New internet uses emerge
• Number of people accessing the internet is shifting from PC to mobile devices
• Opportunity for better overall experience

When building a website while taking into consideration mobile devices, it’s essential to take into attention all factors. The size of the screen, resolution, experience on the phone, navigation, etc. Navigation for mobiles devices is very diverse from accessing from a PC or desktop since they include activities such as panning, scrolling, pressing, flicking, and dragging.

The advancement of mobile phones is fascinating and newer innovations are being conceived daily. They revolutionized the way we accomplish tasks and make our lives easier. We are able to have access to the internet in the palm of our hands and are able to achieve things such as finding the closest location to a favorite area in correlation to our current location, turn objects off or on such as cars or light switches, transfer money/make payments instantly and much more. The remarkable thing is this is all made by solely clicking or swiping with our fingers.  Here are a few capabilities for the mobile device:

• Positioning and movement
• Detects location
• Orientation
• Gyroscope
• Proximity
• Multi-touch
• Video/image – cameras/dual Cameras
• Ambient light(light/dark awareness)
• Device connections such as Bluetooth

(more…)

The other day I stumbled upon this photographer’s website that had an interesting project. She would take old photos and recreate them many years later with the same people inside the photo. Below are some of the recreated photos. Click here to check out the rest of the images.

It goes to show that some things never change.

Gearing to talk about why designers fail and what to do about it is Scott Berkun. Berkun wrote, “Making Things Happen”, “The Myths of Innovation” and “Confession of a Public Speaker”. He also was a manager for Microsoft from 1994-2003, team leader on WordPress and his works have appeared in Wired Magazine, New York Times, Forbes Magazine, Washington Post and many others.

Everything we do is design, even if we are not conscious of it. Writing a poem, painting something beautiful or even writing lyrics to a song, these are all in fact design. Design goes in further that organizing your desk space, training your employee or even organizing a corporate baseball team is considered design.

Are you a designer of some sort? Then you fail. All designers fail about 95% of the time. That just means that when you first arise to your design, plan, or draft, generally it won’t be the final product. Failing isn’t a terrible thing. Once we fail, we recognize our mistakes and construct better solutions or concepts. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, built on July 1, 1940 collapsed on the morning of November 7, 1940. The obstacle was the bridge was built with shallow plate girders instead of strong trusses. Wind can bypass trusses but girders impede the wind. This resulted in the bridge to actually sway back and forth at 42 miles per hour winds. With this failure though, it created the current Narrows Bridge to become a success and also allowed engineers to understand the obstacles that stand in the way for suspension bridges.

Thinking outside of the box can stimulate ideas. Sometimes it’s difficult to come up with designs so it’s better to just shift items around and play with ideas and concepts. The Rubik’s Cube helps demonstrate thinking outside of the box. When we were children and couldn’t figure out a solution to the cube, some of us would take apart the cube and put the pieces back together. No instruction is given that we couldn’t do that! It’s just a matter of seeing another solution to a problem.

Most of us fall into the design trap and this is a major roadblock to get to the final outcome. In the book, “How Designers Think” by Bryan Lawson, he comes up with four design traps.

1. Category: obsessive taxonomy
2. Puzzle: problem solving for its own sake
3. Numbers: believing what’s measured is all there is
4. Drawing trap: love the sketch more than what it represents

In order to get to that perfect design, we must experiment and fail continuously and learn from our mistakes. Understanding what we did wrong and how to get that final product is a process we must all accept as designers.

The next speaker who falls on the list is Jason Santa Maria. A little information about him is he’s the creative director of Typekit, founder of Mighty, faculty member of MFA Interactive design, vice president of AIGA/NY, creative director for A List Apart, co-founder/designer for A Book Apart and a founder of Typedia.

In 1993 we had no fonts, 2008 we were limited to 18 cross browser fonts and now today we have thousands of fonts that can be embedded to websites for users to see. By selecting the correct font, you can project a certain message or impression such as the font choices “The New Yorker” makes. Before, when we post articles online, we would have to decide from a dissimilar font since the typeface on paper may not be the one located on the web. Now, we have the capabilities to have the exact same font on print and the web so now people who read the paper and users who view an article online can have the same experience.

Understanding type and being able to perceive a good one from a bad one is not as simple as it looks. It takes some specialized skills to learn how to differentiate, particularly since there is an overwhelming number of old and new fonts being produced.

Each typeface has a role and should be used only a certain situations with some having exceptions. Contrast of fonts is significant. Having different typefaces, color, sizes, etc. can conceive art. You can control what people read first and control how they feel. Even “ugly” fonts have influence too. Researchers found that fonts such as Comic Sans and Monotype Corsiva can actually improve learning for students. Students and teachers that have an effortless time going through material are likely to succeed but do they retain this knowledge? Giving them a more challenging typeface to read will in fact increase their retention since they’ll struggle and take additional time to focus on the words.

When someone asks what a good font type to use is, it’s not an easy answer as, “Helvetica”. You must take in consideration as what will it be used for? How will it be used? Under what conditions? Do some research on your typefaces. The font you use were created with precision and time by someone, so learn about who created it. It’s important to know the history of it. In the movie, “Back to The Future”, the typefaces on the tombstone were created much later than the date Emmett Brown died, specified on his tombstone.

Each font has a few characteristics that follow them. Some can be stable, powerful, contrast, angular, etc. So the next time you’re working with letters or words, review the different fonts available and see what it can do for your design.