Fit and Finish: Insight from the Ironworks User Experience Group

Ensuring Equal Web Accessibility for All Is Our Specialty

2012-05-22T13:02:22-04:00

Americans are more reliant than ever on the Internet as their primary source of critical information and communication. When disaster strikes, news happens or inclement weather is on the horizon, the quickest access to the most information is just a mouse click (or finger tap) away. Thanks to a 1998 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, millions of Americans with disabilities will always have equal access to digital information when they need it most. Section 508 mandates that ...

Getting Smarter About Brainstorming: This Month from the Idea Forge

2012-05-16T12:17:57-04:00

Discover How the Gamestorming Technique Adds Structure and Fun to the Ideation Process Are your team Brainstorms suffering from idea drought? In our latest Idea Forge, we take a look at some of the practical implications of Gamestorming – a technique that ups the ante for the process of generating big ideas. We caught up with UX Architect Larry King at a workshop where he explained this technique and how he’s used it in the field. Watch to see how Gamestorming harnesses the power of Structured Play and learning theories like Distributed Cognition to help you seek out unexpected solutions...

Introducing Idea Forge

2012-03-14T09:16:11-04:00

This is the first in a series where we discuss practical applications of big ideas in user experience design. In this episode we share a few thoughts on Findability. You may be asking yourself what this means to me? Watch our video and find out!

Celebrating Social Media Week!

2012-02-17T17:00:24-05:00

With Social Media Week 2012 coming to a close we like to share a few thoughts on how we’re shaping our digital strategies today! We’ve addressed social media on Fit and Finish before but for this post we want to share three focal points to identify before putting together a digital strategy. 1- Know your audience: Who is your audience? What hours of the day do you have their attention? What actions do they commonly take (retweeting, clicking links, commenting, asking questions, etc)? Which instances are they comfortable taking action? We can start by examining your site’s analytics. We want...

The Power of Advanced Segments

2012-02-13T11:22:37-05:00

Advanced segments are one of my favorite features of Google Analytics. They are a powerful tool for slicing, dicing, and analyzing specific segments of your traffic that help you to better understand WHO your customers are and WHAT they are looking for on your website. What are advanced segments? Advanced Segments allow you to isolate and analyze specific kinds of traffic. One of the most powerful features of Google Analytics for analyzing website traffic Marketers spend a ton of time and money conducting research to understand who their audiences are and their behavior patterns. Just like traditional marketing, the same...

A Few SEO Predictions for 2012

2012-01-05T12:54:42-05:00

Google was in the news a lot last year. From Panda to Google+, I think we can come up with some reasonable predictions for the upcoming year. Let’s go out on that limb, shall we? It’s 2012 and time to jump on that “what could happen next in SEO” bandwagon. Increased Scrutiny of the Link Graph Google’s Panda updates and subsequent assault on content farms points to an increased focus on quality. There’s no reason to believe that this wouldn’t apply to your link profile. Yes of course, to some degree the search engines have been doing this for years....

When to Use rel=”next”, rel=”prev” and Canonical Tags for Pagination

2011-12-29T09:17:31-05:00

By now, we should all be aware of the canonical tag and how it gets used to help prevent duplicate content issues. For example, you might have URLs like this: Domain.com/article-name?sessionid=123456 The canonical tag would read something like this: Let’s say you had a site selling various kinds of widgets. Your initial widget category page URLs might look something like this: Domain.com/widgets Domain.com/widgets?page=2 Domain.com/widgets?page=3 In an effort to avoid the appearance of duplicate content on the subsequent results pages, many webmasters have placed this tag on the “page=n” results pages: The idea...

Domain and Brand Authority – Earning Trust from the Search Engines

2011-12-02T11:21:40-05:00

2011 has seen one of the more significant updates to Google’s search algorithm in recent history. One key goal of Google’s on-going “Panda” update is to clean up its index and devalue sites that seemed untrustworthy or were just plain-old content farms that offered very little value to visitors. Removing or devaluing these sites, in theory, makes Google a better search engine by offering up higher-quality websites more often to its users. Google has done this, partly, by promoting a concept that can be called “brand authority” or “domain authority.” Essentially, they want to answer a query with the most...

The Last Post About Social Media You’ll Ever Have to Read, Ever

2011-08-16T19:06:35-04:00

Or Why Still No One Is Reading Your Tweets About Grape Jelly A classmate from grad school recently shared a link to the page below with the caption “Saddest Twitter page ever.” The concept was a Twitter feed from Smuckers Jam, which pointed only to the obvious conclusion, that no one wants to read a Twitter feed from Smuckers Jam. Or do they. For those of us who work with clients everyday creating digital strategies, one of the most oft' heard questions--and one asked with the most trepidation--is “what should we be doing for social media?” At best, this is...

Scrollbars and Swipe Gestures in Mac OS X Lion

2011-07-21T14:43:00-04:00

I use both an iPad and a MacBook Pro on a regular basis, and I have always found scrolling pages using finger gestures a bit awkward when switching between the two devices. On an iPad you are directly manipulating the page on the device’s touch screen, so it only makes sense that the page moves in the same direction as the movement of your fingers. The opposite is true when scrolling a document using a Mac multi-touch track pad. If you do a two-finger swipe down, the document moves up. This becomes confusing when rapidly switching between the two devices....