Relational databases distribute their data across many tables by normalization or according to business entities. This makes maintaining a growing database schema easier. Real-world queries often span across multiple tables, and hence joining these tables is inevitable.
PostgreSQL uses many algorithms to join tables. In this article, we will see how joins work behind the scenes from a planner perspective and understand how to optimize them.
In this article, you will learn how SQL aggregate functions can represent an easy way to significantly improve your application’s performance. Mainly, you will see how they were a game-changer in a real-world scenario based on a data-driven application developed for a startup operating in the sports industry.
Let’s now delve deeper into this scenario and learn why you can’t ignore SQL aggregate functions in data science.
There are a lot of factors that contribute to a better user experience on a website. Pages need to load quickly to give users peace of mind and efficiency. Navigation must be clear and straightforward, with direct pathways for visitors to follow when finding your contact pages, blog posts, and products. Your colors need to work seamlessly together while providing just enough contrast in the areas that need it most.
Excellent user experience needs to be considered for every part of your website that acts as a touchpoint with a potential customer or user.
One of the most significant touchpoints of all is your forms.
All websites need some form of interactive content to thrive. Users need to be able to do something with the site, whether it’s looking for information with a search bar, contacting a team for a quote, making a booking, or completing a purchase. Forms power the majority of the interactive activities available on websites.
If you know how to master great UX on a form, you can contribute to more meaningful interactions between your brands and their customers. But not all web forms are the same. Here are some of the top types of forms you need to master and how you can optimize them.
The Opt-in Form is probably the best-known form in the digital landscape. It’s essentially a form that asks visitors to “opt-in” to a specific offer. Sometimes, this means signing up for a webinar; other times, it’ll be agreeing to an email newsletter or a regular series of blog updates.
Opt-in forms grab attention quickly and ask for something specific from the audience. For instance, this example from HuffPost encourages visitors to “Subscribe to the Morning Email.”
Opt-in forms are all about generating action.
Sometimes, they’re placed at the bottom of a landing page after a company has had a chance to explain precisely what they’re offering. Other times, you’ll find the opt-in form situated on a sidebar of a website, constantly enticing people to “sign up” if they like what they see on a blog post or article.
It’s also common for opt-in forms to appear as pop-ups and exit pop-ups on modern websites. For example, a brightly colored opt-in form that promises an immediate benefit to a customer could encourage them to hand over their details before they abandon your website.
So what kind of best practices go into an excellent opt-in form?
The Contact Form is another crucial part of building an effective UX for your website – but it’s also an element that web designers and business owners often overlook. When customers decide they want to learn more about a business, they need a quick and easy way to get in touch.
Contact forms need to be easy to find and use on any website. Usually, your user will expect to see a link to the contact form situated somewhere at the bottom of your webpage. It might be called “Contact Us” or “Customer Support.” Avoid anything that would go over the user’s head.
Aside from being easy to track down, your contact form also needs to reassure an audience that they’re making the right decision by getting in touch. Therefore, the content needs to be short, sweet, and authoritative—highlight why the user might contact your company and how they can do so.
Avoid any unnecessary information in the contact form. For example, you don’t need to know your client’s age and their job to answer a question about where their nearest physical branch is. Keep form fields to the point, or you’ll chase customers away.
Design something personalized but straightforward to make the most of your contact form. Use features like smart content and conditional logic, if possible, to adapt the page to the user’s needs. Dynamic content is becoming increasingly valuable these days. Other best practices include:
Sometimes, when your customers have seen what you have to offer and they’ve checked out the competition, they decide to go ahead with their purchase. To facilitate this, you’re going to need an online payment form. Online forms ensure that your customers can safely enter their credit or debit card details to purchase whatever you have to offer.
Most payment processing companies like PayPal, Square, and Stripe come with payment forms included, so you can easily embed them into a website in minutes. However, there’s always the option to customize those payment forms.
For instance, ideally, you’ll need a payment form that keeps your customer on the same page, so they don’t have to log into another browser to make their purchase. The fewer transitions your client has to make, the safer they’ll feel.
When designing any payment form, simplicity and security are the two most important factors. Your customer should be able to enter their information quickly and easily and get through the transaction process without worrying about their details.
Remember to:
Some companies bundle the contact form and the support form together. Others have a separate support form to get their queries routed directly to the people most capable of helping them. If you want to take the second route, it might be a good idea to design a “help” section on your website where you can locate the support form.
The “Help” section on a site often appears alongside other links on the footer. For instance, it could appear alongside “About” links and “Contact” options. Here’s an example of Hubspot’s Customer Support options:
The best customer support pages come with various ways for clients to help themselves and find answers to their most pressing questions. For example, you might have a search bar where your audience can search for the answers to their queries or a knowledge base full of helpful blogs.
Hubspot allows users to choose between a blog, knowledge base, academy training center, community forum, developer discussion board, and assistance from a certified partner.
Designing a good customer support form is about getting your audience the information they need as quickly as possible. Once again, you’ll need to stick to as few form fields as possible here to avoid angering an already frustrated customer. Also, remember to:
According to Microsoft, around 96% of customers say that customer service is crucial in determining their loyalty to a specific brand. Another 52% of global customers believe that companies need to respond to the feedback provided by customers.
To ensure your customer service strategies are on-par with what your customers expect, you need to get feedback from your audience. That’s where a feedback form comes in. Customer feedback forms often appear after a client has finished purchasing on the “thank you” screen. They may also occur after a customer has completed a service interaction online.
Here’s an example of an Apple feedback form:
By leaving you feedback, your customer is doing you a massive favor. They’re giving you a chance to learn from your mistakes and improve the service you can give next time around. Feedback is one of the best tools for any business that wants to grow and thrive.
If you want your customers to use your feedback forms, you’ll need to make them as simple as possible. Your customers don’t have time to waste on a complex form.
Though you can pre-enter some information on a feedback form to make your customer’s life easier, don’t overstep your bounds. Adding your customer’s email address to the form is fine if they’re already a customer with you. Pre-selecting the “very satisfied” rating above would look presumptuous.
The online form is an essential part of any web design project, but it’s also frequently overlooked. Unfortunately, without a good set of forms, your customers will struggle to interact with your company in a meaningful way.
When creating any form, remember:
The better your forms are, the more effective your interactions with customers will be. Remember, it’s not just the face-to-face interactions that your customers judge when making decisions about your business and whether to trust you. Today’s digital world has prompted a new demand for more meaningful virtual experiences.
Your form could be the first interaction you have with a client, whether it’s a contact form, a booking form, or something else entirely. Get that right, and you can improve your chances of your customers coming back to interact with you again later.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post The Top 5 Form Types to Use in Your Web Design first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Our profession evolves every year, whether through the introduction of a new tool, a new cloud service, or a new working method. This constant evolution requires the establishment of a learning culture to continuously share experiences and ideas, thus encouraging everyone to gain new knowledge each year.
Obviously, this demands a portion of our working time and an online library of training resources maintained by entities with authority in the domain. These entities are responsible for updating the content to allow us to continuously improve our skills, sometimes to advance in our career in order to aim for an internal or external evolution. Therefore, relying on trusted education partners is important to ensure the highest-quality learning content.
There has been a couple of years since the announcement of the removal of Apache Zookeeper as a dependency to manage Apache Kafka metadata. Since version 2.8, we now can run a Kafka cluster without Zookeeper. This article will go over three easy ways to get started with a single node cluster using containers.
Apache Kafka implements independent control and data planes for its clusters. The control plane manages the cluster, keeps track of what brokers are alive, and takes action when the set changes. Meanwhile, the data plane consists of the features required to handle producers and consumers and their records. In the previous iterations, Zookeeper was the cluster component that held most of the implementation of the control plane.
Every year, at this time, blogs like this one like to try and predict what’s going to happen in the year ahead. It’s a way of drawing a line under the archive and starting afresh. A rejuvenation that, as humans, we find life-affirming.
Ten years ago, I would have had high confidence in these predictions — after all I was eventually right about SVG adoption, even if it took a decade. But the last few years have shown that web design is tightly interwoven with the muggle world, and that world is anything but predictable.
So as we look at what might occur in the next year (or five), think of it less as a set of predictions and more as a wishlist.
When I write this post every January, I like to keep myself honest by glancing back at the previous year’s predictions to gauge how accurate (or not) my predictions have been.
Last year I predicted the long-term trend for minimalism would end, WordPress would decline, cryptocurrency would go mainstream, and then hedged my bets by saying we’d make both more and fewer video calls.
Gradients, maximalism, and the nineties revival pulled us away from minimalism. It’s still popular, just not as dominant.
WordPress is still the biggest CMS in the world and will continue to be for some time. But the relentless grind of no-code site builders at the low end, and being outperformed by better CMS at the high end, mean that WordPress has passed its peak.
Over-inflated predictions for BitCoin reaching $100k by December 2021 turned out to be a damp squib. In the end, Bitcoin only tripled in value in 2021. However, with micro-tipping and major tech companies moving into the arena, it’s clear digital currency arrived in the public consciousness in 2021.
And how could I be wrong about more but also fewer video calls? So I’m calling that my first clean sweep ever. With that heady boast, let’s take a look at the next twelve months.
Do not expect the Metaverse to be significant in anything but marketing speak. Yes, the hardware is slowly becoming more available, but the Metaverse in 2022 is like playing an MMORPG on PS5: theoretically, great fun, until you discover that absolutely none of your friends can get their hands on a console.
Ignore the blog posts predicting a noughties-era retro trend. All those writers have done is looked at the nineties-era trend and added a decade. Fashions aren’t mathematical; they’re poetic. Retro happens when people find a period that rhymes with present-day hopes and fears. After the last couple of years, if we revisit a decade, it’s likely to be the late-forties.
Finally, don’t expect seismic change. Material design, parallax scrolling, and jQuery are still with us and are still valid choices under the right circumstances. Trends aren’t neat; they don’t start in January and conclude in December.
Predictions tend to be self-fulfilling. So we’ve limited ourselves to five trends that we believe are either positive or, at worst harmless. Of course, there are no guarantees, but if these come to pass, we’ll be in good shape for 2023.
Underpinning the cryptocurrency industry are blockchains. In simple terms, they’re a set of data that can be appended to but can’t be edited or deleted. Think of it as version control for data.
As with most technology, the first wave has been a way to make a fast buck. However, the exciting development is blockchain technology itself and the transformative nature of the approach. For example, Médecins Sans Frontières reportedly stores refugees’ medical records on the blockchain.
Imagine the Internet as a set of data, editable for a micro-fee, and freely accessed by anyone anywhere. Instead of millions of sites, a single, secure, autonomous source of truth. Someone somewhere’s working on it.
Even before world events descended into an endless tirade of grim news, time was running out for dull, corporate, geometric sans-serif design.
We added gradients, we added personality, we embraced humor. And contrary to the established business logic, we still make money. Over the past few years, there have been extraordinary efforts by designers and developers to examine, test, and champion accessibility, and thanks to them, inclusive design is no longer reliant on the lowest common denominator.
In 2022 you can get experimental without obstructing 10%+ of your users.
Green is a fascinating color, the primary that isn’t (except in RGB, when it is).
Green has the same visual weight as blue, is substantially more flexible, and yet to date, has been radically underutilized in digital design.
Green has a prominent cultural association with the environment. At a time when tech companies are desperate to emphasize their ethical credentials, marketing companies will inevitably begin promoting a brand color shift to green as a quick fix for all those dumped chemicals, strip mines, and plastic-filled seas.
We’ve already seen earthy hues acquire popular appeal. At the other end of the vibrancy scale, neons are popular. Green spans both approaches with everything from calm sages to acidic neons.
In 2022, if you’re looking for a color to capture the moment, look to green.
A picture is supposed to be worth 1000 words, although I’m not sure anyone has actually tried to measure it. The problem is that sites increasingly rely on stock images, so the 1000 words that we’re getting may or may not accurately reflect 100% of our message.
In 2022, a handful of well-chosen words will be worth more than an image, with hero images taking a back seat to large hero text. This is aided by a number of minor trends, the most notable of which is the willingness of businesses to look beyond the geometric sans-serif to a more expressive form of typography.
Reading through the prediction posts on sites other than this, almost everyone agrees on large hero text replacing images, which virtually guarantees it won’t happen. Still, at the start of 2022, this seems to be the direction we’re taking.
One of the unexpected consequences of the past couple of years has been a renewed connection with nature. The effortless complexity in nature is endlessly engaging.
We’ve already begun to popularise gradients — there are no flat colors in nature — and the next logical step is the addition of noise.
In visual terms, noise is the grainy texture that sits so beautifully in vector illustrations. Noise has dipped in and out of trends for years, hampered a little by the leap in file size it creates. However, with WebP and Avif file types, noise is now usable on production sites.
Designing in 2022, when in doubt, throw some noise at it.
Featured image via Unsplash.
The post 5 Big Web Design Predictions for 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
The post Popular Design News of the Week: December 27, 2021 – January 2, 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
The Cloud is ubiquitous: any company looking to ramp up quickly will provision its compute, networking, and storage with its preferred cloud provider, and get started rolling out their products. That makes total sense from a business perspective. The Cloud has simplified development and automation exponentially over the years, and emerging tech such as AI and IoT will only accelerate this.
However, the catch is that the very same foundational architectures which drive the Cloud’s efficiency, flexibility, and cost benefits ultimately also are its weakest links from a security perspective. The result is the daily march of headlines we all read about: ever larger and deeper breaches of data and systems.
In the video below, we take a closer look at Iterator Design Pattern in Java. This tutorial includes an introduction, example, and key points. Let’s get started!
In this video tutorial, we take a closer look at Object Pool Design Pattern in Java. This tutorial includes an introduction, example, and key points. Let’s get started!
