Apple and Google define what the user experience is right now. Apple is all about simplicity and intuitiveness; Google is all about search and the serendipity that comes from their magical algorithms. Apple’s vision is driven by the singular ego of Steve Jobs and the genius of Jonathan Ive; Google’s by the raw power of the masses of data gathered from all our web searches.

What neither of them do is rely on a design by committee, lowest common denominator, let’s copy what our rival is doing approach. Neither should we.

Steve Mason, Senior Developer and hat wearer

Imagine Olympic 100m champion Usain Bolt winning an egg and spoon race: an expected result but an achievement nonetheless. That’s probably a bit how Senior Developer Steve Mason felt as he got himself certified as an EPiServer CMS developer.

Around the Cubeworks office Steve is known as ‘The Legend’ because of his vast knowledge and lightning speed in all things coding. Steve has already played a big part in developing EPiServer sites for Chichester College and Sanyo, so we felt confident he’d ace the test. And he did! Good to get the certificate up on the wall, especially as Cubeworks does more EPiServer sites for clients.

Steve is now in intensive training for the three-legged race.

Six by Tc7

For the uninitiated, Aggers is the nickname of Jonathan Agnew, a stalwart of Test Match Special on the Beeb. As a lover of test cricket and a long-suffering England fan, I have been enjoying following Aggers on Twitter (@aggerscricket) during the current winter series in South Africa. Not only does he keep me updated on the score, but he knows how to banter – a fine twitterer if ever there was one.

But what I particularly like is the instantaneousness that Twitter gives you of something you can’t get elsewhere. Take an Aggers tweet from this morning:

Strauss press conference. “Test won’t last 5 days” http://twitpic.com/xwfkg

Here we have it, the thoughts of the England captain and a photo from the press conference, published ahead of its appearance in other media, even in the age of 24 hour news.

What strikes me most is not necessarily the real-time news itself, but my emotion as a Twitter follower. Coming direct from the horse’s mouth, this snippet of action feels like a real exclusive. It reminds me of the feeling of discovering the debut track of a great new band that your mates haven’t heard of – well, I used to know that feeling before I entered my 30s, had a kid and lost the ounce of credibility I had, but you know what I mean! When you stop and rationalise it, it’s not that amazing, but that’s the point.

Wouldn’t it be powerful if your organisation could harness that emotion to make your users take action for the good, make a charitable donation or, for the more commercially-minded, make an impulse purchase?

Google’s Chinese operations started in 2006, with the creation of google.cn. There was an almost immediate uproar when the company admitted that it was going to filter search results through the Chinese site to censor results to comply with Chinese authorities. Google issued the following statement to clarify their position:

“While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission,”

So what’s changed? To me it seems a shame that the Chinese people could potentially be denied such an incredibly powerful tool. It would seem that Google have contradicted their previous statement with this action, although it seems that the new stance is much more popular. From a company who’s well-publicised motto is Don’t Be Evil I can’t help but think that this is self-preservation masquerading as a stance against a publicly-maligned adversary.

Of course, others have their own opinion. What’s yours? What do you think Google’s motivation is? Is this the end of Google in China? Where is this heading?

Psychedelia Reloaded

This is evolving out of the recent trend of using the full gamut of rainbow colours on black or white. I call it ‘reloaded’ because this trend is able to cherry-pick the best bits of 60s psychedelia while leaving the cheese in the past where it belongs.

• 60s psychedelia in popular culture is a bountiful resource for inpiring a new wave of web design in colour, shape
• Intricately coloured backgrounds with a busy, hand-drawn feel
• Digital artworking brings a modern, sharply ‘in focus’ take on the original hand-drawn approach
• Bright and often challenging colour combinations, and type design reminiscent of old album covers

Magazine layouts

There has always been a lingering desire for web content to look like a glossy print magazine. In the past, this was achieved through Flash – the end result often being small fonts and poor usability. Designers are more able than ever to do this properly – keeping the markup semantic and accessible, while progressively enhancing page content through rich scripting libraries like JQuery.

• Higher-than-ever screen resolutions allow more content to be seen at once. This puts an extra burden on the visual hierarchy, encouraging effective heading size and design
• Grid-based layouts
• A baseline grid for a layout with a polished, typeset feel
• Accessible font replacement technology e.g. sIFR or Cufon
• Big banners and illustrations, diagrams or infographics
• Big fonts

Web 2.0 (still)

This style doesn’t seem to be running out of steam. This is likely due to how effective it has been at becoming a design movement rather than just a visual layer placed over old content. It’s no longer just a glossy button, rounded sans fonts and the odd grid-breaking badge. It’s more about realising the screen as a viable medium:

• Horizontal bands of content are an effective way of sectioning pages.
• A proper hierarchy of information on the page encourages larger headings and body text of a decent, readable size.
• White space is used to enhance the clarity and message of the page. It doesn’t ALL have to be above the fold.
• Big buttons and clear calls to action are the order of the day, a sign that pages are built on the solid foundation of understanding their users’ goals.
• Standards compliance, accessibility and semantic markup are very compatible with Web 2.0 design. These are often equal passions.

Eco design

This is a trend that has been growing with the resurgence of environmental responsibility we’ve seen in the last few years. It will manifest itself in small ‘nature’ touches and flourishes at first, like those blue sky gradients and seamless grass backgrounds we’ve seen in recent years. These are popular with clients because they carry a feelgood factor.

• Natural elements of decoration rather than pattern
• Use of natural textures including recycled card and paper
• Green, Brown and Orange are starting to be the usual suspects
• Marker fonts and handwritten notes
• Cute, flat-shaded vector illustration

Any more?

If you’ve spotted any other emerging styles I’d love to know about it in the comments.

Paging

Paging is the traditional solution for dealing with a large amount of data – the data is split up into manageable chunks, then the user is given links to navigate back and forth through each “page”. Google search results are an example of this that most people will have experienced. The main disadvantage with paging is that is breaks the data up – if we wanted to display a table of data such as a school league table, it would be a bad user experience to have to jump back and forth in order to compare data in different pages.

Batched Scrolling

Batched scrolling is a fairly new technique, a prominent example of which is on Twitter. What I really like about Twitter’s technique is that a manageable amount of tweets are displayed to you initially, at the bottom of which is a “more” button to add more tweets to the list. Each “batch” can be loaded in quickly, and it’s easy to scroll up and down – perfect if you’re trying to follow a discussion that in a traditional paging model would appear spread over several pages. Control is firmly placed in your hands, with Twitter effectively saying “Here’s some tweets to read, but we’ve got more if you want them”.

Infinite Scrolling

Microsoft’s Bing search engine has taken the concept of batched scrolling a step further – all the data is still presented on one page, but rather than waiting for you to click a button to indicate that you want more search results, the Bing site waits for you to scroll to near the bottom of the list and then dynamically fetches more results, effectively allowing you to scroll indefinitely.

It’s an odd experience at first, especially for those of us used to gauging the length of a page by glancing at the scrollbar, but I’ve grown to quite like the concept over time. I’m still unconvinced by its necessity for search engine results, as the relevance of results generally decreases the further down the list you travel. Google Reader, however, uses this techique brilliantly: if you click the “all items” view you can scroll all the way through all of your unread RSS items. I think that this is ideal as all the items in this list are relevant, and generally I’ll want to see them all at some point.

I’d love to hear what you think about these new techniques in the comments.

The Twitter fail whale by Viying Lu

What has an unsuccessful whale got to do with your business? I’ll explain by the end of this post – all you need to know for now is that you definitely don’t want to be one. Easier said than done though because Twitter, like most social media sites, contains many pitfalls for an unsuspecting organisations to fall into. So to help you out here are our top five things NOT to do on Twitter.

1. Don’t start tweeting without a strategy

It’s surprisingly easy to damage your brand in just 140 characters. Start tweeting without having a plan about who in your business will be tweeting, to which people, and about what will make your company look amateur and confuse the image of your brand. One of the worst reasons you can start tweeting or is “because everyone else is doing it.”  So to help you avoid the temptation to getting going without a strategy, here are some ideas that may suit your business:

• Customer service – Twitter gives your business the opportunity to demonstrate how helpful you are, whether it’s openly and honestly dealing with a complaint, or responding to questions.  @WholeFoods do this very well.
• Build brand credibility – Share and link to interesting comments and thoughts that are relevant to your industry.  Post questions and encourage participation from your followers.
• Voucher codes – @Delloutlet has generated $3m in additional sales in the last two years by releasing exclusive voucher codes to their Twitter followers.

2. Don’t post news, PR….and nothing else

Yawn.  You have a news or press release section on your website for this, and it’s probably the least viewed section of your site.  There is a reason for that. Twitter belongs in the family of social media, of conversations and interacting with people.  It is not solely about pushing the message of how wonderful you are, no one will be listening and you’ll lose followers very quickly.  It’s OK to post the odd bit of news and self-promotion in between all the useful stuff, whether that’s tutorials, fun competitions and interesting links like @Mailchimp who get the balance of self-promotion just right.

3. Don’t just autotweet

Because at best, you’ll look like you don’t care. At worst you will make your business look like a spambot (that’s a robot that spams people). Very, very rarely autoresponders can work. I recommend any business tempted by automating anything on Twitter to read Econsultancy’s Twitter DM autoresponders: 15 tips and 40 + examples. Hint: because it frees up your time is not a good enough reason by itself.

4. Avoid the growing list of #tag FAILS

Hashtags are a way to tag your tweet with a particular trending topic so that they can be easily searched and found.  You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol e.g. #welovetheNHS Some businesses have harnessed the #tag to great effect.  The #moonfruit campaign was the most popular trending topic on Twitter during the 10 days it was live. However, here are two tales to act as a word of caution:

Starbucks: it’s all about timing

Starbucks created a marketing campaign which seemed to have everything going for it – a major national offline-online operation involving six major US cities each with their dedicated #tag.  Unfortunately, the campaign went live at exactly the same time an anti-Starbucks documentary aired on YouTube, meaning all the negative buzz surround Starbucks had a new platform to be heard.  Oops.

Habitat: an opportunity too good to miss?

Looking opportunistic and in bad taste is definitely not something a brand aims for.  However, when Habitat piggybacked on the massive amount on attention the Iranian protests received in June this year by using #Iran and #Mousavi in their promotional tweets, the company received an enormous backlash. Habitat is a household brand and should have known better.  This is really a cautionary tale that shows the importance of having internal guidelines on how an employee (or an intern in Habitat’s case… allegedly) should use Twitter, and ensuring your company has a plan of action if something does go wrong.

5. Don’t forget to listen

Twitter is conversation, not broadcast. Imagine how frustrating it is having a conversation with someone who won’t listen when you speak. Do not let your business become that person. Ways you can practise listening include:

• Re-tweet anything you find interesting (prefix your tweet with ‘RT’ and the Twitter user’s @name).
• Keep an eye out for mentions of your brand by using Twitter’s search facility.  Where appropriate answer questions and thank users if you receive praise.
• Post questions in-between everything else you tweet about.  Be sure to answer any replies you receive.

And the fail whale? It’s a much-loved Twitter error message, appearing during the service’s frequent crashes as it struggled with its growing popularity in the early days. You still don’t want to be one.

Have you seen any examples of Twitter use you’d like to share?

Photo by Espen Klum

Google Caffeine, the worst kept “top secret” project of 2009 is ready for roll out early next year.  After a flurry of speculation caused by the beta version disappearing, Google blogger Matt Cutts confirmed the news that one of your New Year’s resolutions is going to be “check my position in the Google rankings”. For now though, we wait.

But what are we waiting for, exactly?

On the surface, Google search won’t look too different. Video and news results will appear half way down the first page instead of at the top, which is hardly revolutionary. Instead, Google have focused their efforts on what happens behind the scenes, in the elusive indexing algorithm that determines the fate of your website in the natural search rankings.

It’s difficult to tell you exactly what the impact of Google Caffeine is going to be until it goes live, but there are some clues out there which indicate how our current non-caffeinated search is going to improve.  Mashable conducted a detailed comparison of Google Caffeine back in August explaining the difference in old search vs. the new release, and in summary we should expect Google to:

• Be faster
• Give more relevance to keywords than before
• Increase the size of search results

There is also evidence to suggest results from social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been given a boost, with Caffeine able to produce searches of real-time content like status updates and tweets.  This means social media and search just got cosier.

What now for your search marketing plans?

In the short-term, it seems Google Caffeine is going to provide some subtle improvements to the mechanics behind Google search without impacting your search ranking in a significant way – for now.  However, once released we recommend checking the impact on your key landing pages to ensure you have not dropped in rankings in a significant way.

In the long-term search engine optimisation just got trickier.  The results of various studies into Google Caffeine have all found relevance of content being more important than ever before.  Glossing over keyword research in the future will put you at a serious disadvantage if you want to compete for popular phrases.  For people who have dismissed social media’s ability to provide ROI, Google Caffeine is an interesting development.  Search marketing and social media are set to become the best of friends. Now is the time to start thinking about your social media strategy if you haven’t already.

If you have any questions or thoughts on the impact of Google Caffeine we’d love to hear your comments below.

What is the page fold?

The page fold is the point below which you need to scroll in order to see more of a page when it loads up. Imagine the physical fold in a newspaper when it’s still in the rack – that’s where the name comes from. Unlike a newspaper however, the fold on a web page will appear in different places because different people have different screen resolutions.

Should you be worried about content below the fold?

The fold is less of an issue than it was in the web’s nascency because web-literacy has increased. In a recent blog post, The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing, usability experts CX Partners show how people now use scrollbars to gauge the length of a page, and point to various popular websites to demonstrate how their designs give the fold less priority.

The  fold is still important however: to revisit the newspaper metaphor, this is normally the best place to put your headline (prioritised) content. So, instead of trying to cram everything in above the fold give your priority content room to breathe. You’ll get better click throughs because it will stand out more.

Is the fold affecting visitors to your site?

At Cubeworks we can do various things to help you determine the influence of the fold on visitors to your site. For example, we can track where users click on your page and correlate this with screen resolution data to determine whether there is an issue. We can then advise on design changes to alleviate the problem.

I hope that this article has been of use to you in understanding what the page fold is, and how it may affect your site. If you’ve got any questions then I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Zendesk's happy Buddah logo

The Cubeworks helpdesk service has always had very high client satisfaction levels. I used to work on a helpdesk for a software company about 10 years ago so I know how crucial it is to provide great support. Clients only tend to get in touch when they really need support – it’s not often they phone up the support team for a chat (though they’re most welcome to). I take great satisfaction that we’re good at providing support and it’s important to me that we can maintain this level of service as the company grows.

Increasing demands

In the past two years, the number of support tickets we handle has increased by over 200% due to the number of new projects we’ve taken on. Our development team – who deliver our helpdesk service – has  also increased from four people to eight. Unfortunately, under the increased load, our systems and processes have occasionally creaked at the seams. So it was time to think at how we could improve things.

Enter Zendesk.

Zendesk to the rescue

Zendesk is a web-based helpdesk service that receives incoming emails and automatically creates support tickets. That’s just the beginning though. The real advantage is that we can set all sorts of SLA targets and escalation routes behind the scenes to make sure that tickets are resolved promptly and the fiddly ones are escalated as soon as possible. Within a matter of weeks, it’s already noticeable how our service has stepped up a gear. Issues are being resolved even quicker, tricky issues are being escalated and clients are providing feedback more quickly.

Zen(desk)-like calm

I love Zendesk. A lot.

It has improved our customer service better, it has reduced the time we spend on support and, as a result, it gives me a lovely calm feeling. Just in case we’re not all calm enough though, we can always tune it to Zendesk’s very own Budda Machine Wall. And relax…