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15 Best CSS Frameworks: Professional Bootstrap and Foundation Alternatives

Whether you are a CSS expert or a front-end beginner, using the right CSS framework is crucial for your daily tasks. There are numerous frameworks whose ultimate goal is the same: helping developers target multiple screens, in the simplest possible way.

This is why Bootstrap is by far the most popular framework on the market. All developers have heard of Bootstrap, and more than 80% of them say they are happy using it.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some great alternatives if you’re willing to shop around. Bootstrap won’t be top dog forever, and there are numerous new lightweight and powerful CSS frameworks.

If you are bored of coding with Bootstrap and Foundation and tired of using complex CSS rules, this list is for you.

From frameworks that take a pure CSS approach to minimalist frameworks with fully customizable themes, nothing is left out. Let’s get started…

1. Bulma

Bulma is one of the most popular alternatives to Bootstrap and Foundation. It is an entirely free, open-source CSS framework that does not have a steep learning curve. No prior CSS knowledge is required to use Bulma.

When you add the variety of colors, responsiveness, and clean flexbox-based grid it offers, it’s no wonder Bulma is becoming more popular every day. Bulma is a well-documented framework that you should definitely try out.

2. UIkit

If you’re looking for a lightweight yet powerful CSS framework that can be wired with HTML and JS, Ulkit is for you. It fully supports right to left languages and has one of the best icon libraries out there.

Keep in mind that Ulkit is also easy to use. All in all, Ulkit is an excellent Bootstrap alternative that is perfect for designing web layouts for desktop and mobile screens.

3. HTML5 Boilerplate

Even though Bootstrap is relatively easy to learn, it is much more than just a front-end template. So what if you need a fully compatible JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML5 template? In this case, HTML5 Boilerplate is a good choice.

Of course, since it’s a template, this framework does not include layouts and component modules. However, if you need a reliable CSS template that offers extensive documentation, HTML5 Boilerplate is a great solution.

4. Metro UI

Metro UI is one of the most flexible CSS frameworks on the market. This front-end framework can be easily combined with JavaScript-based frameworks like Angular, React, etc.

We found Metro UI to be an excellent open-source CSS framework and a great alternative to Foundation during our testing.

5. Skeleton

As a two-in-one solution, Skeleton quickly made it on our list. This is both a boilerplate and a comprehensive CSS framework. We enjoyed customizing its 12-column grid during our testing, and we found out that it has virtually no learning curve.

The automatic width resizing works like a charm, and the syntax is fully responsive. This is why we consider Skeleton to be an excellent Bootstrap alternative.

6. Bootflat

If you are looking for a quick way to create a web app, Bootflat is the framework you need. Bootflat’s components are built with CSS3 and HTML5, and the framework offers a comprehensive panel of color schemes for you to choose from.

Bootflat looks and acts like a simplified version of Bootstrap. However, that doesn’t mean that this CSS framework isn’t scalable and robust. On the contrary, you can fully manipulate the size and performance of the web designs you create.

7. Semantic UI

If you exclude the fact that Semantic UI doesn’t have the utility classes Bootstrap offers, it is a comprehensive CSS framework that you should try. The best Semantic feature allows you to write HTML code without using BEM methodologies.

So, if you need a framework that will help you write readable codes in minutes, Semantic is the one for you.

8. Susy

We know that most developers nowadays use flexbox and native CSS grids. Still, there’s nothing better than Susy if you need a grid system that supports legacy browsers. Although Susy is no longer maintained, it is one of the most flexible old-school grid systems.

9. Materialize

Like most CSS frameworks on this list, Materialize is built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

It’s specifically designed to help you develop faster using a standard template and customizable components. As the name suggests, Materialize is based on the basic principles of Material Design.

10. Kickstart

If you need a lightweight alternative to Bootstrap, Kickstart is the CSS library for you. A great thing about Kickstart is that it doesn’t require jQuery which makes it very small.

Of course, like a pruned version of Bootstrap, this CSS framework isn’t as robust. Still, this is an excellent choice for those who need a UI framework and a comprehensive boilerplate library.

11. Tailwind CSS

With a fast styling process and the ultimate freedom it provides, Tailwind is extremely popular among some developers. This is a utility-first, front-end framework that is fully responsive and stable.

Unfortunately, Tailwind CSS requires some time to learn, and it is not the most flexible choice when it comes to revising CSS rules.

12. Pure CSS

Yahoo specially developed Pure CSS to help developers create fully responsive web pages.

We consider Pure a minimalist alternative to Bootstrap that offers every module a beginner needs (navigation menu, grid, tables, etc.).

13. PowertoCSS

PowertoCSS is on this list for a good reason. This is an ultimately responsive CSS framework that you can use to create grids and scale web apps on any platform.

PowertoCSS is based on Modular Architecture and Scalable when it comes to design.

Unlike other CSS frameworks, PowertoCSS is very lightweight, beginner-friendly, and comes with detailed documentation.

The coding process is simple, and we found the learning curve to be shallow.

14. Spectre

Spectre is one of the most flexible and lightweight CSS frameworks we tested for this article.

It has a modern (flexbox) layout system; it is fully customizable and allows you to get quick, attractive results.

15. Primer

Our last suggestion is Primer, a great open-source CSS framework.

To be precise, Primer is more of a design system that lets you use a BEM CSS framework and create your projects quickly and efficiently.

So, even though Primer is not a CSS framework in the strict sense, it will help you use React and Figma components, icons, and advanced documentation to unify all of that.

Wrap Up

Choosing the right CSS framework is not easy. It all depends on your personal needs and preferences as a front-end developer.

Although Bootstrap and Foundation are still the most popular frameworks, many of the alternatives presented above will continue to gain popularity for good reasons.

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8 avril 2022/par Service comm.

Exciting New Tools For Designers, March 2022

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We’re going to have some fun this month. There are so many new tools and resources out there for designers that make life easier, and others are simply enjoyable.

Here’s what is new for designers this month …

Polka Dot Generator

Polka Dot Generator is exactly what you think. Adjust colors, dot size, shadow, and fuzziness, and then export the CSS for use in your projects. This could make for fun effects or backgrounds.

Design Memes

Design Memes is just a lot of fun. It’s a collection of memes based on design culture updated daily. It’s a little silly and a little reflective. Yes, it’s completely ok to laugh at yourself.

Pppointed

Pppointed is an SVG arrow-making tool that helps you create cool pointers without a lot of effort. Just pick a color, shape, and style, and you are ready to go. Save your custom arrows as SVG files or copy the code and use them on the web whenever you want to point at things visually.

Open Source Color System

Open Source Color System is a set of palettes that include carefully picked colors to help you overcome interface challenges. For example, it is one of the only color tools out there that includes palettes for light and dark modes. It’s also designed with accessibility in mind to help you create a complete and usable system.

Cowsay

Cowsay is a nifty little web interface of the same name made with Svelte and HTML Canvas. Play with it and then copy your art as ASCII or an image.

Minze

Minze is a simple JavaScript framework for native web components. It’s tiny and fast, modern, shareable, framework agnostic, and uses TypeScript to scale your component library. Plus, you can get started with it right away.

Tally

Tally is a simple – and free – online form builder. You can use it without coding, and it works like a document file, so there’s no learning curve. You can create unlimited forms, integrate with other tools, set logic, collect payments, and more. There’s a pro version as well if you need even more features.

Hue.Tools

Hue.Tools is another color tool to help you maximize effort when creating palettes. Generate a color you like, see specs and values in all the different color spaces, inspiration from design sites, and colors that work with it. It’s fun and functional.

Sturdy

Sturdy is a low overhead code collaboration platform for fast-moving teams. With Sturdy, you work in the open with your team. Discover and interact with draft code as it is written. Those team drafts are like live pull requests (Figma or Google Docs) but using your local editor.

Mage

Mage is a tool that transforms your data into predictions. Build, train, and deploy predictive models in minutes with no AI experience required. This is a premium tool, but you can try it for free.

Huemint

Huemint is a machine-learning-based color scheme generator for websites, graphics, and branding. There are many options to play with, and you can generate some pretty interesting combinations that ordinarily you might not think of.

CSSUI

CSSUI is another tool you’ll love because it includes pure CSS interactive components without any JavaScript. It’s easy to customize, uses standard HTML, is easy for all levels to use, is tiny and fast, and supports pretty much all modern browsers. It’s an open-source tool that you can download and use immediately.

UI Icons Line – Free

UI Icons Line – Free is a set of 1,000 free vectors for use in your projects. Who doesn’t need a robust set of icons?

Skill Icons

Skill Icons is a set of icons to help you showcase your design and development skills on your resume or GitHub. They all look great and match.

Ambient Design

Ambient Design is a mobile app design market where you can get mobile UI kits for Figma. Purchase kits separately, or buy quarterly or yearly plans to access all current and future UI kits.

TextFrame

TextFrame lets you create animated tutorials for your users to get the help they need. It integrates directly with WordPress or any other website with just a couple of lines of code and includes plenty of customizable options to make it easy for you to help others understand how to use the website. The tool is free for one site and just a few bucks per month for additional sites.

Booqsi

Booqsi is a fun new social media network for book lovers. The platform is still in beta and lets you save and share books, create shelves for reading, and doesn’t force a connection to Amazon. It’s just all about the books. And there’s a bonus: every link from the site goes back to bookshop.org to help you find and support local bookstores.

Stylo

Stylo is an open-source WYSIWYG interactive editor for JavaScript. It is made to bring great user experience and interactivity to the web, for everyone, with no dependencies. It has an interactive design, is customizable, and is future-proof.

Tutorial: How to Favicon in 2022

How to Favicon in 2022 is an excellent lesson on the five icon files every website needs (plus one JSON file). If you are creating more than that, this is a must-read.

Tutorial: Creating Generative SVG Grids

Creating Generative SVG Grids is an in-depth, step-by-step tutorial for anyone who wants to create a more artistic SVG. It uses a handful of tools, including SVG.js, Generative Utils, TinyColor, and GSAP.

Fromage

Fromage is a new and beautiful premium typeface family from Adam Ladd. It includes 14 styles with an interesting serif and alternative sans option. The high-contrast design is great for a variety of projects.

HD Colton

HD Colton is a premium super sans serif typeface with a whopping 91 styles and family package options. It would make a bold statement as a display option.

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14 mars 2022/par Service comm.

WordPress Website Analysis: Before & After ImageEngine

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WordPress is by far the world’s most popular CMS. Not only does it dominate the CMS market with a 64% market share, but it also powers 39.6% of all websites. It has taken the internet by storm by democratizing the web for all. Now, anyone can build, manage, and host a successful website without needing a college degree or coding expertise.

However, while WordPress is great at managing many technical aspects, it still can’t do everything for you. Built mostly on PHP, there are often concerns regarding how performant WordPress is. And, with performance impacting everything from bounce rates to SEO rankings to conversions, it’s something that should be on your radar too.

If you don’t know it yet, images are one of the main causes of slow-loading websites. In recent years, WordPress has stepped up its efforts to try and help users with image optimization out-of-the-box.

Still, as we’ll show, it’s not a total solution, and there is still plenty you can do to deliver better experiences on your WordPress website through image optimization.

What is WordPress Image Optimization? Why is it Important?

Simply put, image optimization is anything you do to make images load faster on your website pages. Almost all websites that use images can benefit from some form of image optimization, even those using WordPress.

Why?

Well, performance is a hugely significant factor when it comes to the competitiveness of your website today.

Google has also made performance an increasingly important factor when it comes to SEO rankings. In fact, performance is a direct ranking signal that carries significant weight.

Google’s Page Experience Update that went live in 2021 has been the biggest move in that direction yet. Soon, Google might even use visual indicators in SERP results to distinguish high-performing websites from the rest.

In Google’s own words, “These signals measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page and contribute to our ongoing work to ensure people get the most helpful and enjoyable experiences from the web.”

So, Why Should We Target Images For Performance Optimization?

According to Google, images are the largest contributor to page weight. Google has also singled out image optimization specifically as the factor with the most untapped potential for performance optimization.

This problem isn’t going away soon. According to data by the HTTP Archive, there are roughly 967.5 KB bytes of image data on desktop web pages and 866.3 KB of image data on mobile pages. This is an increase of 16.1% and 38.8%, respectively, over the last five years.

Thanks to popular e-commerce tools like Woocommerce, it’s estimated that up to 28% of all online sales happen on WordPress websites.

And don’t forget, images are both a key part of conveying information to the user and integral to the design of your website. If they take significantly longer to load than your text, for example, it will negatively impact the user experience in a variety of ways.

In summary, optimized images help your WordPress website by:

Improving user satisfaction.
Improving various traffic metrics, like bounce rates, time-on-page, etc.
Boosting your SEO rankings.
Contributing to higher conversions (and sales).

How Does Image Optimization in WordPress Work?

WordPress is so popular because it’s a CMS (content management system) that allows anyone to build, design, and manage a website without any coding or advanced technical experience. Advanced features can be installed with just a few clicks, thanks to plugins, and you rarely have to touch the code behind your website unless you want to make some unique modifications.

In short, using a CMS like WordPress shields you from many of the day-to-day technicalities of running a website.

WordPress Image Optimization: What It Can Do

As we mentioned, one of the main reasons WordPress is so popular is because it takes care of many of the technical aspects of running a website. With that in mind, many think that WordPress should also automatically take care of image optimization without them having to get involved at all.

Unfortunately, that’s not really the case.

True, WordPress does offer some built-in image optimization. Whenever you upload an image to WordPress, it currently compresses the quality to about 82% of the original (since v4.5).

In v4.4, WordPress also introduced responsive image syntax using the srcset attribute. This creates four breakpoints for each image you upload according to the default WordPress image sizes:

150px square for thumbnails
300px width for medium images
768px max-width for medium_large images
1024px max-width for large images.

Here you can see an example of the actual responsive syntax code generated by WordPress:

<img loading="lazy" src="https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-9" width="610" height="406" srcset="https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-300x200.jpg 300w, https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-768x512.jpg 768w, https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-1536x1024.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 610px) 100vw, 610px">

Depending on the screen size of the device from which a user visits your webpage, WordPress will let the browser pick the most appropriately sized image. For example, the smallest version for mobile displays or the largest for 4K Retina screens, like those of a Mac.

While this may seem impressive, it’s only a fraction of what can be achieved using a proper image optimization solution, as we’ll show later.

Lastly, WordPress implemented HTML native default lazy loading for all images starting with version 5.5.

So, in short, WordPress offers the following image optimization capabilities baked-in:

Quality compression (limited)
Responsive syntax (up to 4 breakpoints)
Lazy loading

WordPress Image Optimization: What it Cannot Do

There are other issues many have with both the implementation of image compression and responsive syntax as it’s used by WordPress. This leads to some users even purposefully deactivating WordPress’ built-in image optimization so they can fully take control of it themselves.

Here are some of the reasons why:

WordPress uses a very basic form of quality compression. It does not use advanced technologies like AI and machine learning algorithms to compress images while maintaining maximum visual quality. It’s also lossy compression, so the quality is lost for good. You can clearly see the difference between an original HD image and the compressed version created by WordPress.
WordPress only compresses most images by up to 20%, while advanced image optimization tools can reduce all image sizes intelligently by up to 80%.
Responsive syntax can provide significant performance improvements over simply uploading a single HD image to be served on all devices and screens. However, it’s still only limited to a set number of breakpoints (typically 3 or 4). Since it’s not dynamic, a whole spectrum of possible image sizes is not created or used.
Responsive syntax code is not scalable and can quickly lead to code that’s bloated, messy, and hard to read.
WordPress doesn’t accelerate image delivery by automatically caching and serving them via a global CDN, although this can be done using other tools.

Another important optimization feature that WordPress does not have is auto-conversion to next-gen image file formats. Different image formats offer different performance benefits on different devices. Some formats also enable higher levels of compression while maintaining visual fidelity.

Next-gen formats like WebP, AVIF, and JPEG-2000 are considered to be the most optimal formats on compatible devices. For example, until recently, WebP would be the optimal choice on Chrome browsers, while JPEG-4000 would be optimal on Safari browsers.

However, WordPress will simply serve images in the same formats in which they were originally uploaded to all visitors.

How to Measure the Image Performance of a WordPress Website?

As the undisputed king of search engines, we’ll base most of our performance metrics on guidelines established by Google.

Along with its various performance updates, Google has released a number of guidelines for developers as well as the tools to test and improve their websites according to said guidelines.

Google introduced Core Web Vitals as the primary metrics for measuring a web page’s performance and its effect on the user experience. Thus, Core Web Vitals are referred to as “user-centric performance metrics.” They are an attempt to give developers a testable and quantifiable way to measure an elusive and abstract concept such as “user experience.”

Combined with a number of other factors, Core Web Vitals constitute a major part of the overall page experience signal:

You can find a complete introduction to Core Web Vitals here. However, they currently consist of three main metrics:

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): The time it takes the largest above-the-fold element on your page to load. This is typically a full-sized image or hero section.
FID (First Input Delay): The delay from the moment a user first interacts with an element on the page until it becomes responsive.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): The visual stability with which the elements on a page load.

Here is an illustration of how these metrics are scored:

While these are the three most important metrics to optimize, they are not the only ones. Google still measures other metrics like the FCP (First Contentful Paint), SI (Speed Index), as well as the TTFB (Time to First Byte), TBT (Total Blocking Time), and TTI (Time to Interactive).

A number of these metrics are directly affected by the images used on your web pages. For example, LCP, FCP, and SI are direct indicators of how fast the content of your web page loads and depends on the overall byte size of the page. However, it can also indirectly affect FID by keeping the main thread busy with rendering large amounts of image content or the perceived CLS by delaying the time it takes large images to load.

These metrics apply to all websites, whether they are custom-made or built using a CMS like WordPress.

When using tools like Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights, you’ll also get scored based on other flags Google deems important. Some of them are specific to images, such as properly sizing images and serving images in next-gen formats.

If you only use built-in WordPress image optimization, you’ll get flagged for the following opportunities for improvement:

Some of the audits it will pass, however, are deferring offscreen images (lazy loading) and efficiently coding images (due to compression):

A Better Way to Optimize WordPress Images: ImageEngine

Billions of websites are all vying for prime real estate on Google SERPs, as well as the attention of an increasingly fussy internet-using public. Every inch matters when it comes to giving your website a competitive advantage.

So, how can you eliminate those remaining performance flags and deliver highly optimized images that will keep both your visitors and Google happy?

Sure, you could manually optimize images using software like PhotoShop or GIMP. However, that will take you hours for each new batch of images. Plus, you still won’t benefit from any automated adaptive optimization.

A more reasonable solution in today’s fast-paced climate is to use a tool developed specifically for maximum image optimization: an image CDN like ImageEngine.

ImageEngine is an automated, cloud-based image optimization service using device detection as well as intelligent image compression using the power of AI and machine learning. It can reduce image payloads by up to 80% while maintaining visual quality and accelerating delivery around the world thanks to its CDN with geographically dispersed PoPs.

Why is ImageEngine Image Optimization Better Than WordPress?

When making a head-to-head comparison, here are the reasons why ImageEngine can deliver better performance:

Device Detection: ImageEngine features built-in device detection. This means it picks up what device a visitor to your website is using and tailors its optimization strategy to what’s best for that specific device.
Client hints: By supporting client hints, ImageEngine has access to even more information regarding the device and browser to make better optimization decisions.
Next-gen formats: Based on optimal settings, ImageEngine automatically converts and serves images in next-gen formats like WebP, AVIF, JPEG2000, and MP4 (for GIFs).
Save data header: When a Chrome user has save-data mode enabled, ImageEngine will automatically compress images more aggressively to save on data transfer.
CDN with dedicated edge servers: ImageEngine will automatically cache and serve your optimized image assets using its global CDN. Each edge server has device awareness built-in to bring down latency and accelerate delivery. You can also choose to prioritize specific regions.

So, the key differentiator is that ImageEngine can tailor optimizing images for what’s optimal for each of your visitors. ImageEngine is particularly good at serving mobile visitors thanks to WURFL device detection, which can dynamically resize images according to most devices and screen sizes in use today. As of now, this is a completely unique capability that none of its competitors offer.

It allows for far better and more fine-tuned optimization than WordPress’ across-the-board approach to compression and responsive syntax.

If you want, you could turn off WordPress responsive syntax and compression, and you would still experience a performance increase using ImageEngine. However, ImageEngine also plays nice with responsive syntax, so it’s not completely necessary unless you want to serve the highest-fidelity/low-byte-size images possible.

How Does ImageEngine Work with WordPress?

The process ImageEngine uses to integrate with WordPress can be broken down into a few easy steps:

Sign up for an ImageEngine account: ImageEngine offers three pricing plans depending on the scale and features you need as well as a no-commitment 30-day free trial.
Specify your image origin: This tells ImageEngine where to find the original versions of your images. For a WordPress website, you can just use your domain, e.g., https://mywordpresswebsite.com. ImageEngine will then automatically pull the images you’ve uploaded to your WordPress website.

Copy the Delivery Address: After you create an account and specify your image origin, ImageEngine will provide you with a Delivery Address. A Delivery Address is your own unique address that will be used in your <img> tags to point back to the ImageEngine service. Delivery Addresses may be on a shared domain (imgeng.in) or customized using a domain that you own. A Delivery Address typically looks something like {random_string}.cdn.imgeng.in. If your images are uploaded to the default WordPress folder /wp-content/uploads/, you can access your optimized images from ImageEngine simply by changing your website domain. For example, by typing {imageengine_domain}.cdn.imgeng.in/wp-content/uploads/myimage.jpg into your browser, you’ll see the optimized version of that image. Just press the copy button next to the Delivery Address and use it in the next step configuring the plugin.

Install the ImageEngine Optimizer CDN plugin: The plugin is completely free and can be installed just like any other plugin from the WordPress repository.
Configure and enable ImageEngine Plugin in WordPress: Just go to the plugin under “ImageEngine” in the main navigation menu. Then, copy and paste in your ImageEngine “Delivery Address,” tick the “Enabled” checkbox, and click “Save Changes” to enable ImageEngine:

Now, all ImageEngine basically does is replace your WordPress website domain in image URLs with your new ImageEngine Delivery Address. This makes it a simple, lightweight, and non-interfering plugin that works great with most other plugins and themes. It also doesn’t add unnecessary complexity or weight to your WordPress website pages.

ImageEngine vs Built-in WordPress Image Optimization

So, now let’s get down to business by testing the performance improvement you can expect from using ImageEngine to optimize your image assets.

To do this test, we set up a basic WordPress page containing a number of high-quality images. I then used PageSpeed Insights and the Lighthouse Performance Calculator to get the performance scores before and after using ImageEngine.

Importantly, we conducted this test from a mobile-first perspective. Not only has mobile internet traffic surpassed desktop traffic globally, but Google themselves have committed to mobile-first indexing as a result.

Here is a PageSpeed score using the Lighthouse calculator for WordPress with no image optimization:

As we can see, both Core Web Vitals and other important metrics were flagged as “needs improvement.” Specifically, the LCP, FCP, and TBT. In this case, both the LCP and FCP were a high-res featured image at the top of the page.

If we go to the opportunities for improvement highlighted by PageSpeed, we see where the issues come from. We could still save as much as 4.2s of loading time by properly resizing images and a further 2.7s by serving them in next-gen formats:

So, now let’s see how much ImageEngine can improve on that.

The same test run on my WordPress website using ImageEngine got the following results:

As you can see, we now have a 100 PageSpeed score. I saved roughly 2.5s on the SI (~86%) as well as roughly 1.7s on the LCP (~60%). There was also a slight improvement in the FCP.

Not only will you enjoy a stronger page experience signal from Google, but this represents a tangible difference to visitors regarding the speed with which your website loads. That difference will lead to lower bounce rates, increased user satisfaction, and more conversions.

There was also a 53% overall reduction in the total image payload. This is impressive, considering that it’s on top of WordPress’ built-in compression and responsive syntax.

Conclusion

So, as someone with a WordPress website, what can you take away from this?

Well, first of all, WordPress does feature some basic image optimization. And while not perfect, it should help you offer reasonable levels of performance, even if you use a lot of image content.

However, the caveat is that WordPress applies aggressive, across-the-board compression, which will lead to a noticeable reduction in visual quality. If you use WordPress for any type of website where premium quality images are important, this is a concern — for example, as a photography portfolio, exhibition, or image marketplace like Shutterstock.

By using ImageEngine, you can reduce image payloads and accelerate delivery even further without compromising too harshly on visual quality. What’s more, ImageEngine’s adaptive image optimization technology will provide greater improvements to more of your visitors, regardless of what device(s) they use to browse the web.

Whether or not you still want to use WordPress’ built-in optimizations, ImageEngine will deliver significant improvements to your user experience, traffic metrics, and even conversions.

Plus, true to the spirit of WordPress, it’s extremely simple to set up without any advanced configuration. Just sign up for ImageEngine in 3 easy steps, install the plugin, integrate ImageEngine by copy/pasting your image domain, and you’re good to go.

[ This is a sponsored post on behalf of ImageEngine ]

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8 février 2022/par Service comm.

How to Use AR in Brand Experiences

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AR (Augmented Reality) continues to build as one of the most exciting technology innovations to appear in recent years. More accessible than virtual reality experiences, since no specialist headset is required, AR has quickly emerged as a crucial tool for building unique experiences.

Although interest in AR as a tool for customer interaction and experience has been growing, demand has skyrocketed in recent years. In addition, since the pandemic of 2020, companies no longer have the same in-person opportunities available to create meaningful relationships with customers.

To ensure a client is fully invested in your brand today, you need to find a new way of building that emotional link. As an immersive, experience-led solution for brand building, AR can improve a company’s chance of earning brand loyalty. What’s more, around 71% of consumers say they would shop more often if AR technology were available.

The question is, how do you develop your own AR branded experiences?

Creating Branded Experiences in AR

For an augmented reality experience to be effective, you need more than just the right technology; you need a strategy for how you’re going to engage, empower, and support your target audience.

The best AR branded experiences aren’t just multi-dimensional advertisements; they’re tools intended to engage, inform, and entertain your audience in a new, highly immersive realm. Before you can begin to work on your AR app, you need to think about what kind of branded experience you want to develop. Here are some excellent examples to get you started.

AR Try-Before-You-Buy Interactions

Globally, ecommerce sales are growing at an astronomical pace. Going forward, there’s no question that the digital landscape will become the new platform for shopping and transactions. But, unfortunately, there are some limitations when it comes to shopping online.

While the right website developer or designer can create a stunning site packed with information about a product or service, there’s only so much that a webpage can do. Delivering a truly immersive user experience for your target audience involves replicating the kind of in-person experiences they would get in a digital format.

The best example of this is the “try-before-you-buy” AR app. Most commonly seen in the clothing and beauty industries, this app allows customers to use AR filters to see what everything from a new hair color to a shade of lipstick might look like on them. The experience is highly accessible and engaging because it builds on customers’ familiarity with filters and similar effects on social media channels like TikTok and Instagram.

A popular example of an AR try-before-you-buy experience comes from Sephora, with the “Virtual Artist” application. Originally installed within the Sephora app in 2016, the technology uses Modiface to scan and track the eyes and lips of the customer using a smartphone camera. After that, the system can overlay eye-shadows, lipsticks, and other products, to give the customer idea of what they might look like in real-life.

As AR applications become more mainstream, new solutions are emerging for companies concerned about things like privacy. Consumers who don’t want to load their image into a system for try-before-you-buy experiences can still access the benefits of AR with the right tools.

For instance, ASOS created the new “See My Fit” service in 2020 to help customers shop for clothing during the pandemic. The solution allows users to see what clothing will look like on a model with a similar body type to their own. This helps to show shoppers how products realistically look in similar bodies while reducing the risk of returns.

Today, my team and I have launched at @ASOS ‘See My Fit’, an innovative experience aiming to help customers understand if a product will suit them through AI. This feature is a stepping stone allowing customers to see an item of clothing on a ‘model like them’. pic.twitter.com/WDuAmCvNeX

— Linda Martins (@Lindas_Martins) January 13, 2020

ASOS certainly saw the benefit of this innovation, with an increase in revenues of around 24% in the six months leading to the end of February 2021.

AR for Product Catalogs and Visualization

We all remember what it was like to flick through the glossy pages of a magazine or catalog for our favorite stores. Unfortunately, in today’s digital age, these paper brochures are far from the most efficient tool for shopping. We need a more digital experience that allows us to select products, see what they will look like, and add them to our virtual baskets.

One excellent example of how companies can use AR to improve the overall shopping and visualization experience for customers comes from Home Depot. The brand was one of the first to upgrade its user experience strategy with a new Project Color application in 2015. Although this app might seem a little outdated by today’s standards, it’s still an excellent insight into what companies can do to improve their customer’s brand experience.

The Home Depot app used AR to scan a room and implement the color a customer chose for their walls into that space, considering things like furniture, shadow, and lighting, to allow for a more realistic insight. The app has updated significantly over the years to become increasingly immersive.

Visualizing products in a real, contextual space is hugely beneficial for a customer’s purchasing experience and perception of a specific brand. If your customer sees buying the right product from you as simple and convenient, they’re more likely to stick with your organization long-term.

The product catalog and visualization approach to AR in brand development has grown increasingly popular in the last two years, perhaps driven by the demand for more online shopping opportunities. In 2020, Wayfair announced the release of an updated version of its “View in Room” app, which now uses LiDAR technology to provide enhanced utility when shopping for home products.

According to Wayfair, the LiDAR technology and “RealityKit” software give customers a more authentic and realistic view, so they can make better decisions about what they want to buy. According to Apple, customers are 11 times more likely to buy an item of furniture if they have seen how it looks in their home using AR.

Creating Unique Brand Experiences

AR is one of the technology innovations in our current landscape, helping blur the lines between digital worlds and reality. In a future defined by the rise of the metaverse, AR could have a significant impact on how we spend our time in a more virtual world.

Already, companies are taking advantage of this, with things like virtual pop-up shops and temporary experiences intended to differentiate their brands. For instance, Machine-A, a London-based concept store, is usually committed to showcasing contemporary fashion designs.

When it became apparent that London fashion week for 2020 would be virtual, Machine-A came up with a virtual boutique enabled by AR. By scanning a QR code embedded into billboards and posters across London, users could enter the boutique virtually from their phones and experience the designs themselves.

The concept created by Machine-A has opened the minds of countless business brand teams and marketers to new methods of increasing engagement and awareness among customers. In a world where you can’t necessarily interact with your top customers in person, providing them with a new and immersive experience can be a great way to generate loyalty.

The companies more willing to invest in innovative solutions like AR are also more likely to stand out as innovators in their field. Other companies have experimented with similar “pop-up” experiences and unique ways to capture audience attention. For example, Burberry placed a QR code in a Harrods store, which customers could scan to visit a branded experience, where an Elphis statue walked around in their surroundings through the lens of their smartphone camera.

It’s even possible to use AR experiences to attract the attention of new audience groups. For instance, the retail brand, Pull & Bear launched an AR game created with Facebook to help the company reach the 90% of Gen Z customers who identify as “gamers.”

Provide New Levels of Customer Support

As many of today’s businesses know, memorable branding isn’t just about having the right image or website; it’s also about providing the correct level of customer service and support. Most purchasing and brand loyalty decisions made today are based on customer experience.

Providing customers with unique experiences to improve their shopping journey is sure to make your company stand out in the new digital age. But it’s also possible to go even further with AR in your brand CX strategy too.

Amazon Salon, for instance, the first bricks-and-mortar hair salon created by Amazon, was partially established to test new technology. The “point and learn” service, for example, allowed customers to point a product they were interested in on a display or shelf and immediately access educational content. Users could also scan QR codes to visit the product page on the QR site.

This helps customers immediately get to the product they want to buy without relying on input from human services agents. In a similar vein, AR could be an excellent way to onboard a customer, learning how to use a new product for the first time.

Imagine having a user’s manual your customer can enjoy scanning through, thanks to AR technology. All your customer needs to do is scan the QR code on the back of a product, and they can see the item they need to build or install coming to life in front of them. This reduces the risk of customers having to call for help from tech support and means clients can see the value in their purchases a lot faster.

Companies can embrace AR as a virtual learning experience, helping users collect information and learn how to do things through an immersive first-hand experience. This kind of immersive technology could help to make any brand stand out as more user-experience-focused. Even car companies could essentially provide their customers with a complete virtual HUD showing them how each button and dial on their dashboard works.

Upgrade Website Design

Perhaps the most common way companies will be using AR to create branded experiences today is by updating their website. You’ve probably already seen examples of AR being used in a host of retail sites, with new experiences designed specifically for the age of augmented reality.

360-degree images, for instance, allow customers to essentially “look around” a product, and see it from different angles, just like they would if they were looking at the item in-store. We can see an excellent example of this on the BMW build-your-own web page, where vehicle browsers can see their vehicles from every angle.

The 360-degree product viewing experience lets you check everything from the side molding to the sculpted edges in perfect detail.

QR codes and app downloads can also allow customers to take their AR experience even further, looking at things like what life would be like behind the wheel of one of these virtually augmented vehicles.

As AR becomes more commonplace and the tools available for designers in this arena continue to expand, there will be even more opportunities available to bring AR into the website experience. Even essential website upgrades today might include allowing customers to upload pictures of themselves or their homes, then using augmented reality technology to implement parts of a product catalog into the space.

AR Virtual Events

Finally, when it comes to exploring all the unique ways you can build a better brand experience and excellent customer relationships with AR, it’s worth looking at the event space. The event landscape has struggled significantly over the last couple of years. The pandemic forced most live events to be canceled, and although the post-pandemic era holds new hope for upcoming in-person experiences, the landscape will be very different.

Going forward, most companies plan to avoid a complete shift back to in-person events by creating “hybrid” experiences and augmented reality events instead. Augmented and virtual reality tools allow customers to step into an event arena from wherever they are.

For instance, the Pot Noodle Unilever brand hosted a virtual alternative careers fair in AR, where people could use their phones to navigate through a range of graduate employer booths. The unique career fair experience was designed to replace the more common in-person interactions graduates might have as they approached the end of their education.

The custom-developed 3D booths featured a range of different employers, and students could tap on the booth screen they were interested in to see a video from each employer. As an added bonus, the connection to the Pot Noodle AR careers fair website meant that students could also instantly apply for any of the jobs they were interested in.

Similar events could help brands recreate some of the meaningful experiential experiences that their customers have been missing out on in the last couple of years. They could also act as a valuable tool for bringing together people in a hybrid event, where someone visiting an in-person demo table could scan a QR code to send virtual demonstrations of a product back to their team.

This would reduce the number of people who needed to be present in an event environment at any given time, reducing the risk of health issues.

Bringing Brands to Life with AR

In the new consumer landscape, brand relationships are more important than ever. As a result, customers are making more careful choices about who they purchase from, based on their understanding of that company’s values and differentiators.

Now that you won’t always have an opportunity to interact with customers in-person to earn their trust, AR could be the solution for a lot of companies in search of new engagement tools. All you need to do is figure out how you’ll leverage all the benefits AR can offer.

Will you be creating an app, building a new website with enhanced 360-degree photos, or designing in-person experiences? Hopefully, these examples have inspired you to start exploring your options.

Featured image via Unsplash.

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15 décembre 2021/par Service comm.

Exciting New Tools For Designers, Holidays 2021

Actualités, Actualités

The year’s winding down as everyone segues into a much-needed holiday R&R. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some awesome new tools and resources for website design projects.

Check them out, and hit the ground running in January. Here’s what’s new for designers this holiday period. Enjoy!

Fancy Border Radius Generator

Fancy Border Radius Generator is a fun tool that allows you to create exciting shapes for elements. Use the included templates or create your own border shapes and then export the CSS/HTML for a variety of uses.

Pulsetic

Pulsetic answers the question: “Is your website down?” Get website downtime alerts by phone call, SMS, email, or Slack. Create beautiful status pages and incident management reports and keep visitors (and your team) updated.

Ffflux SVG Generator

Ffflux SVG Generator makes it easy to generate fluid and organic-feeling gradients. You can use the resulting graphics as backgrounds to elements on a page to give a colorful fluid look to page elements. Choose colors and styles, then save or copy your SVG for use.

Fable

Fable is a web-based motion design platform to help you tell moving stories. It’s designed to be easy enough for beginners to use but has tools that even the most experienced motion designers can appreciate. This is a premium tool, but you can try it free.

Modern Fluid Typography Editor

Modern Fluid Typography Editor takes the guesswork out of sizing and scale for type sizes on different screens. Set a few preferences and see ranges your type styles should fall in. This typography calculator is visual and easy to use.

Emoji to Scale

Emoji to Scale is a fun look at emojis in a real-world relationship to each other. Make sure to also note the Pokemon to Scale project, which is just as much fun.

Page Flip Text Effect

Page Flip Text Effect is a fun and straightforward PSD asset that adds a nice element to design projects. Everyone can use some fun, colorful animation, right?

Nanonets

Nanonets is a practical tool for automated table extraction. You can snag tables from PDFs, scanned files, and images. Then capture relevant data stored in tabular structures on any document and convert to JSON Excel, or CSV and download.

Browsers.page

Browsers.page shows browser name and version, matched with a list of the browsers you support as a company or project. It’s a visual reminder to update if you are working with some browser lag. It’s a free tool and includes a frontend API.

UKO UI

UKO UI is a Figma dashboard and design system bundle packed with components and pages to build from. It’s free for personal use.

Floating UI

Floating UI is a low-level library for positioning “floating” elements like tooltips, popovers, dropdowns, menus, and more. Since these types of elements float on top of the UI without disrupting the flow of content, challenges arise when positioning them. It exposes primitives, which enable a floating element to be positioned next to a given reference element while appearing in view for the user.

Style-Dictionary-Play

Style-Dictionary-Play lets you experiment with a style dictionary in your browser with a live preview and mobile and desktop views. It’s an open-source tool and allows for URL project sharing, and you can use it without logging in or signing up.

Airplane Runbooks

Airplane Runbooks makes it easy to turn small amounts of code into complex internal workflows. Model onboarding flows, admin operations, cron-like schedules, and more and share with your team. It’s like Zapier but for first-party operations that touch prod data.

Shoelace

Shoelace is a forward-thinking library of web components that works with any framework. It’s fully customizable – and has a dark mode. It’s built with accessibility in mind, and the open-source tool is packed with components.

Tutorial: Coloring with Code

Coloring with Code is an excellent tutorial by the team at Codrops that will help you create beautiful, inspiring, and unique color palettes/combinations, all from the comfort of your favorite text editor. It’s practical and easy to follow along as you work through the steps on your own.

Stytch

Stytch is a full-stack authentication and authorization platform whose APIs make it simple to seamlessly onboard, authenticate and engage users. Improve security and user experience by going passwordless with this premium tool.

Highlight

Highlight keeps web apps stable. With pixel-perfect session replay, you’ll get complete visibility into issues and interactions that are slowing down users. You can start using this premium tool in minutes, and it works on every framework.

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13 décembre 2021/par Service comm.

Improving the Reader Experience With Adobe Embed API

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

The Adobe PDF Embed API provides a simple way for web developers to display PDFs on their web pages. While browsers provide good support for rendering PDFs, they do so in an « out of context » manner that takes over the entire screen. The PDF Embed API however lets you place a PDF within your site’s layout, providing much better control over the position and size of the rendered document. This improved experience also provides deeper integration into the PDF viewer, letting developers listen for events and perform operations on the document. In this article, I’m going to demonstrate a simple, but hopefully really useful example of this.

Imagine a large document covering many pages, for example, a textbook. Your website users, potentially students, could work with the document over many weeks while school is in session. If the document is a few hundred pages long, it would be incredibly useful to remember where they were in the document when they start reading again. While a large PDF may have bookmarks, even then they could only be for chapters or other sections, not the exact page the user last read. Luckily, the Embed API provides a method to help with this. Let’s take a look!

Source de l’article sur DZONE

4 décembre 2021/par Service comm.

Improve Performance by Combining Headless CMS with an Image CDN

Actualités, Actualités

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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28 septembre 2021/par Service comm.

7 Tips for Transforming CX with Live Chat

Actualités, Actualités

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.

Quiz: The Maddeningly Difficult Metadata Quiz

Actualités, Actualités

Metadata is an essential component of any website. It clarifies the meaning behind your content in a way that search engines, and browsers are able to understand.

Using metadata effectively can mean the difference between a successful site, and a total flop. So, how well do you understand this critical web design tool? Take our maddeningly difficult metadata quiz and find out!

Featured image via Unsplash.

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10 septembre 2021/par Service comm.

7 Ways to Use Gamification in Marketing Campaigns

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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.