Are you wondering where I have been hiding? Me too!
I had some technical difficulties because my website got hacked. And because the main website was hacked, I lost access to my blog.
The good news is that I am up and running again… for now! The bad news is I lost all of the images that accompanied my blog posts. I am slowly trying to restore most of them. But some may never be replaced.
Never the less I learned a few valuable lessons from this experience:
Back up your files. Sure I tend to think I save often. But backing up your files is just as important. And I really neglected to back things up.
Know a great developer. My good friend Anita Cheng cleaned up my files an got me up and running again. I would not have a website again if not for her.
Did I mention to back up your files?
Thanks for your patience. I will post more UX-related stuff soon.
As my project with Wingspan Arts comes to a close, I am pleased to share the results of my Website Audit.
What did I do? I volunteered to perform a Website Audit through Catchafire. For those who don’t know, Catchafire is a website that allows professionals to give back to the community. The professional who volunteers will use his/her skills, be that UX Design, Web development, Graphic design, Marketing and other creative fields. They are providing their exercise to an organization that needs help, and saves that organization sums of money.
What is in a website Audit? A Website Audit report that includes:
Outline of Organization’s goals for the website
Feedback on current website’s layout, user functionality, visual design, content and other features
Recommendations for improvements to help achieve Organization’s desired goals
After I completed the project, I got a wonderful and very lovely review from Rachel, who was my parter in this projects and the representative for Wingspan Arts.
My professional review from Wingspan Arts after completing the Catchafire project.
Surveys (interviews) with stakeholders and users (parents)
Userflow
User goals
Competitive benchmarking
Content audit and text review
Design analysis and consistency
Social media presence and activity
Strengths and weaknesses of the site
Information architecture and proposal of new taxonomy (navigation)
Footer proposal
Recommendations for improvements
Wireframes (to share with the developer)
What I gained from the project
Pride in helping a community center in need
Exercising professional “muscles” that I don’t get to “flex” on a regular basis at my current job
Learned more about my UX process
Working remotely and coordinating meeting and data
Synthesizing survey results
Content analysis of the current websites (yes they have 2!)
Creating a full report summarizing all findings and recommendations
Feelings of accomplishment that I hoped someone else out, and used my professional skills to do so.
I encourage you to check out Catchafire as well and volunteer your time. They have opportunities that can take as little as an hour, or as much as a few weeks.
Here are the six characteristics of high-converting CTA buttons.
They are buttons. Save your creativity for another occupation, like writing novels. Button up.
They have compelling copy. Use verbs. And please, for the lost love of conversions, don’t use the word “submit.”
They have logical placement. Eyes move in paths, not jumps. Put it where it will be seen.
They use a contrasting color. Although I don’t advance the idea of toying with shades of gray or blue, or green, I happen to know that buttons with color contrast convert better.
They have close proximity to the previous action. The mind and the pointer have a symbiotic relationship. Your CTA becomes part of that symbiosis as it moves directly into the cognitive and visual flow of the user.
They don’t compete with other crap. If you want to purposely lose conversions by crowding out your CTA, go ahead. I, for one, advance the idea that the CTA should be king of the page.
More on the six characteristics of high-converting CTA buttons.
As a UX Visual Designer at mylife.com, I design simple and innovative solutions to complex User Interface problems. Create multiple iterations and concepts for the final online product for desktop and responsive mobile formats. Actively participate in a fully integrated agile/scrum team with product managers, developers, engineers, QA and others. Recommend and implement copy and design changes to improve customer conversion and engagement.
Coming up with great content can be really tough sometimes. It is hard to figure out what you want to say. I know that I struggle with that when I am developing blog posts. Normally I report on things that I am working on. Or I share graphics that I find interesting. This is one of those such graphics.
After sketching a few ideas, one can take these rough sketches to the next level with wireframes. This is a great way to explore more ideas, yet not commit yourself to a high-fidelity design. I created this wireframe in Adobe InDesign because that program is quick and easy to use (for me) and has all the functionality one needs to create a wireframe.
Wireframes are a good middle step between touch sketched and a high-fidelity mock up.
Is your company thinking of updating their website and you need to figure out what content already exists on your site?
AND what new content they want to include?
AND what old content should be carried over in to the new site?
Then is sounds like you need to do a content audit.
What is a content audit?
According to Wikipediaa content audit is the process of evaluating content elements and information assets on some part or all of a website.
In a related term, content inventory, is a quantitative analysis of a website. It simply logs what is on a website. A content inventory will answer the question: “What is there?” and can be the start of a website review. A content audit will answer the question: “Is it any good?”
Specifically, Slater states that the content audit can answer five questions:
What content do we already have?
Who is making this content?
How do people find it?
How is it performing?
Is the content current (accurate) or outdated?
I came across a great, and very in-depth resource to assist you with your content analysis. On The Moz Blog there’s a great article called “How To Do a Content Audit – Step-by-Step” and it chock full of great resources to help you get started.
Here is a breakdown of some of the topics covered:
A step-by-step example of our process
Step 1: Assess the situation and choose a scenario
Step 2: Scan the site
Step 3: Import the URLs and start the tool
Step 4: Import the tool output into the dashboard
Step 5: Import GWT data
Step 6: Perform keyword research
Step 7: Tying the keyword data together
Step 8: Time to analyze and make some decisions!
Step 9: Content gap analysis and other value-adds
Step 10: Writing up the content audit strategy document
Collaboration is truly valuable. I revisited the truth in that statement this week while working on the CoCo website redesign project I am involved in.
The task at hand was to get the website organized so that I could start thinking about new design possibilities for the site. But before I could do that, I had to have a clean and organized Information Architecture structure to work with. Sadly, the stakeholders did not understand the importance of not only doing a content analysis of the current site, but thinking about where they wanted the site to go. I understand it is very difficult for non design and web people to see the potential that change can bring. So I don’t blame them at all for not having the forsight to dream about the site’s potential. But if they could not do it, we had to.
So my fabulous content manager Wendy and I worked one evening to really get a site map organized. We talked about how the site exists now. We discussed the ways they organization wanted to change and the new features they wanted to include. And we debated what the navigation terms would be used.
It was a great collaboration and it was so helpful to have someone to hash out this process with. So in the case of working on a complicated process, like creating an organized and cohesive site map, two heads are better than one.
As part of my Community Coalition of South LA Taproot project, or better knows as CoCo I am working on some deliverables to accompany the project. Based on one of the stakeholder interviews I performed this week, and other resources provided by the organization, I came up with this fabulous Shelia Persona.
The wonderful Strategic Projects team of UXPALA (User Experience Professionals Association of Los Angeles) spent a good part of Sunday afternoon working on the “not quite ready for primetime” uxpala.org website. Though it is still in it’s very early stages, the team came together to get a lot of work accomplished. We have to pull information form the already existing meetup website, plus create new content that must also be included on our formal website. All if this while working with the Information Architecture and structure of the site. Though there is yet a lot of work to be done, we made some great headway.
The UXPALA.org website is a work in progress, but it is certainly coming along after a long afternoon of work from the Strategic Projects team.
As part of my class project, I also had to create a wireframe for a desktop version. Though my concept really focuses on just the mobile app, I was tasked with creating a computer version that would promote the app. Below is the wireframe for this desktop website that would be promotion the app and leading viewers on where they could download the app.
Hollywood Walking Tour App Desktop ad website
Jennifer Blatz explores the world of UX through words and imagery
