This is an article from DZone’s 2022 Enterprise Application Integration Trend Report.
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In the echo chambers of application development, we constantly hear the mantra « API-first, » but this slogan has a fundamental flaw: APIs should typically be the last choice when building a distributed application. The correct war cry ought to instead be: « APIs outside, events inside. »
For decades Artificial Intelligence has been a focus of best-selling science fiction authors and an antagonist for blockbuster Hollywood movies. But AI is no longer relegated to the realm of science fiction, it inhabits the world around us. From the biggest enterprise companies to plucky startups, businesses everywhere are building and deploying AI at incredible speed.
In fact, open source allows anyone with a laptop to build impressively good AI models in a day.
Today, more than 100 billion searches are conducted every month on the Google search engine alone. Search engine users conduct searches for several reasons including the foundational conversion of information into action. An action could be a decision to purchase, consume information for decision-making, or seek a better understanding of an issue or topic among others. Search engines make information available at our fingertips right whenever we need it.
In this era of big data, search solutions are useful not only for popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing but also for enterprises for monitoring and managing the growing volumes of data in their databases to enhance operational efficiency. The enterprise search industry has grown remarkably and is expected to be worth $8.90 billion by 2024.
This is an article from DZone’s 2021 Kubernetes and the Enterprise Trend Report.
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In the modern technology landscape, Kubernetes is a widely adopted platform that enables organizations to deploy and manage applications at scale. The container orchestration platform simplifies infrastructure provisioning for microservice-based applications, which empowers efficient workload management through modularity. Kubernetes supports various deployment resources to help implement CI/CD pipelines using updates and versioning. While Kubernetes offers rolling updates as the default deployment strategy, several use cases require a non-conventional approach to deploying or updating cluster services.
This is an article from DZone’s 2021 Kubernetes and the Enterprise Trend Report.
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As more organizations have begun to embrace cloud-native technologies, Kubernetes adoption has become the industry standard for container orchestration. This shift toward Kubernetes has largely automated and simplified the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, providing numerous benefits over legacy management protocols for traditional monolithic systems. However, securely managing Kubernetes at scale comes with a unique set of challenges, including hardening the cluster, securing the supply chain, and detecting threats at runtime.
Picture a dark office, blinds drawn. Picture a UX designer smoking a cigar. See the light filtered through the smoke whipped to fog by a spinning ceiling fan. Watch as the UX designer sits at a desk and considers the website.
The UX designer has devised a series of tests to determine if a green button is better than a red button. One of them involves tipping a tortoise onto its back. He looks the website over carefully and says, “Describe in single words, only the good things that come to mind about your mother.”
The website pauses, sweating under pressure, then replies, “Let me tell you about my mother…”
BLAM! The website pulls the trigger of an unseen gun, and the UX designer collapses, leaving the project to be rebuilt from scratch in Material by Harrison Ford, with overuse of Post-its delegated to Edward James Olmos.
In the past’s bleak dystopian future (1982’s Blade Runner was set in 2019) no one benefitted from asking the wrong questions. And little has changed.
Designing any test to verify UX is fraught with as many complications as administering the test. Questions are skewed by bias, conscious or otherwise, and competing agendas. Even with something as apparently simple as a split test, the potential for distortion is immense.
When planned by a designer, a UX test offers little benefit to a client; the benefit is to the designer, who can then say their ideas are validated (or not).
Imagine hiring a developer to code a website, only to discover that the developer didn’t know CSS and expected to be paid to learn it before completing the work. You would hire someone else because that developer isn’t qualified.
From a client’s perspective, a UX designer should know, through experience, whether a green button is better than a red button. Designing an elaborate test to split-test the button color serves little purpose other than indemnifying the designer against mistakes.
It’s widely accepted that there is substantial ROI (Return On Investment) from UX testing. We’ve all heard apocryphal stories about sites that split-tested their checkout and improved retention by 5%.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that without user testing, that site could have improved its checkout retention by 4.9% simply by hiring a competent, experienced designer. But what about the remaining 0.1%? Well, for most sites, 0.1% represents very little profit. And the cost of recovering it via testing far exceeds the benefits.
When a company the size of Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, or Google split tests a website, it can afford to allocate $25k for user testing because it stands to gain 0.1%, and that represents far more than $25k. To meet the same 0.1% improvement, a small business has to design and run the same tests, incurring the same costs. But in the case of a small business, $25k could eat up all of its profits.
UX testing almost always works. But it is only profitable at scale.
If a good UI designer with a grounding in UX can improve checkout retention by 4.9%, tripling the project budget for just 0.1% more is a tough sell. Bluntly, that $25k is better spent on advertising.
We all have the tendency to think we’re unique. It’s a survival trait attributed to our prehistoric brain. That belief in uniqueness is particularly strong in highly competitive people. We all think our site, our side-project, our approach are original. And we’re all wrong.
When a psychiatrist sits down with a patient, they have two immediate goals: categorize that patient into an established diagnosis, and assess the severity of the condition. It may be that the patient is depressed or anxious or even suffering from a potentially more debilitating condition like schizophrenia. What the psychiatrist is not trying to do, is define a new illness.
Occasionally — perhaps once per decade — a genuinely unusual patient will present themselves, and a new form of illness is considered. New treatments are found and tested. These treatments are rarely developed on behalf of individual patients; doctors work with grants from governments, medical schools, or the pharmaceutical industry and publish their results.
The vast majority of websites face similar problems. They deal with similar demographics, work within a similar culture, and deal with similar technology. As such, they can be categorized in the same manner a psychiatrist categorizes patients.
The key to delivering successful UX solutions is not UX testing in individual cases, but rather UX research, examining similar projects, and cribbing their solutions. If you categorize a project accurately, you’ll find a solution readily available.
Your client doesn’t need to pay for UX testing to benefit from it. Enterprise sites, government sites, and even personal projects will test UX patterns. Sites like Shopify or Stripe will user-test their checkout processes at scale and enable companies to benefit from the results by adopting their platforms.
If you’re currently testing designs for small business, one of two things is true: either you’re wasting your client’s money investigating a problem someone else has already solved, or you’re designing something so original that it has no precedent (and you probably shouldn’t be).
Designers should be opinionated. Designers should know UX best practices and how they apply to a range of scenarios. Designers should be capable of making an educated guess. Designers should be self-validating.
Once or twice in your career, you may find a legitimate need to test something. However, the vast majority of the time, the correct answer is to tip the tortoise back onto its feet and choose whichever color button has the higher contrast.
Featured image: Still of Brion James in Blade Runner. Copyright Warner Bros. Entertainment
The post The Case Against UX Testing first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Governance is the way in which an organization is run and controlled [1]. Governance is the way rules, norms, and actions are structured, sustained, regulated, and held accountable [2].
Generally, governance is categorized into three types based on the nature of the organization, type of outcomes desired, and practical agenda of the organization [3-12].
Apache Tomcat is an open-source application server maintained by the Apache community. It is one of the most popular solutions for hosting Java applications due to its ease of use and lightweight yet versatile functionality. However, if you run the projects based on Jakarta EE 8 (or higher), you may be interested to use the TomEE server with built-in required enterprise technology that isn’t found in Tomcat.
Due to the extreme popularity of these stacks globally and within Jelastic PaaS in particular, we’ve decided to share the tips on how to install automatically clustered Tomcat and TomEE servers to get a highly available solution that can efficiently serve a large number of users, process high traffic, and be reliable.
Enterprises in 2021 deal with a massive amount of data on a regular basis. The Global Data Fabric market analysis says, « businesses that use insights from data extraction will earn $1.8 Trillion by the end of 2021 ». With such great amounts of data, it is becoming increasingly hard to maintain and categorize the collected data. Moreover, manually processing the data only became more time-consuming and monotonous. With rapid technological advancements, companies are finding ways to find even the slightest advantages to be the best in the market. Hence, adopting the right ELT tools/platform can greatly contribute to enterprise productivity. ELT tools can collect data, segregate the data based on common characteristics and provide clear-cut insights about the collected data.
Below is a list of the 10 enterprise-grade ELT tools that I rate above 4 (out of 5). These can provide great advantages to enterprises that adopt them.
From 45,000-year-old cave paintings to 21st-century space rocket diagrams, illustrations have long played a significant role in human communication.
Pictures cross-language and literacy barriers, allowing people to understand and communicate complex moods and feelings that they cannot in words. When we were little, we could understand and appreciate E.H. Shepard’s illustrations of Winnie the Pooh and friends long before we could read A.A. Milne’s words.
The word ‘to illustrate’ has two main meanings: to create a picture of; and to demonstrate or provide an example of. In the context of the web, illustration is part decoration, part emotional signal, helping to create a particular impression to the user by painting a metaphorical picture.
Illustrations provide a useful shorthand means to convey mood or tone, the voice of a brand.
You could argue that icons are illustrations because they are pictorial, but they are symbols. Icons may, and usually should, fit stylistically with illustrations, but they are not illustrations themselves. A symbol is a simplified representation of an object, idea, or action. For example, ‘search’ is usually represented by a magnifying glass shape.
Illustrations, on the other hand, are more complex. They transmit an underlying emotional quality that connects with the intended audience. Illustrations can create a narrative about the subject without the need to add more text. It gives even the most basic, functional website a sense of personality when used properly.
Illustration styles are many and varied, ranging from simple outlines to detailed, full color, realistic images. And the amount of illustration used varies greatly across sites.
Different styles evoke different feelings and provoke different responses, so it is important to think carefully when choosing an illustration style. There are two major factors to consider: what the site is for and what sort of character do you want to give it.
It is possible to break things down into broad categories to see what works best in different areas. We’re going to look at how designers can use illustration to good effect across four categories…
Financial services, fintech, enterprise software, and larger corporate sites tend to use illustration as a way to humanize themselves.
The style tends to be minimal, using simple shapes and sparingly. Acorns uses a simple oak leaf motif to go with its acorn logo. Other illustrations are tied in by keeping to shades of green.
This creates a feel typical of newer companies (Acorns was founded in 2014), especially those that are primarily web-based.
Longer established, more traditional organizations use illustration for the same purposes, although they may be restricted to certain areas only, where they want to emphasize approachability. Danske Bank, for example (founded in 1871), has illustration on its corporate site in the ‘About’ and ‘Sustainability’ sections.
Visa also limits illustration to a specific area, the section on Visa Direct. This has the effect of separating this particular (newer) service from the rest of what Visa offers.
Another increasingly popular approach in this category is abstract graphics. This is particularly useful when it is difficult to show what is being promoted. For example, Instabase adds arrangements of geometric shapes for visual interest, using the same color palette as the site icons.
One of the key points with illustration in these types of sites is getting the balance right between friendly, human and approachable on the one hand and serious, trustworthy, and secure on the other. Get too cutesy, and potential customers won’t take you seriously. Github’s enterprise page does have some illustration, but the color is less vivid, and Octocat is only alluded to, unlike the home page which is illustration-rich.
Things get a little freer when it comes to food and drink. Styles vary much more, and the personality conveyed can be stronger and more individual. Some still go for a light peppering of illustration, with aspects such as color and type made stronger, while in other cases, the illustration becomes much more prominent.
Palais Kitchen and Caleño both do the former, with brand-appropriate line drawings.
My Drink’s vintage-style animated illustrations take the place of photographs to balance the text on its home page.
Melopeion Honey doesn’t use very many illustrations, but what it does use is large.
Monkey47 could be described as a concept website, and the illustrations play a key role. (The social media menu is really rather charming.)
In this category, what users really want to see is photographs, but illustration can help too. A photograph can only show what something looks like, while illustration can add the extra emotional dimension connected to an experience.
At the minimal end of the scale, Protos Car Rental uses some nice, simple illustrations to emphasize the holiday aspect of its business.
Comptoir Libanais blends photographs with illustration to create a very distinct identity.
Hotel Frida is also about character, and the victorian-style fantastical animal illustrations help create a quirkiness.
Highcourt uses simplified and stylized layout illustrations to give a complete overview of the building’s interior than photographs could.
The Neverlands doesn’t just use illustration; the whole site is an immersive experience based on illustration.
Sites promoting ethical and or sustainable companies, natural skincare, natural and/or organic food and drink, vegan products, social responsibility, and so forth tend to rely heavily on illustration, particularly if they are reasonably new.
Quite often, this is in the form of plant drawings that make a lazy allusion to nature, but it can also involve conveying information in a way that doesn’t come across as lecturing.
Wild Souls steers clear of any hint of hippiness, with a sense of randomness to its illustration placement.
Superfood Gin does the plant thing, but it is in reference to the botanical ingredients here, so it is very relevant.
Capsul’in’s main company page is a fairly standard offering, but for its Zero Impact product, it has a separate section with illustrations to help explain the product’s features.
Donate Responsibly uses illustration to explain how well-meant action can be inadvertently damaging without appearing to scold or patronize.
A variety of children’s brands will use illustration — even when it is parents or guardians who are really the target — and Little Yawn Collective combines the child-friendly, and natural product approaches with its sleepy animal illustrations.
Illustration can be a powerful tool in a designer’s arsenal, but it can be difficult to get right because it invokes emotion, and emotion is subjective.
Just like type or color, it needs to be used appropriately and with care. Sometimes less is more, and sometimes getting the placement absolutely right can make the difference between a successful design and a flop.
This is just a selection of the wide range of illustration styles and usages out there on the web, but we hope it will give you a starting point when you are considering whether and how to use illustrations in your next project.
The post How Illustration Adds Emotion To UX first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
