design

It takes a village to build a world-changing social media presence

Building your social media team

Your social media team

Social media can help to engage customers, build brand, raise public awareness or support internal collaboration. Precisely because of its breadth of impact, it's not obvious where it fits in an org chart: In marketing or public relations? Communications or customer care? I.T. or H.R.?

Developing an effective social media team requires more than finding the right box on the org chart or figuring out where that community moderator should sit. It's about identifying the goals for your social media program, the competencies needed for successful execution, and the gaps you need to fill.

read full article

Hear how art and tech combine for social change

Designing for Democracy: Thursday, March 5 in Vancouver

Frequent collaborator and Friend Of the Show Jason Mogus tells us about a fantastic-sounding event this Thursday, March 5 in Vancouver. Alex met the keynote speaker, Favianna Rodriguez, at Web of Change last year and was blown away; this is your chance to experience something amazing.

Here's the scoop, directly from Jason:

read full article

It's lonely at the top

Google Reader, our newsreader of choice here at Social Signal (hunter-destroyer droids constantly prowl the premises, looking for holdouts still using Bloglines... there's one now! KABOOM!)...

...anyway, Google Reader has launched a redesign. It's crisper, cleaner, simpler and faster.

But apparently, there's a downside: you'll have a lot fewer friends.

read full article

Design and development

We draw on our international network of world-class design and development partners, all of whom specialize in social web projects, to deliver compelling community platforms for thriving conversation.

read full article

Target V.P. Michael Axelin on the seven components of successful innovation

Tonight's symposium featured Michael Alexin, Oberlin College class of '79, V.P. of Softlines Design and Product Development at Target. Yes, this is the man responsible for keeping me clothed during my last pregnancy, and even tougher, the post-pregnancy pre-weight loss months.

read full article

Usability tip: "cancel" isn't the same as "no"

Warning: a pet peeve follows. 

Way, way too many programmers are in love with the words "OK" and "cancel", as in the dialog box "You are about to format your hard drive and set fire to your house. [OK] [Cancel]."

Originally, it made sense: this was your chance to either proceed with an operation or cancel it altogether. But those words have become synonyms for "yes" and "no", and that's a problem.

Take this example:

Do you want [deleted] to remember the username?'

(I've blocked out the name of the offending Firefox extension because, well, why single them out when there are so many other offenders?)

This box popped up while I was trying to register a domain name. It was asking me a question: did I want something to happen? And the logical answers are either "yes", "no" or (and this is asking too much from most apps) "I'm not sure; tell me more".

But "cancel"? That could mean anything from "cancel saving the username" to "cancel submitting the form" to "Stop the Internet: I want off." A few seconds of reflection later, and the likely meaning is clear... but as Steve Krug pointed out so famously, making users think (at least about interface choices) isn't a friendly thing to do.

There are still times when "OK" and "Cancel" make sense; I don't suggest jilting them altogether. But when you're asking a yes/no question, what possible reason could you have for not offering users the ability to give a yes/no answer?

read full article

That's how I want to go

(Old web developer at a desk) Old web developers don't die. They degrade gracefully.

read full article

Cartoon: Primary colours

(One child pointing to her shoes) Do you like them? They’re Pantone 254.

read full article

MacBook with tag cloud

 

This week's tagging project: a MacBook cover that displays my del.icio.us tag cloud, thanks to the folks at Pimp My Laptop.

Here's how I did it:

  1. I used the del.icio.us tagroll feature to customize the look of my tag cloud and make sure it included all my tags ("size" controls how many tags display; max/min font controls the size of the individual tags).
  2. I hooked my laptop up to a huge external monitor so I could make the tagroll display big enough to create a screen capture that was high enough resolution to print out clearly.
  3. We took screen captures in chunks (Rob figured out the necessary size to display by working backwards from the Pimp My Laptop specs) so that they'd be even higher res.
  4. We stitched it back together in PhotoShop until we had an image of the size specified by Pimp My Laptop.

Ta da! I'm now wearing my tag cloud on my (laptop) sleeve. 

read full article
Bookmark and Share