Topic: Web Strategy

Mentoring Junior Designers

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Mentorship isn’t magic; training doesn’t just happen. You need a clear process in place to train junior team members and give them the skills they need to grow. Senongo Akpem shares his process for asking questions and tailoring projects to match a team member’s abilities.

Multimodal Perception: When Multitasking Works

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Don’t believe everything you hear these days about multitasking—it’s not necessarily bad. In fact, humans have a knack for perception that engages multiple senses. Graham Herrli unpacks the theories around multimodal communication and suggests that we can sometimes make things easier to understand by making them more complex to perceive.

Building to Learn

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Whether you’re just getting started on the web, or trying to pick up a new framework, Susan Robertson has a radical idea: build something that interests you. Sure, there are courses and tutorials out there to walk you through it, but a project you’re actually excited about will help you solidify those skills and make them easier to recall when you need them most.

Developing Empathy

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Everyone talks a lot about empathy, but distilling that theory-driven talk into practices for our day-to-day work can seem daunting. Susan Robertson shows how she’s been able to practice empathy for users as a developer.

Designing for Non-Native Speakers

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Half of all web pages are in English, but only about 28 percent of people using the internet speak English as a first language. Fortunately, designing for non-native English speakers doesn’t have to come with a huge price tag. Senongo Akpem shares three straightforward strategies for making your sites and apps more usable for non-native speakers.

Feedback Phases and Personas

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You want feedback in the early stages of any project, but how can you make sure you’re getting the most out of it? Anthony Colangelo recommends a five-stage feedback process to gather input from unique feedback personas every step of the way.

The Homepage Exception

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Structured, automatic systems are great at managing content efficiently—but not so great at accommodating human changes in that content. On the other hand, free-for-all WYSIWYGs lead to inconsistency and breakdowns. Stakeholders and content administrators need flexibility and control, especially where the all-important homepage is concerned. What’s a website to do? Johanna Bates suggests embracing a people-friendly homepage solution within our robot-driven architectures.

Approaching Content Strategy for Personalized Websites

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Experience management systems are making it easier than ever to customize content for your visitors—but are you using your newfound personalizing powers for good (or for creepy)? Colin Eagan shows that personalization can be done, thoughtfully, using the same tools you would apply to any content strategy conundrum: by asking why, being deliberate, and putting users first.

Building Nonlinear Narratives for the Web

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The web operates in ways that can conflict with our traditional view of what a “story” is. Content is chunked, mixed, and spread across channels, devices, and formats. How do we understand story lines, characters, interactions, and the role of the audience, given this information sprawl? Cue nonlinear narratives—Senongo Akpem guides us past basic “scrolly-telling” to immersive, sometimes surprising experiences.