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Exciting New Tools For Designers, October 2021

There are some spook-tacular finds in this month’s October collection of resources and tools for designers and developers. From interesting tools that can help in the design process to boo-tiful typefaces, there’s something for everyone here.

Here’s what is new for designers this month…

Atropos

Atropos is a lightweight, open-source JavaScript library to create touch-friendly, three-dimensional hover effects. The results are stunning and have a nice parallax style. Everything is highly configurable and customizable. It’s available for JavaScript, React, and Vue.js and has zero dependencies.

CSS Gradient Editor

CSS Gradient Editor helps you create the perfect gradient style – you can start from presets – that you can use in projects. Design a background, fill, or almost any other gradient element you might need, make adjustments or customizations, and then get the CSS with one click so you can use it right away.

Octopus.do

Octopus.do is a fast visual sitemap builder that lets you work in real-time using the content brick method. Share and collaborate in real-time and there’s no signup required to use it.

Pirsch Analytics

Pirsch Analytics is a privacy-friendly, open-source alternative to Google Analytics — lightweight, cookie-free, and easily integrated into any website or directly into your backend. It includes filters to see metrics in the way you want and light and dark modes.

Basic Pattern Repository

Basic Pattern Repository is a collection of simple SVG patterns for projects. Everything is rooted in a simple style to help push projects along quicker. You can get it via GitHub or as a Figma Library.

Blobr

Blobr is a way to get a branded API portal, manage access, and monitor usage all in one place. Customize everything to fit your brand and the tool grows as you do with the ability to increase or change capacity. Plus, it is easy to set up and free to use.

HEXplorer

HEXplorer helps you better understand something you use all the time – HEX colors. This pen by Rob DiMarzo shows how the values for different colors come together to provide greater comprehension when it comes to this color format.

CCCreate

CCCreate is a curated collection of tools and resources for web creators. It includes some tools that have been around for a while as well as some newbies. Everything is grouped and sorted by type of resources – color, icons, type, layouts, animation, shapes, docs, and miscellaneous so you can find what you are looking for faster.

Glass

Glass is a photo-sharing app for photographers. It’s a social network of sorts that lets you share images with the greater photography community without “likes.” Just great images.

Revolt

Revolt is a chat app that’s still in beta and designed for easy communication without having to download apps. It’s an open-source project that is customizable and with an intuitive and recognizable interface. The thing that’s different about this app is that it is built on a privacy-first model.

Doodle Ipsum

Doodle Ipsum is the illustrated version of placeholder elements. Customize your doodles, grab the code, and use them on your web prototypes, landing pages, or no-code tools.

Mechanic

Mechanic is an open-source framework that helps you create custom, web-based tools that export design assets in your browser. The best part is you can try it right on screen using the “poster generator.” If you like what you see, there’s plenty of documentation to help you along the way.

Medio Website Template

Medio is an agency-style website design template for Bootstrap 5. The layout is perfect for a design agency or marketing group but can be adjusted for almost any multi-purpose design. The free template includes a minimal design and includes features such as parallax, popup video, and more.

Tutorial: Simplifying Form Styles with Accent Color

This tutorial is a life-saver when it comes to using and understanding the new CSS accent-color property. This quick lesson will help make your life easier and is simple to use. It starts with setting an accent-color property on the root element and then applying it.

Houdini.how

Houdini.how is a worklet library that is full of CSS and code examples to help you work smarter. See how different elements look cross-browser and learn to adjust the code and put them together in just the way you want. Houdini is a set of low-level APIs that exposes parts of the CSS engine, giving developers the power to extend CSS by hooking into the styling and layout process of a browser’s rendering engine.

Chainstarters

Chainstarters is a powerful, rapid, Web3-enabled platform for software developers. It eliminates the burden of setting up and maintaining a secure and scalable infrastructure, allowing you to focus on creating amazing technology.

Web Vitals Robot

Web Vitals Robot is a search optimization tool that monitors SEO metrics for you – so you can prevent your business from disappearing from Google.

Searchable

Searchable is a unified search tool that looks at local, cloud storage, and apps to find the files you are looking for. It returns results in a jiffy with previews so you don’t have to open every file to find what you are looking for.

Athlone

Athlone is a fun serif with lots of personality. The free demo version includes a limited character set for personal use only and the full version has everything you need for fun display or branding with this typeface.

Capitana

Capitana is a Geometric Sans typeface with humanistic proportions and open apertures. This means that all shapes are constructed from basic forms, the circle, triangle, and square, and are designed according to the classic proportions of the Roman Antiqua. Distinct ascenders and pointed apexes with deep overshoot give it a cool beauty and classic elegance. It includes 784 characters per style in nine weights from Thin to Black, it offers both light and extremely heavy weights for striking headlines.

Colours

Colours is a funky script with just enough texture to keep it interesting. The free version includes a partial character set and is for personal use only.

Flexible

Flexible is a variable typeface that includes 18 styles in the family. It’s made for creativity and display use. This typeface is made for experimenting because there are so many things you can do with this single family.

Singo Sans Serif

Singo Sans Serif is a simple and strong typeface that would make an excellent display option. The free version is for personal use only. Fun fact: Singo means Lion in Indonesia, which is where the name of this strong font comes from.

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11 octobre 2021/par Service comm.

Improve Performance by Combining Headless CMS with an Image CDN

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The headless CMS trend is gaining traction growing at over 20% annually. The driving force behind the headless CMS trend is developer’s increasing need for flexibility and control. Using the headless CMS’s API, front-end developers can use JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, or Angular to quickly deploy content and designs in various web pages and apps.

Images Are A Crucial Part Of Any Web Experience

A headless CMS holds potentially thousands of images. How quickly images are rendered has a huge impact on user experience. This is why developers and designers need to focus on streamlining how they access, optimize, cache, and deliver images in a performant way.

ImageEngine is an image CDN that provides a simple solution for accelerating performance, and saves you time and delivery costs. With its multiple components and plugins for React, Vue, and Angular, ImageEngine makes it easy for developers to achieve superior image performance scores on tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Plan for Image Performance. It is Worth It

Performance is not always the first thing designers and developers consider when designing a website. But performance has a huge impact on eCommerce sales, conversion rates, and SEO. That’s why setting aside budget and time to solve image performance issues yields substantial benefits.

The most compelling reason to work on image performance is the upside from sales or website conversions. Google estimates that the average website on mobile takes around 9 seconds to load. However, 75% of users will consider abandoning a site that takes over 5 seconds to load.

Companies like Amazon and Walmart have closely scrutinized the relationship between load times and sales conversion rates. For Amazon, they estimate that for every 100 milliseconds they accelerate their site, it increases revenue by 1%. For them, that means millions of dollars. But even if you are a relatively small company, performance boosts sales and pays for the time you put into it.

Images are a big reason why websites load slowly. The average website payload is 2MB in 2021, and 50% of that is images. Frequently, images are larger than they need to be and can be optimized for size with no impact on quality…if you do it right.

However, image optimization can be challenging. Knowing the requesting device screen dimensions, pixel density, ability to handle next-gen image formats becomes very complicated. That is where ImageEngine comes in. It simplifies and offloads all the complexity to an expert image optimization solution.

Performance Drives Google SEO Rankings

Even before users come to your site, performance has a critical impact. You may have heard of Google’s latest Page Experience update to their search engine ranking algorithm. It integrates a new set of performance metrics called Core Web Vitals. These metrics are:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the render time (in seconds) of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport, relative to when the page first started loading. Typically, the largest image is the hero image at the top of pages.

First Input Delay (FID): Measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page (i.e. when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the layout shift that occurs any time a visible element changes its position from one rendered frame to the next.

LCP is an image-centric performance metric. The more optimized your images are (particularly your hero images at the top of a page), the faster your LCP will be.

Why do Core Web Vitals matter? Isn’t SEO ranking all about content relevance, backlinks, and domain authority? Yes, but now performance matters more than it did a year ago. In a market where websites are constantly jockeying to match their competition’s pages (for content relevance, keywords, and other SEO issues), performance is making a difference in keyword search engine rankings.

ImageEngine customers that have optimized their images have improved their Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed Insights scores and seen search ranking improve dramatically. Frequently this means moving onto the first search results page, or even the #1 or #2 spot.

Avoid Code Bloat and Exponential Image Variants from Responsive Images

When they hear “image optimization,” many web designers think of the practice of generating multiple image sizes, multiple file formats (JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF), and massive amounts of code using tags to select appropriate variants. While this approach works, it leaves much to be desired and often yields a sub-standard optimization and a maintenance headache.

That is where the automatic settings of an image CDN like ImageEngine solve yet another problem. ImageEngine detects mobile devices and their image-related parameters, optimizes images for these parameters, and then delivers images through its global CDN. In most cases, the automatic mode of ImageEngine will provide optimization up to 80% on most images, with no perceptible impact on quality.

Combine an Image CDN with your JavaScript Front-End Framework

If you are already using a headless CMS or eCommerce platform, then how can you integrate image optimization into your front-end system?

There are a number of options for integrating ImageEngine. From the headless CMS side, the only thing required is to store high-quality, large images in your CMS. Don’t worry about their size or format in the CMS. ImageEngine will pull the images and perform optimization immediately and tailor them specifically for any requesting device.

Next, you will need to sign up for a free trial from ImageEngine. In the example below, we will address how to configure for Contentful, a popular headless CMS. To set up an ImageEngine account that pulls images from Contentful, all you need to do is to create a user account and set images.ctfassets.net as your image origin. “images.ctfassets.net” is where all images are served from when using Contentful.

At the end of the signup process, you will receive a Delivery Address. You will need to copy this and insert it after installing the ImageEngine component.

For your front end, ImageEngine offers components for many popular JavaScript frameworks.

React: Overview; NPM Package ; Documentation
Angular: Overview; NPM Package ; Documentation
Vue: Overview; NPM Package ; Documentation

For the following example, we will use Contentful CMS with React framework. A full example and explanation can be seen here. Another example can be found here.

Install React NPM Package

First, install the ImageEngine NPM package

npm i @imageengine/react

Integrate ImageEngine Into Your App

We will only be working in “App.js”. Make sure to delete all the code from it.

Import ImageEngine Components

In the “App.js” file, import the necessary components from the ImageEngine NPM package like so:

import { ImageEngineProvider, Image } from "@imageengine/react"

Add the “ImageEngineProvider” component inside your app’s main div. This allows all child components to access images from ImageEngine.

Insert Delivery Address Into ImageEngine Provider

When you sign up for an ImageEngine account, you receive a Delivery Address. You can find it in your ImageEngine dashboard after logging into your account. This Delivery Address is how the component will point to ImageEngine and start optimizing and delivering images. Make sure the origin related to your delivery address is images.ctfassets.net. This is where all the images from Contentful can be reached.

In the ImageEngineProvider, modify and insert your own “deliveryAddress,” replacing “blazing-fast-pics.cdn.imgeng.in” shown below.

 return (   <ImageEngineProvider      deliveryAddress="https://blazing-fast-pics.cdn.imgeng.in"      stripFromSrc="https://images.ctfassets.net">      <Image src={page.logo.url} className="App-logo" alt="logo"></Image>      </ImageEngineProvider>

Insert “Image” Component

Lastly, add an “Image” component inside the “ImageEngineProvider” providing the image source.

The image source may be local to your app or fetched from Contentful using the GraphQL API. The following example renders an image from Contentful.

Completed App.js example

Your final App.js should look like this:

import { ImageEngineProvider, Image } from "@imageengine/react" function App() { return ( <ImageEngineProvider deliveryAddress="https://blazing-fast-pics.cdn.imgeng.in" stripFromSrc="https://images.ctfassets.net"> <Image src={page.logo.url} className="App-logo" alt="logo"></Image> </ImageEngineProvider> ) } export default App;

Note that the example is also using the stripFromSrc property. This will replace any occurrences of https://images.ctfassets.net in the image source url that the Contentful API returns, with the deliveryAddress which is already mapped to the Contentful origin in the ImageEngine control panel.

Automatic Image Optimization By Default

For most images, the automatic mode of ImageEngine will deliver perfectly optimized images. For example, in many cases, this will be a resized image WebP that can be up to 80% lighter payload. You can inspect the final image and see the Delivery Address, the new image format (e.g. WebP), and the ImageEngine CDN server.

Device Intelligence in Action

In auto-mode, the most notable optimizations applied to an image are format conversion, change in pixel size, and compression rate. ImageEngine in auto-mode will make sure that your customers get the highest quality image with the lowest possible byte size.

Format Conversion

Thanks to ImageEngine’s built-in device detection, the most efficient format for a given image is automatically chosen. The input needed to make this decision comes from ImageEngine’s device-aware servers and an advanced ruleset. For example, ImageEngine can accurately identify devices and browsers that support the WebP format. This means ImageEngine can confidently convert from JPEG to WebP, deliver huge savings in terms of byte size, and dramatically improve the web browsing experience.

Resizing

On the web today, where the majority of traffic comes from mobile devices, one size is not enough to offer a great user experience. Again, the built-in device detection knows the size of the screen – both in pixels and millimeters – and is able to resize the image to perfectly fit the viewport. This is further enhanced by ImageEngine’s support for Client Hints. It can also handle high-resolution displays, like Retina, out of the box and will scale the image at the actual pixel size needed to produce high-quality images.

Using Directives

If you want more granular control over how the image is presented, you may use ImageEngine’s directives. Use the “directives” prop to do so without having to modify the source image.

<Image src="/images/pic_2.jpg" directives={{ outputFormat : 'webp', rotate: 45, inline: true }}/>

Conclusion

After implementation, you will have 30-days of ImageEngine and on-boarding support so you can be sure that you are seeing the improvements you need from an image CDN like ImageEngine. You can even schedule a call with our Customer Success team to help you get set up with ImageEngine today!

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ImageEngine –]

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The post Improve Performance by Combining Headless CMS with an Image CDN first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

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28 septembre 2021/par Service comm.

Popular Design News of the Week: September 20, 2021 – September 26, 2021

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Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.

The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!

Kraken – High-Performance Web Rendering Engine

Brands Change Their Logos To Terrible New Designs

10 Web Design Trends and Predictions for 2022 and Beyond

18 Designs That Made a Big Impact in 2021

Awful Web Designs From 18 of MMA’s Top Fighters

Don’t Get Left Behind by the No-Code Wave

The Top 7 Websites to Learn Web Development Online

Xata – Database Service for Serverless Apps

How To Optimize CSS for Peak Site Performance

21 Exceptional Google Fonts You Probably Haven’t Discovered Yet

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26 septembre 2021/par Service comm.

The Pros and Cons of Tailwind CSS

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As a utility-first CSS framework, Tailwind has rapidly become popular among developers. With its fast styling process and the freedom it offers when designing a website, it’s really no wonder why.

But how can you make sure this is the right CSS framework for your upcoming development projects? In this blog post, you’ll learn what Tailwind is, and how it differs from other frameworks like Bootstrap, or Foundation.

In addition, we will highlight the main advantages and disadvantages of the framework. By the end, you will be able to make an honest and objective assessment as to whether Tailwind is the right framework for you. So without further ado, let us dive deeper into it.

What is Tailwind CSS?

First released in May 2019, Tailwind CSS is a front-end CSS framework. It is currently at version 2.2. Since its release, Tailwind has created quite a following. More than 260k developers have used it to enhance their design systems.

Stats like these make Tailwind one of the most popular CSS frameworks on the market, and all in less than two years. There are many reasons for this. Primarily, because its features make it the ideal choice for a wide variety of projects. Tellingly, most developers prefer it to create React projects.

The main difference between Tailwind and its competitors is that it gives developers complete control over the styling of a web application. So, is it the right CSS framework for you? To answer this question, let us take a look at Tailwind’s advantages and disadvantages.

Tailwind CSS: Pros and Cons

Tailwind CSS: Advantages

1. Control Over Styling

Tailwind is a unique CSS framework when it comes to styling web applications, meaning that Tailwind does not have a default theme that you have to use like other CSS frameworks.

For example, you can give each project a different look even if you use the same elements (color palette, size, etc.). Therefore, it’s one of the few CSS frameworks that is not opinionated on how you should style your project.

2. Faster CSS Styling Process

There is no faster framework than Tailwind when it comes to styling HTML. As a result, you can easily create good-looking layouts by styling elements directly. This is possible because Tailwind offers thousands of built-in classes that do not require you to create designs from scratch.

Therefore, you do not have to write CSS rules yourself. These CSS classes are the main reason why building and styling with Tailwind is so fast.

3. Responsiveness and Security

With Tailwind’s pre-built classes, you can design the layout directly in an HTML file. This makes it a very responsive, mobile-friendly CSS framework. Apart from that, Tailwind has proven to be a stable framework since its initial release.

The framework was developed by top-notch engineers, which is why bugs and breaks are rare.

4. Additional Features

Tailwind CSS works in the front end of a website. For this reason, it is reasonable for developers to demand ultimate responsiveness. Well, Tailwind provides the ability to create responsive themes for your web applications and remove all unused CSS classes. With PurgeCSS, Tailwind helps you keep your final CSS as small as possible.

Tailwind CSS: Disadvantages

1. Styling and HTML are Mixed

Because you do not have to write CSS rules yourself, Tailwind works differently than most CSS frameworks. While this is great for those unfamiliar with CSS, it also means that Tailwind mixes style rules in with your HTML files.

This goes against the principle of the “separation of concerns.” Many developers prefer to separate page structure and style, claiming that classes make the Tailwind markup process verbose.

2. It Takes Time to Learn

Because of the built-in classes, Tailwind CSS is quite learning-intensive. Even for experienced developers, it can be a challenge to learn how to use and fully utilize the pre-built classes. But, of course, as with any other development task, practice makes perfect.

However, if you are confident and quick when it comes to writing CSS classes, Tailwind may not be the best choice for you. Even if that’s true, Tailwind generally makes CSS styling faster in the long run.

3. Lack of Important Components

Unlike Bulma and Bootstrap, Tailwind does not have many significant styling components. Unfortunately, this means you have to manually add features like headers, buttons, and navigation bars for web apps.

This is not a significant drawback, as experienced developers can implement these features quickly. However, you will need to spend some time doing so.

4. Documentation

Although Tailwind CSS has made great strides when it comes to adding guides and video tutorials, it still lags behind competitors like Bootstrap. Of course, you can always contact the developers if you have a problem.

However, keep in mind that this may take some time. For this reason, you may need to customize the framework to your needs manually.

Is Tailwind Worth Trying?

In a few words, working with Tailwind is quite different from other CSS frameworks. We have identified its main advantages and disadvantages. Based on these features, we can easily say that Tailwind is:

An excellent solution for developers familiar with CSS who want to speed up the creation and design process in the long run.
Not such a good idea if you are not familiar with CSS or do not want to spend time learning a new CSS framework.

It becomes clear that it all depends on your personal needs and preferences. However, if saving time on CSS styling is a priority for you, you should definitely give Tailwind a try.

Regardless of whether you choose to use Tailwind or not, it’s evident that many developers use it for good reasons. Since it offers a faster styling process and is a responsive and stable framework, it’s here to stay.

Tailwind can help you save time and change the way you design websites, and so taking the time to test it out is worthwhile.

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24 septembre 2021/par Service comm.

7 Tips for Transforming CX with Live Chat

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Not so long ago, customers only had a couple of ways to interact with brands.

If you had an issue with a product or service, you could reach out through the customer service phone number or send an email. Occasionally, sites would introduce dedicated forms on their website that allowed consumers to send support tickets straight to the service desk – but that was it.

The problem with this kind of service was all the waiting.

Send an email or ticket, and you have no idea when the company is going to get back to you. Customers end up refreshing their inbox all day, waiting for a response. Call the company, and 9 times out of 10, you’ll be placed on hold. You can’t exactly do much when you’re stuck listening to hold music, so customers are gradually getting more frustrated as they wait for a response.

Fortunately, the evolving digital age has introduced a new solution: live chat.

Transforming Your CX With Live Chat

Live chat is a quick and convenient way for your customers to contact your business and get a response immediately. The result is happier clients, better customer satisfaction scores, and even opportunities for bigger sales.

More than 41% of customers say they expect to see live chat on a site.

Even if you don’t have an agent on hand to answer a chat message immediately, you can create an automated system that notifies your customer when someone is available. That means they can go and do other things while they’re waiting for a response. Live chat solutions with bots can even allow your customers to fix problems for themselves. That’s pretty convenient!

Widgets equipped with answers to commonly asked questions can automatically deal with customer queries or help them find solutions to their problems before passing them over to an agent. This means that your customer gets a solution faster, and your agents don’t have as much pressure to deal with. It’s a win-win – as long as you get it right.

Unfortunately, a lot of companies don’t know how to implement live chat experiences correctly.

Kayako’s study into 400 customers found that 47% couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a positive experience through a live chat tool.

How to Upgrade Live Chat CX

The evidence shows that customers love the idea of live chat, but the reality of how businesses implement this technology isn’t always ideal.

However, since 86% of customers say they’re willing to spend more on a better customer experience, it’s worth figuring out what separates a good live chat interaction from a bad one.

1. Set Expectations Instantly

Setting the right expectations is crucial if you want to generate better satisfaction for your customers at a later date. When customers know what to expect from your live chat strategy, they can also make more informed decisions about which support channels they’re going to use, and whether they want to hang around for someone to answer their messages.

The first thing you should do is showcase your agent’s availability. In this example from Help Scout, you can see whether the team is active, online, and ready to talk. The company also sets expectations for how quickly you can get an email response if you don’t want to chat.

Other ways to set expectations include:

Showing your opening hours: List when team members are usually available to answer questions if you’re not currently online.
Topics: Offer your customers some topics that they can ask about or use the welcome message on your chat tool to direct your customers to an FAQ page.
Restrictions: If there’s anything you can’t deal with over live chat, like changing a customer’s password, let them know in advance so they don’t waste time.

2. Leverage Pre-Chat Forms

Pre-chat forms are some of the most important parts of the live chat experience. They ask your customer to explain their issue to your chatbot so that they can be directed towards the right agent. Using these forms correctly ensures that your agent has all the information they need to solve a problem fast.

You can even set up automated systems that direct customers to different agents and teams based on their needs. For instance, the live chat app on Outgrow.co gives customers the option to fill out different forms depending on whether they want answers to a question, a demo, or something else.

The button you click on dictates which professional you’ll get through to. Although filling out a form can seem like an extra friction point for your customer at first, it helps to streamline the customer journey. After all, if you can direct the customer to the right agent the first time, there are fewer chances that they’ll need to explain their issue to various different people.

Here are a few things you can ask for in the live chat form to make it more effective:

The customer’s name: This will help to personalize the conversation. It could also be an opportunity to track down any background information you have about an existing customer and the orders that they may want to speak to you about.
An email address: Having an email address will allow you to bring up a customer’s record on your CRM. It also means that you can send any information that the customer needs to their email inbox at the end of the conversation.
A brief explanation: Ask your customers to share what they’re reaching out to you about and use keywords in their message to assign the chat to the right agent or professional. You could even add a drop-down menu of topics for them to choose from.

Remember, don’t ask for too much information straight away, or you’ll risk your clients feeling that the service experience is too complicated.

3. Make Sure It Works Everywhere

We’ve reached the point now where every customer expects a brand’s website to be responsive on any device. Most web-building templates automatically work on mobile tablets and smartphones. Additionally, it’s becoming increasingly easy for companies to transform their website and online store experiences into dedicated apps too.

However, while most businesses know that their site needs to be responsive, they often forget about the mobile element when it comes to live chat. If your live chat function is only available on the web browser version of your website, then this is going to end up making your mobile customers pretty unhappy. They don’t want to have to stop browsing on their phone just to connect with you.

Ideally, you’ll want to create a separate component for your mobile app where your customers can easily access the same live chat functions they’d have on your browser-based site.

If you’re just offering live chat through a mobile version of your website, make sure that it’s easy for your customer to click into the chat section and send messages without accidentally ending up on a different tab or page. It might also be worth setting up functions that allow your chat app to send push notifications to your customer’s phone whenever they get a new message.

Being able to put their smartphone down or switch to another app while they wait for a response will provide a much more intuitive experience for your audience.

4. Make Sure You Support All the Right Languages

You’d think that this CX tip for live chat would be obvious, but it’s shocking how many companies fail to offer support for all the languages that their customers might use. If you’re selling your products throughout the world, and you know you have customers in China, then it doesn’t make much sense to only offer live chat in English.

Some of the available live chat apps on the market today come with features that allow you to automatically translate languages when your agents are talking to foreign customers. For instance, LiveChat currently supports 45 languages.

If you’re creating your own chat app from scratch, then you’re going to need to work with your developer or designer to make sure that the right languages are supported. Remember, you don’t have to cover everything, but at least make sure that you can connect with the most common groups of customers in your CRM.

Ensure that if you are using multiple languages, your customers know how to switch to their preferred option too. Usually, the best way to do this is with a drop-down menu. You could also use little flag icons of the countries that you support.

5. Find Ways to Reduce First Response Time

Speed is probably one of the biggest advantages of live chat, and the main reason that customers like it so much. According to the CMO council, fast response time is the number one thing that a customer looks at when measuring satisfaction.

While you might not be able to have someone on-hand to answer your customers 24/7, you can improve the way they perceive your load times in a variety of ways. For instance, start by making it clear when your people are online to talk to your customers. Setting expectations on when you’ll be available to immediately respond should help to avoid frustration.

Keep all chats in the same place for agents: Having a combined contact center solution on the back-end makes responding to queries much easier for your agents. If they can see all of your brand’s live chat, social, and email conversations in one place, they don’t have to waste time jumping between different platforms and tabs.
Set routing queues: Use an automated system to send every message you get to the most appropriate agent available. You can intelligently route conversations based on the issues that your customers have or the things they want to discuss. It’s also worth ensuring that your system prioritizes routing conversations to the first agent available.
Send notifications: Make sure that you set your live chat system up to send push notifications to agents when a new message is waiting. It’s also with notifying your customer when they have a response, just in case they’ve switched to another tab.

The notifications you send to your agents could come with access to a customer’s CRM file, so that your agent can go into a conversation with the context they need. Agents that instantly get context on a conversation don’t have to waste as much time tracking down the right information. Giving your agents context also means that they don’t have to ask repetitive questions, which could annoy your customer.

6. Make the Chat Experience On-Brand

Every company wants to give their customer a slick experience with live chat. The solution you build needs to be easy to use, and responsive across every device. However, it also needs to be something that your customer associates with your brand.

Companies generally have a lot of options for how a live chat window can look. You can adjust the appearance to suit your brand by picking specific colors, tweaking button shapes, and even changing the available fonts.

Working the visual elements of your brand into the design of the live chat experience is the best way to make your customers feel comfortable and confident that they’re dealing with your company. For instance, Hubspot uses matching colors, rounded edges on chat bubbles, and even a fun illustration to make their chat experience more “branded.”

Remember, when you’re creating a Live Chat experience that’s “on brand”, it’s also a good idea to think about things like voice and tone. Infusing live chat with the unique personality of your brand will make the experience more memorable.

If you usually stick with informal language and use a lot of slang, then it makes sense to continue that in live chat – even when you’re sending automated messages. To make sure your brand identity really shines through:

Write scripts for your automated messages in your brand’s tone of voice
Write guidance scripts for employees that highlight your tone for agents
Provide training on brand tone of voice for your support team
Encourage support agents to connect with customers on a personal level
Remember to set guidelines on how to use things like gifs, slang, and emojis too!

7. Make a Checklist For Security and Tech Issues

One of the most significant things that will affect the experience your customer has with your live chat service, is technical and security issues. Choose the right developer or designer to help with your app, and the risk of problems dwindle. You can also address the issue of having to constantly maintain, check, and update your live chat experience by using a pre-existing solution, like Intercom.

No matter how you choose to approach live chat, these are the things you’ll need to check for most:

Page load times: Page load times are crucial for user experience and SEO, so you should be taking them seriously already. Check your web chat software isn’t dragging down the performance of your page or causing unnecessary problems.
Cross-channel conversations: If your website has various subdomains, make sure that moving through these in chat won’t mean you lose the session. Customers don’t want to have to repeat themselves!
Functionality with browsers: Your chat app needs to work just as well on every browser and operating system – including mobile devices.
Data management: Under things like GDPR, you need to ensure that you’re controlling user information safely. Ensure you have a DPA in place, and make sure that your web channel doesn’t affect any PCI-DSS compliance systems you have in place. Your chat solution may need to automatically mask credit card information, for instance.

Time to Enhance Your Live Chat Strategy

Ultimately, whether you like it or not, your customers love live chat technology, and they’re not going to stop looking for it on your website. Today’s consumers expect you to serve their interests by delivering customer support on the channels that they choose. Unfortunately, most companies just aren’t living up to expectations.

Following the tips above could help you to transform the way that you interact with your clients and improve your chances of better satisfaction overall.

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22 septembre 2021/par Service comm.

No-Code vs. Low-Code, Turing Completeness, and Conway’s Law

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

No-Code

No-code facilitates the reuse of predefined components, typically using a drag and drop interface or a web form. Such platforms always include things like identity and access management, and most importantly don’t require any code to stitch components together, therefore reducing the need for engineers to spend time architecting databases, APIs, or internal workflows. They are always related to one particular task and audience, like web development, spreadsheets, analytics, market automation, etc. Airtable, Zapier, Webflow, Retool, Waylay Digital Twin solution, and similar apps can be found in this category.

Low-Code

On the other hand, low-code has a different set of goals and user personas in mind. The major misconception about low-code is that the “low” in low-code means that a person with hardly any knowledge of coding is the user of such a platform.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

14 septembre 2021/par Service comm.

8 Freelance Project Management Apps for 2021+

Actualités, Actualités

In my experience, the biggest challenge that freelancers face — more than winning clients or setting prices — is project management; take on too much work, and you’ll start missing deadlines, take on too little, and you’ll start missing your rent.

Some people are naturally organized; they rock up at their desk at 08:59, fully confident in what they will spend the next 8–12 hours working on. Let’s be kind and say that I am not one of them, and leave it at that. The only way I have managed to survive the industry is by self-consciously micro-managing my schedule on a daily basis.

When I worked in an agency, I knew what I would be working on days in advance. Now, I know 90% of what I’ll be working on, weeks in advance.

That level of organization requires very, very, very careful planning. I hold team meetings at the end of the day, yes, “team” meetings of one person. To do that I use a number of tools that suit me.

How to Choose a Project Management App

The most important aspect of any project is the end. That’s when the client will assess your work, and that’s when you get paid. So when you choose a project management solution, make sure it gives you a clear path to the project conclusion.

I know one freelancer who sets himself a hard stop at 7 pm every day. At 7 pm, he downs tools switches off, and walks away. I once heard him end a client call at 7 pm because he’d reached his cut-off point. It made me wince — I would have stayed on until the call concluded — but it hasn’t affected his business.

I know another successful freelancer who works on a budget. When she has earned the money she needs for that day, she stops. She bills by the hour to make this work, so when she sits down in the morning, she knows exactly what time she’ll finish.

Personally, I prefer a task-based approach. I know what I have to get done; if I can get ahead, then great, but my main focus is ensuring I don’t fall behind. I believe that if you hit your deadlines, everything else will take care of itself. Admittedly, there have been a few late-nights (and all-nights) over the years, but thankfully they’re less common these days.

No one style of project management suits everyone. And it doesn’t matter what approach you take, provided you take an approach.

8 Best Project Management Apps for Freelancers

As a freelancer, the most important thing characteristic you can have is reliability. Cultivate a reputation for delivering on your promises, and you’ll become invaluable to your clients. The best project management app is the one that helps you keep your promises.

There are some excellent tools on the market that facilitate project management, but most are aimed at SMEs, or project managers running a team of freelancers.

The tools here are listed from least, to most useful for the average freelancer. I’ve avoided too many time-tracking apps because I find these tend to encourage billing by the hour, which is potentially damaging to your business long term. If you do need pure time-tracking, check out Harvest. I’ve also avoided solutions that are too large-scale to benefit freelancers. If you’re looking for a project management tool for teams, then Basecamp, Jira, Project.co, and Redbooth are all worth considering.

Sadly none of these apps are perfect, and there’s a good chance you’ll need to use two or three to manage your projects.

8. Todoist

Todoist is hands down the best to-do app on the market. The downside is that its feature set is minimal.

Todoist really excels at lists. You can break down tasks into sub-tasks, and sub-sub-tasks. The downside is there’s no real scheduling or comparison of multiple projects in a single view.

The mobile apps are great, and Todoist recently introduced boards, a form of kanban board that gives you a good overview of everything. If it introduces a gantt chart, I can see myself relying on it more.

Todoist has a free forever plan that is fine for most freelancers, and the paid plans start at just $3 per month.

7. Bonsai

Bonsai is an excellent service for freelancers that grew from a simple invoicing app to include proposals, contracts, time-tracking, and more.

I used Bonsai for invoicing for a couple of years, and it does everything it claims to do. However, there are a couple of significant areas where it falls down. Firstly, its invoicing is super-aggressive and cannot be customized — make sure you’re on friendly terms with any client you send a Bonsai invoice to. Secondly, while it does a good job of tracking what you have done, it doesn’t help you plan what needs to be done beyond a formal proposal.

If you’re running a few simple projects, then it’s possible Bonsai is right for you. Pricing starts at $19 per month.

6. Monday

Monday is one of the biggest players in the project management market. It offers a dizzying array of options, and if this list were aimed at project management for agencies, Monday would be further along our countdown. Monday may suit freelancers, particularly those who have migrated from agency work, but for most, it’s more than we need.

There is a free-forever plan that covers almost everything you could want. However, if you need to view your projects as a gantt chart — and I strongly suggest you do — then you’ll need to update to the standard plan, which starts at $8 per user per month, with a minimum of three seats, meaning at least $24 per month when billed annually.

5. AND.CO

AND.CO stands out as a slick, easy-to-use option for managing a freelance business. Like Bonsai, it allows you to manage proposals, invoicing, time-tracking, expenses, and more.

AND.CO also has extremely well-liked customer support. An underestimated consideration when you don’t have your own accounts team to resolve problems.

As with other solutions of this type, the task-management is lacking. It does include a simple to-do list, but in my opinion, it’s not sufficient, and you’ll need to supplement it with something that supports gantt charts.

There’s a free forever plan, but it’s barely more than a free trial. Pricing for full-featured access starts at $18 per month when billed annually.

4. ClickUp

ClickUp is a SaaS that aims to replace just about everything else you could need. Unlike some options on this list, it includes a CRM, which is a bonus because there’s nothing worse than relying on the search function in your email to track down someone’s contact details.

ClickUp also offers a genuinely free-forever account with enough features to make it usable. If you choose to upgrade to a paid plan, it’s just $5 per user per month, which is excellent value.

If anything, there’s just too much in here. If you’re someone who considers themselves a power-user who enjoys digging into every nuance of a UI, then ClickUp could be for you. But, if, like me, you favor a simple tool that does what it’s told and gets out of the way, then there are better options.

3. Asana

Asana is probably the best-known project management tool on the market. It offers a tremendous number of options and is flexible enough for any style of project management.

There’s a free forever plan that is ideal for getting started and offers you most — you may be sensing a theme here — of the features you’ll need. But Asana’s best feature is its excellent timeline implementation of the gantt chart, for which you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan costing $10.99 per user per month, with a minimum number of 2 seats that translates to a rather expensive $21.98 per month.

2. Trello

Trello is famous for its kanban boards, and many people prefer them to gantt charts, which has helped the app grow rapidly in the last few years.

If you’re prepared to pay $10 per user per month, Trello actually offers gantt charts as well, in the form of its timeline feature.

Trello is mainly designed for teams, not freelancers. However, if you do have the budget for a premium plan, Trello gives you an enviable ability to switch project management styles on a whim.

1. Toggl

Toggl is perhaps the perfect balance of time-tracking and gantt chart that is ideal for freelance projects.

As with most tools, Toggl is designed for teams, with billing starting at $8 per user per month. However, it offers a solo plan, designed for freelancers, that is free forever.

The main thing you miss out on with Toggl’s Solo plan is team timelines, which you won’t need unless you’re outsourcing work. One other obvious omission is unlimited planning boards, which you may find yourself paying for sooner or later.

But for a mixture of simplicity and powerful features available for $0, Toggl is hard to beat.

Featured image via Pexels

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13 septembre 2021/par Service comm.

7 Ways to Use Gamification in Marketing Campaigns

Actualités, Actualités

We all want a little more fun and games in our lives. So, why not add some gamification to your next interactive content campaign?

By 2025, the gamification market is expected to witness a massive 30.1% growth rate, with global sales revenue reaching around $32 billion.

That’s because gamification adds more entertainment to the website experience and gets audiences engaged. The idea behind gamification is to bring game mechanics into the design of a website or piece of content. There are many different ways to do this.

Some companies add hidden achievements and bonuses to their blogs that customers can collect by visiting every page and reading their content. Others allow readers to collect points for leaving comments or play games to win potential prizes.

Used correctly, gamification is a fantastic way to connect with your audience and increase engagement levels. So, how can you use gamification in interactive content?

The Evolution of Gamification

Elements of gamification have appeared in everything from marketing campaigns to web design and even eCommerce strategies.

In 2014, an Apple App Store review of more than 100 health apps even found that gamification elements in applications led to greater participation and higher user ratings. In other words, customers are more likely to get involved with an activity that includes gamification components.

While gamification can take on many different forms, the aim for most companies is to create an environment where customers can feel more invested in their interactions with the website. For example, if you win a point every time you comment on a blog post, and you can trade those points in for prizes, you have more of a desire to keep commenting.

The promise of being able to “accomplish” things with pieces of interactive content and websites also appeals to the competitive part of our psychology that pushes us to keep doing things in exchange for the promise of a kind of reward.

Many companies have generated a lot of enthusiasm for their brands through leaderboards, time events, and similar experiences. For example, just look at how popular McDonalds becomes each year when the monopoly game rolls out as part of the purchasing experience.

People buy more items than they usually would during McDonald’s Monopoly just for the opportunity to win. This same boost in engagement benefits your content strategy too.

6 Ways to Add Gamification to Your Content

There’s no one right way to gamify your website or your marketing content. The method you choose will depend heavily on your audience and the kind of experience they respond best to.

The key to success is finding a way to grab your customer’s attention and hold onto it. Here are some of the tried and tested strategies to explore:

1. Create an Actual Game Experience

When it comes to incorporating gamification into your website design and content, you don’t necessarily need to be clever. You can be extremely straightforward and just design an actual game. For instance, to help attract more people to the American Army, the US created a war simulator that potential applicants could play on Steam.

The game aimed to introduce young people who might consider a career in the military to what that job might be like. If the kids liked what they saw on Steam, they could visit the military website and learn more.

For companies who can’t afford to build an entire fully-featured game, something a little smaller can be just as engaging. For instance, rather than using a standard pop-up with a discount code to entice customers to buy the rental service, Gwynnie Bee created a scratch card. People could scratch the spaces using their smartphone or computer cursor and win money off.

The great thing about the interactive content from Gwynnie Bee is that it encouraged potential visitors to connect with the business in a lucrative way. To use the scratch card, you first had to give your email address. This meant the company could build its email list while delighting consumers.

When designing a game experience for your marketing campaign, remember:

Get the right support: Designing a great game is tough, particularly if you want something more complicated than a scratch card. Don’t take the risk of creating something that doesn’t work properly; hire a developer.
Promote the experience: Make sure everyone knows about your new game. Share screenshots on social media and talk about it in your email campaigns.
Focus on fun: Remember, games are supposed to be fun. Measure the reactions of your audience to ensure they’re having a good time.

2. Design a Loyalty or Reward Program

Loyalty is one of the most valuable things your audience can give you. So why not reward them for it? Loyalty programs are fantastic tools for business growth and engagement. They give you a way to turn one-off clients into repeat customers and advocates for your brand.

How you choose to reward your customers (and when) is up to you. Some companies might give customers points every time they share a post on social media or comment on a blog. This encourages more engagement with your brand.

On the other hand, you might just let your customers earn rewards for every purchase they make. This is a strategy that Starbucks uses with its reward program.

As customers increase their spending with Starbucks, they get the reward of extra points that they can put towards future purchases. This keeps customers coming back for more and may even entice some clients to buy Starbucks when they otherwise wouldn’t.

The oVertone company is another excellent example of a brand using gamified rewards with its marketing strategy. The loyalty program breaks down into tiers, where users can see how much they need to spend to ascend to the next level. New rewards and perks appear with each level.

Remember, when building a loyalty program:

Make your customers feel special: Ensure that your audience feels good about being one of the lucky few in your loyalty program. Give discounts and offers they can’t get elsewhere.
Keep them informed: Make it easy for your customers to see what they need to do to get their next reward, so they keep coming back for more.
Mix things up sometimes: To stop the experience from getting boring, roll out things like “double points” days and bonuses for your most active customers.

3. Encourage Customer Interaction

The biggest benefit of gamification is that it encourages and increases customer interaction. You can give rewards to participants that comment on your blog posts, for instance, or share your posts on social. The customer benefits from the reward, while you get the advantage of a better business presence.

Samsung drives interaction with gamification with a function on its website that allows customers to discuss issues and watch videos. The most active participants get a badge for their efforts.

If your business structure requires a lot of engagement from your audience, then using gamification elements can encourage them to stick with you for longer rather than losing interest. For instance, language learning software Duolingo has a four-point gamification strategy for its users.

Duolingo knows that learning a new language takes a lot of time, so it asks users to set small specific goals instead. The smaller tasks bring users back regularly, and consistent users gain rewards. There’s even a progress bar to help you track your progress compared to other customers.

Gamification gives your customers another reason to keep coming back and connecting with your brand. That makes a lot of sense for companies that rely on long-term relationships with customers, like Duolingo and other teaching brands, for instance. Remember:

Make it simple: People will only want to interact with your brand if it’s easy to do so. Make it clear what you want your customer to do and what they need to do next.
Reward every action: Keep people coming back for more by rewarding them for their actions, even if it’s just with a gold star or digital sticker.
Nudge inactive customers: If a client gets involved in your interactive content, then stops participating, send an email reminding them why they should come back.

4. Run Contests and Offer Prizes

Probably one of the easiest ways to use gamification in your advertising campaigns is with a competition. Contests and competitions have been around since the dawn of business. They’re a useful way for companies to collect information from customers, particularly if you ask your clients to sign up to your site with an email address to get involved.

Competitions are also a way to push your audience into doing positive things for your company. For instance, you could run a competition where consumers share a social media post and tag a friend to enter. Or you could have a competition that asks your clients to refer a friend to get involved.

When KIND, a healthy snack company, wanted to connect with its customers and create a new product, it didn’t just do market research. Instead, the company created the “Raise the Bar” contest to let customers cast a vote for which flavor they wanted to see next.

When 123ContactForm wanted to engage its audience, it gave people the chance to win one of three platinum subscriptions for 6 months.

Contests are naturally exciting and fun to take part in. They’re an opportunity to get your audience excited, and you don’t need to give anything huge away either. Just make sure that the prize you offer is something that your audience will be interested in.

A few more pro tips include:

Generate hype first: Don’t just launch a contest out of nowhere; get people excited about the idea with announcement blogs, social media posts, and emails.
Give people a lot of ways to get involved: If people can’t take part in the competition on social media, let them do something on your website instead.
Follow up after the win: When someone does win something from your website, follow up with that winner and post pictures in the form of a blog/case study. This will generate more hype for your brand and get people excited about the next event.

5. Get Your Audience Feeling Competitive

No matter how much they might deny it, most people are at least a little competitive. So when you’re implementing a gamification campaign into your content and marketing efforts, it pays to tap into that sense of competition. All you need to do is find a way to encourage your followers to compete.

The best example of a company that did this particularly well is Nike. Nike and the Run Club app teamed up to motivate people to get involved with healthy activities. The app allowed users to customize and build their ideal training program based on their athletic level.

At the same time, you could also win badges and trophies to share with your running community. The more you took part in challenges on the app, the more you could potentially win.

The Fitbit application has a similar way of keeping customers engaged. When you download Fitbit, you can access information about your exercise strategies and potentially track your progress towards your goals. However, there are also measurable achievements to earn – like a badge when you first walk 500 miles.

Users on Fitbit can also find their friends using the same app and compete with them in various challenges.

To successfully add a competition to your gamification strategy, remember:

It needs to be social: People will be more inclined to get involved if they show off their achievements. So make sure that people can showcase their accomplishments.
Make people want to win: There needs to be a reason to get to the top of the leaderboard. You might offer people discounts or exclusive prizes if they accomplish certain goals.
Show progress: Prompt people to keep working on reaching their targets by showing them how close they are to success.

6. Make Boring Content Seem More Interesting

Some content is naturally more engaging than others. If you want to showcase some important information or data, you might create a whitepaper or a report. Unfortunately, the result can be a relatively bland piece of content.

With elements of gamification, you can make the experience a lot more engaging and interesting. Sites like Daytum.com allow users to turn personal stats and information into charts that showcase information in engaging ways. You can allow your users to track their progress through the report and rack up points as they go.

Adding subtle elements to otherwise clinical and less interesting information is a wonderful way to make the experience more exciting. The more enticed your customers are by your content, the more likely it is that you’ll sell them on your business.

Gamify Your Marketing Strategy

Gamification isn’t a new concept, but it’s one that many companies and designers can begin to take advantage of these days. Thanks to more advanced browsers and smartphones, customers can more fully enjoy the interactive elements of websites and content campaigns.

As your audience dives deeper into the digital world, they expect more unique experiences from you. Gamification can make any website or marketing experience more memorable. It’s time to take advantage.

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8 septembre 2021/par Service comm.

10 Tips to Help Video Content Succeed in 2021

Actualités, Actualités

According to a recent Hubspot survey, more than 85% of marketers believe video content is essential for any marketing strategy. This percentage is more than 20% higher than in 2016.

Understanding why this is the case is not hard. Modern digital marketing is all about engaging with your audience and sharing personal stories. And there’s simply no better way to do that than video content.

Videos are engaging for people of all ages and less boring than other types of content. However, it’s not easy to create or optimize video content. That’s why we have created a list of the top 10 video content tips and tricks you should follow.

Top 10 Tips and Tricks to Succeed in Video Content Marketing

Whether you are an influencer, blogger, or business owner, video content is important for promoting your services or products. The following tips will help you improve your video content strategies.

Plus, you can apply these tactics across all websites and platforms: from your website or YouTube channel to social media platforms like Instagram or Twitter.

1. Utilize Video SEO

Contrary to what many believe, SEO does not only apply to written content. In fact, video SEO is just as important for drawing organic traffic to your website or social network account.

You can achieve this in several ways. When you upload a new video, you need to consider things like keywords, tags, file names, and descriptions. However, this is only part of what you can do to optimize your videos for SEO purposes.

There are plenty of video SEO guides for beginners that can help you improve your online presence through your video content.

2. Identify Your Goals and the Scope of Your Videos

As with written and visual content in general, it is critical to identify your business goals for video content. This is one of the first things you should think about when launching a new video content campaign.

Think about what you want to achieve. For example, do you need to generate new customer leads or expand your audience? Considering the reach of your videos can help you stand out from your competitors.

When it comes to video content, planning is key. For this reason, setting the goals of your strategy should be a priority.

3. Schedule Your Video Content

While it’s important to set goals, no video content strategy will work without consistency. Planning your video content is the best way to be consistent when creating, uploading, and promoting.

There are many online apps and tools that can help you organize your video content strategy. For example, scheduling tools like Buffer or MeetEdgar can help you keep everything organized and save time uploading your videos.

In addition to these social media scheduling tools, you can also use apps like Trello to help you organize your content creation in general.

4. Use Premade Material like Instagram Templates

If you are a professional video creator or video editor, you’ll have no problem creating top-notch video content. But what happens if you have no experience with video content at all?

Luckily, there are plenty of tools out there to make your life easier. For example, if you want to create video stories for Instagram, you can use captivating pre-made Instagram templates.

Editing such templates using software like Photoshop can save you both time and money. However, if you do not have Photoshop experience, you can also create videos using simple online editors like Canva.

5. Make Your Videos Engaging and Emotional

There are a few tips we would like to share when it comes to the content of videos. An important thing to keep in mind is that your videos should always be engaging. If you don’t try to engage with your audience through your videos, there is a big chance of failure.

Therefore, whether you own a personal blog or an enormous corporate website, your video content should connect you emotionally with your audience. Adding a personal feel to your videos is a fantastic approach to consider.

By doing so, your customers/readers will feel the need to engage by sharing their stories with you.

6. Create Educational and Relevant Video Content

There are a few tips we’d like to share with you when it comes to video content. One important thing to keep in mind is that your videos should always be engaging. If you are not trying to engage your audience through your videos, there is a high chance of failure.

Whether you have a personal blog or a huge corporate website, your video content should connect emotionally with your audience. Adding a personal touch to your videos is an excellent approach to consider.

This way, your customers/readers will feel the need to engage by sharing their stories with you.

7. Implement CTAs

Calls to action are one of the most effective marketing strategies for written content. Although most websites only include CTAs on the homepage, it’s a brilliant thing to also use them in blog posts, videos, and visual content in general.

You should let your customers know how they can interact with your brand. For example, let them know about your website or how they can follow you on social media for more information.

CTAs are the best way to keep your customers and ultimately increase your conversion rates.

8. Focus on Storytelling

Videos that focus on sales often bore viewers. For this reason, you should add some value to your video content. Creating videos that act like stories is a great thing to do.

When you tell a personal story, your customers can better understand your brand and how it can help them. Remember, storytelling makes your content more engaging and interesting.

9. Promote your Content

Say you have developed a great video content strategy and have already created some top-notch videos. What should be your next step? Well, maximizing your target audience is a smart approach.

You can achieve this by promoting your videos on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. Another smart move is to incorporate your video content into other content like blog posts, your website, etc.

10. Occasionally Evaluate your Video Content Strategy

Since you have already established your goals and the scope of your videos, you know exactly what you want to achieve with your video content strategy. Therefore, it’s important to evaluate how your plan is working. If you are happy with the analytics of your videos, that’s great.

If not, you can always consider what’s going wrong. For example, maybe you need to promote your videos better or include more CTAs.

Wrap Up

In this article, we analyzed how important video content has become for marketing. For this reason, implementing videos into your marketing strategies is a great thing to do.

If you follow the tips and tricks above, you will increase your video content strategy’s chances of success.

Featured image via Unsplash.

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3 septembre 2021/par Service comm.

Designing UI for the Voice Era

Actualités, Actualités

The world of web design is incredibly dynamic. Every year, new trends and opportunities emerge, primarily driven by the arrival of modern technology.

In recent years, we’ve seen various updates to the web design landscape, such as the arrival of AR and VR solutions for making mixed media. Video content has increased in quality, while the demand for inclusivity and usability has transformed the way that we build everything from websites to apps.

Yet, for the most part, web design trends have continued to focus on the visual.

When we hear the word “interface,” we often think of the graphical user interface – the ultimate way to connect users with sites. However, now we have a new, more natural way for customers to interact with their digital tools… The era of voice is here.

Designing for the Age of Voice

The technology sector has made incredible progress in the development of things like Automated Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding.

Thanks to updates in the way that machines process and understand human language, voice recognition accuracy is now at 90% and above. More than ever before, users can speak to a smart assistant, speaker, or phone-based application, and get the results that they’re looking for without error.

The simplicity of communicating with technology via voice means that users have adopted this technology at an incredible pace. Half of all searches will be made with voice by the end of this year.

We’re standing on the edge of a fundamental shift in the way that we interact with computers and critical tools. As designers and developers, we need to be ready to embrace this new medium.

With that in mind, here’s what designers need to think about when designing for voice UI.

1. Decide How to Experiment with Voice

There are various steps involved in making a website more “conversational.” One of the first steps for any designer or developer is to think about the kind of voice-based interactions they’re going to enable for an app or website.

For instance, rather than embedding voice technology into a website, you might decide to create a separate Amazon Alexa “Skill” for devices like the Echo. Companies like Capital One have already invested in this technology so that users can ask their smart speaker about their balance, rather than opening a laptop and logging into the site.

To determine what kind of voice experiences you should be creating for your client, work with them on a customer journey map. Using this map of interactions that the customer has with your client on a regular basis, you can highlight areas where voice interactions might fit into the user flow.

For instance, if customers are constantly asking questions about a brand or its service, an FAQ page that’s equipped with a bot that can respond to voice queries could be an excellent choice.

UI design should always solve problems. Examining the frictions and frustrations that your client’s end-users encounter during their journey will help you to decide which direction to take with your voice UI experience.

2. Examine the Anatomy of Voice Commands

Before designers can create a dialog flow for their voice UI, they need to understand how voice commands work. The key to success in a successful design for voice is understanding the objective of the interaction. A voice consists of three crucial factors for designers to consider:

Intent: Intent represents the subject and context of the voice command. A high utility interaction involves a request for a specific task. For instance, your users might request that your app gives them a list of five-star hotels in a specific area. Designing for these requests is often straightforward because what the voice algorithm needs to do is clear. However, low-utility requests can be harder to decipher, such as “hotels near me,” because there’s less specificity for the bot to work with.
Utterance: Utterance refers to how a user phrases a command. For instance, in the case of looking for five-star hotels in Amsterdam, the customer might say “show me hotels,” or they might ask for “places to stay”. Designers must consider every variation of an utterance for their voice command UI.
Optional variables: This refers to the extra filters that your voice UI needs to be aware of. In the case of five-star hotels in Amsterdam, the descriptor “five stars” is optional. The optional input needs to overwrite default values and bring more detail to the search.

SideChef, for instance, is a voice-activated recipe app that offers narrated guidance to users and allows customers to search for recipes based on their specific needs. The app comes with a wide range of variables built-in, allowing users to customize their searches according to descriptors like “vegetarian” or “quick” meals.

3. Learn How to Prototype with Dialog Flows

Learning how to leverage a complex UI strategy like VUI takes time and practice. Prototyping designers will often have to think like scriptwriters, designing various dialog flows to suit the different needs of customers, and the numerous interactions they might face.

Dialog flows will outline:

Keywords that lead to the interaction
Branches that represent where the conversation might lead
Example dialogs for the user and the voice assistant.

Practicing your dialog flows with scripts that illustrate the back-and-forth between the voice assistant and user will help designers and developers to understand the various nuances that can appear in a customer to robot interaction.

Remember, while a crucial part of good voice UI design is keeping the communication conversational and straightforward, you will need to ensure that there is a dialog flow in place for every discussion that may occur between end-users and their apps, website, or digital tools. Users don’t want to feel overloaded and overwhelmed, but they need to ensure that they can complete their tasks too.

Consider the voice-based game RuneScape: One Piercing Note, for instance.

The developers behind this app allowed players to speak with other in-game characters and use commands like “pull the lever” or “open the chest.” In designing the playable components of the game, the designers needed to think about every possible interaction that a player might have with different parts of the story while ensuring that users didn’t stray off track.

A Few Tips for Voice UI Design

Voice UI design can be very complex, mainly if you’ve never created something using voice as your only input before. However, once you get used to creating dialog flows, the whole process starts to feel a lot easier.

As you’re designing, remember to:

Always confirm when a task is complete: When designing a checkout flow for an eCommerce page, one of the most crucial screens for a designer is the confirmation page. It shows the customer that the transaction has successfully been completed and stops them from worrying whether they’ve done the right thing. The same concept applies to Voice UI design. If your client’s end-user asks a voice-activated app to book an appointment with their therapist, for instance, they want to know that the appointment has been successfully booked and added to their calendar. Determine how you’re going to deliver the peace of mind your customers need.
Create a strong strategy for errors: Designers and developers are still in the very early stages of experimentation with voice UI. This means that there’s a good chance that something could go wrong with your applications and tools from time to time. Having a strong error strategy in place is crucial. Always design a dialog flow scenario that allows the assistant to respond if they don’t understand a request, or don’t hear anything at all. You can also implement analytics into these situations to identify misinterpretations and improve usability in the future.
Add extra layers of security: Various Voice UI solutions like Google Assistant and Alexa can now recognize individual voices. This is a kind of biometric security that’s similar to face or touch ID. As voice recognition continues to improve, it’s essential to ensure that you’re adhering to the latest guidelines in security. Additional authentication may be required for some companies. For instance, passwords, face recognition, or fingerprints might be needed for things that require payments and transactions. For instance, the Duer voice assistant uses face recognition to both approve payments, and make meal recommendations based on previous purchases.

Are You Ready for the Voice UI Revolution?

Voice-based user interfaces are here to stay.

In the years to come, the chances are that developers and designers will need to learn how to use voice more consistently as part of their interface strategies.

The good news is that although voice takes some getting used to as a design tool, it’s easy enough to make sure that your projects are moving in the right direction. Just like any other kind of design, implementing voice means thinking about whether the interactions and experiences that you’re delivering to end-users are seamless, effective, and valuable.

Succeeding in voice UI isn’t just about adding the capacity for voice into your designs. It’s a matter of learning how to make user’s lives easier with the power of voice.

Featured image via Unsplash.

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13 août 2021/par Service comm.