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Home > Community > Best Practice Blogs > User Experience & Usability
Craft a compelling user experience for your site community
Archive: January 2011
It was a packed house last night at the March New England Sitecore User Group meetup where nearly 50 Sitecore enthusiasts swarmed Velir’s Davis Square office to get a sneak peek at an early release of Sitecore 7.
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Tags: Infrastructure, CMS Evaluation
Topics: Web Implementation and Integration, User Experience and Usability
“What? I did it last year!” “Um, no thank you- I will pass.” “No way!”
Before last year at Uponor those would be some of the common responses when someone was asked to head up the creation of that years catalog. It was a 100% manual process with no permanent owner, no defined process, and information scattered throughout shared drives, individual hard drives, and notes scribbled on scratch paper on people’s desks. Sound familiar?
Tags: Content Strategy
Topics: User Experience and Usability
Seeking new ways to enhance predictions of user action and intent, marketers are forging new ground in finding ways to tie together online and offline data to build more comprehensive engagement models. Once, the collection and analysis of online activities and offline interactions were separate pillars of data managed by disparate internal teams – and often done by comparing stacks of reports and spreadsheets with different indicators. However, advances in tracking technologies are offering new opportunities for organizations to develop a more comprehensive view of a user's behavior across multiple touchpoints. The new challenge often lies in establishing new collaborative relationships with offline, non-marketing counterparts within the organization – and then developing programs to optimize across these channels.
Tags: Online Marketing
Topics: User Experience and Usability, Persona and Personalization, Mobile Web
A Content Management System (CMS) is a useful tool to manage your website texts and images. This new era of online marketing brings you multichannel campaigning, social content, email marketing and content personalization.
Multiply these by the number of devices like smartphones and tablets and you’ll have quite a challenge on your hands. The CMS as we know it doesn't cut it anymore. You need a robust e-business platform that facilitates both content and marketing management. Enter CMS 2.0: the Customer Experience Platform (CXP).
There a numbers of factors that have come together to help shape the digital trends for 2013. The move to the Cloud over the past three years has revolutionised technology. Mobile has become the new platform of choice and the introduction of social media channels has brought with it the need for multi-channel engagement strategies. And the next decade will be what the IDC has termed The Third Platform.
The first platform was the introduction of the mainframe for computing. The second platform was the introduction of the personal computer and local networks. Now we are entering the next platform, which is built on mobile devices and apps, cloud services, social business and big data. This Third Platform gives us a huge range of new opportunities in how we engage with our audiences over the next year.
Tags: Big data, Customer engagement, Mobile Web, Online Marketing, Relevancy, User Experience, Website Visitor Context
Travel is an emotional business, for better or worse. So often we're booking a flight to see far away family and friends, or saying a difficult goodbye to a loved one at the airport, or checking into a hotel on yet another business trip. Almost always we're in an emotionally charged state of mind, positively or negatively, and that's the reason why the traveling public has such strong bonds with their favorite travel brands. And such a bitter distaste for those that have perhaps not been sensitive to that tearful goodbye or delayed that crucial business meeting. It's a delicate business, travel.
Tags: User Experience, eCommerce, Online Marketing
Within the Sitecore interface it is possible to add custom buttons, Desktop shortcuts (or the like), by modifying the core database.
This blog post covers some of the more under-utilised features of Sitecore, useful for reducing work for the content entry team. These features were heavily utilised by True Clarity in development of an international e-commerce site, which needed the ability to quickly roll out regional sites.
I have experienced directly the baggage that can be associated with an organization’s website, and the resulting organizational inertia to change. How many of you have either joined a new organization, or experienced someone new coming into your organization, and when you (or they) have inquired about making updates/improvements to the organization’s website you are met with eye rolling and a less than enthusiastic response?
Tags: User Experience
You may have designed the perfect Sitecore site, but it's of little use if your content author experience is lacking. In the end, it’s the adoption of Sitecore by your Content Authors that determines if your Sitecore build is successful.
Tags: Content Authoring
Let's have coffee...
Sitecore recently challenged us by organising a competition among its Belgian partner agencies for the best way to introduce their CEP story to the business. It took some brainstorming (but that's what we love) of which the result is a short, but very comprehensive story about "Coffee loving Bob". Undoubtedly Bob loves a good cup of coffee... but not just any coffee: his favourite coffee all together with the right dose of sugar and a tiny cloud of milk, served at the right moment of the day and when he feels it's the best time to talk about the best CMS (Coffee Management System).
How well do you know your customers? Are they browsers or detail diggers? Are they seasoned executives who are comfortable making decisions based on industry trends - or do they tend to be new managers looking to make a mark in their organization? Do they come to your site once they're deep into their evaluation - or just looking for potential solutions? Where they fall in this broad spectrum will drive the type of information they deem relevant - and the behaviors they will make as they move through the buying cycle.
Tags: Content Strategy, Information Architecture, Online Marketing, Site Design, User Experience
User experience and usability are concepts that can have different definitions and understanding depending on who you talk to. Some users may consider a good user experience one where they can get the information they need using the least amount of clicks; others may consider a good user experience generous use of imagery, a specific use of color or the visual appeal overall. In many cases, people inter-connect the concept of Visual Design and Great User Experience.
Tags: Information Architecture, Site Design, User Experience
Usability testing has become a standard practice when designing a website, but what about the experience you are designing for your content authors? Aside from the obvious benefit of creating a more usable solution, some simple usability testing allows you to engage your potential users early – increasing the buy in and adoption down the road.
Tags: Content Authoring, UI, User Experience
When we think about User Experience, we typically focus on End-Users. We think about better navigation modeling, improved SEO, simplifying clicks and clear messaging. And, yes, these are all very important elements of a successful site. After all, we need customers to visit and return to our sites.
But there is another user that is too often overlooked – the CMS User. This user, when frustrated, can turn a seemingly positive CMS deployment in to an unnecessarily negative dialogue about the capabilities of the CMS tool and the CMS developer. When happy, this user can be a most insightful partner and advocate for both CMS tool and developer.
Tags: Content Strategy, User Experience
Adoption is key to success: a website that combines ease of use with a unique experience gives visitors a reason to come back and learn more about what you and your organization have to offer.
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