The X-Factor “Delight me in surprising ways: A beautiful surface, a carefully-placed animation, or a well-timed sound effect is a joy to experience. Subtle effects contribute to a feeling of effortlessness and a sense that a powerful force is at hand.” – Google Android […]
Simultaneously destroying the earth and re-creating it, in its own form. It’s a fascinating time to be in the digital services space; I can tell you. Everyone now accepts that mobile and tablets are the way to go, but with all the wild predictions and stories, the reasons behind this are often overlooked or misunderstood. […]
What do the best mobile websites avoid? Going mobile (or GoMo, for short) for your website might seem a huge task as you try to reconcile squeezing all your content onto a screen no bigger than your hand. It doesn’t need to be, breaking the project down into blocks of tasks is where to start […]
Wow, things have sure got busy at Connected; 3 new clients and 3 existing clients going through major re-builds makes for a busy month on top of our normal support load. As a result response times have slipped a little from our average YTD of 15hrs to nearly 22hrs, just outside our target response time […]
A slight departure from our normal digital-world musings but it’s a worthwhile cause. The world famous Nurburgring in Germany is under threat of sale, for lots of stupid reasons, a big public campaign is underway to spread the message far and wide. The north loop (Nordschleife) is nearly 13 miles (21 km) long and has more […]
White Space “Don’t be afraid of it.” – Vitaly Friedman […]
Fifteen months ago, I wrote a post “The recession will never end : adapt or die” and in it, I talked about about the cycle of business and how, to survive the roller-coaster of economic change that will define the businesses of the future. Well, the roller-coaster ride is certainly interesting and what we’ve seen, […]
Read More… from The recession is over, regardless of what anyone tells you
Visual Hierarchy “Understand the importance of users’ tasks and establish a visual hierarchy of these tasks. An important object can be given visual prominence. Relative position and contrast in color and size can be used to convey task importance.” – IBM “Create a visual hierarchy that matches the user’s needs.” – Whitney Hess […]
Universality “Our mission is to make the entire world more open, and this means reaching every corner, every person. So our design needs to work for everyone, every culture, every language, every device, every stage of life. This is why we build products that work for 90% of users and cut away features that only […]
The world seems to have, eventually, woken up to the power of OPEN SOURCE. It offers benefits far beyond (the perception of) low cost. In a fast-moving digital environment, it’s not enough to deploy killer applications today – we need to think about the future and what’s round the corner. In a traditional software project […]
Back in February we started a Flipboard Magazine called : Going Mobile – Spring 2013. It was an experiment and seemed to have gone down well with over 100 regular readers and nearly a 1,000 page flips since it started. Curated content via the web is close to our heart so we’ve extended the experiment […]
Typography “Celebrate typography. Type is beautiful, not just legible. Clear, straightforward information design. Uncompromising sensitivity to weight, balance, and scale.” – Microsoft […]
Services “Build digital services, not websites. Our service doesn’t begin and end at our website. It might start with a search engine and end at the post office. We need to design for that.” – GOV.UK […]
You can’t fail to have noticed to big hoo-ha about mobile websites; from 1% adoption in 2011 to being on 95% of organisations’ radar in Q2 of 2013. It seems the business world has suddenly woken up to need to go mobile, but how many marketers really understand whats involved and how to go mobile? […]
Read More… from Just 4 ways to approach Going Mobile – simpler than you think
Reverse & redo “Provide the ability to undo and redo actions. Applications must provide users with the ability to freely explore applications (which includes the ability to make mistakes) without fearing permanent damage.” – IBM […]
Whilst not universally acclaimed as iconic screenplay, Gordon’s famous quote rings quite nicely with the concept that all of us have the same amount of time in a given week or day or month. It’s all about how you use that time. At Connected, we’ve been religiously recording time for over 5 years; not in […]
Website visits from mobile devices ranges somewhere from about 10% and this gets the web world clamouring for responsive design frameworks. But what about email, that oft overlooked medium that can easily drive 30% plus on-site conversions. With email you can control the destination of clicks, so why haven’t we seen more responsive email and […]
Quality “Good design is thorough to the last detail. Thoroughness and accuracy of design are synonymous with the product and its functions, as seen through the eyes of the user.” – Dieter Rams “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, […]
Start with the basics. What is responsive website design? Since 2011, the industry has laid down a set of standards to specifically deal with the challenges of building web-sites for mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop. This standard is backed by Google, Microsoft, Apple and most of the web development community. It doesn’t really matter what it’s called, […]
The adoption of smart devices and the death of the PC in only 2 years is nothing short of staggering. Even more impressive is the pace at which this is happening. Just 1% of the websites on the ‘net were responsive at the end of 2011, yet 18 months later it’s on the radar for […]
