Baltimore, MD / April 3 – 7, 2013 The IA Summit is an annual conference that brings information architects and user experience practitioners together to collaborate and build new skill sets in this ever-evolving field. This year the conference was held in Baltimore, Maryland where Nicole, Mike, and I attended four busy days of workshops, talks, and networking events.
In recent years, the health insurance sector has increasingly reached out to consumers through mobile and social channels. However, despite this proliferation of online services, the health sector has been slow to optimize their brand pages for mobile through responsive web design.
As seen in Part I of this series, Web Content Writing Part I – Basic Survival Skills, our readers’ brains are in survival mode—trying to forage through the streams of content coming at them to find what is valuable. We, as writers, can do a lot to help them by writing in clear, plain language. In other words, by Just Saying It.
Teladoc and Beth Israel have partnered to bring a new telehealth product to New York, connecting residents remotely with health care providers. Cloudberry worked with the two brands to form the new campaign, creating a page that is easy to navigate and which acquaints new users with the potential benefits of telemedicine as well as a range of integrated marketing materials (e.g. subway ads, print ads, mailers, banner ads).
Cloudberry had the pleasure of hosting our second annual World Usability Day event on November 8, 2012. World Usability Day (WUD) is an annual collection of events held worldwide, where professionals gather to discuss the creation of user-friendly products and services.
Until recently, Flash was the go-to program to create an interactive experience. While it was never the only program of its kind, it was loved by designers for being intuitive and simple for creating animations and multimedia experiences. In addition, Flash could deliver this material at low bandwidth and allowed for the delivery of audio and video across platforms using a common format.
Your readers’ brains are in survival mode—surrounded by a culture where short formats are the norm and content is coming at them from every corner—overflowing Google Readers, text alerts, email to check, streams of updates on Twitter and Facebook in the corners of their screens, and the ever-bouncing IM.
The U.S. Treasury Department awarded Cloudberry experience architect Nicole Kendrot the grand prize in its 2012 MyMoneyAppUp competition. The competition required innovators to submit mobile app design concepts to help Americans make good financial choices and shape their financial futures. Nicole’s winning app, Centz, helps students tackle the daunting challenge of managing student loans.
Responsive Web Design has been embraced by content-focused verticals. However, other industries, such as financial services, are slow to jump in. After coming across this post on Design Daily listing well-done responsive sites, I searched for examples of responsive sites within the financial services vertical.
Every mobile user has been there—trying to look up a piece of information only to be confronted with terrible usability (a tiny page, minuscule font, or graphics that never load). As smartphones and tablets become more mainstream, users and businesses alike stand to benefit from websites that translate well to mobile.