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Évolution des principaux outils de changement de schéma de base de données

Évolution des principaux outils de changement de schéma de base de données

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Depuis l’avènement des bases de données, les outils permettant leur changement de schéma ont connu une évolution considérable. Découvrons-en plus sur ce sujet !

Migration de schéma de base de données peut être la zone la plus risquée dans le développement d’application – c’est difficile, risqué et douloureux. Les outils de migration de schéma de base de données existent pour soulager la douleur et ont fait des progrès considérables : des outils CLI de base aux outils GUI, des clients SQL simples à la plateforme de collaboration tout-en-un.

These tools are great for testing and debugging, but they can be difficult to use for schema migration. You need to understand the syntax of the SQL language and the structure of the database. If you don’t have the necessary skills, you may end up writing inefficient queries or making mistakes in your schema changes.

GUI Clients – MySQL Workbench / pgAdmin

MySQL Workbench and pgAdmin are graphical user interface (GUI) clients for MySQL and PostgreSQL respectively. They provide a graphical representation of your database schema, allowing you to easily view and modify the structure. You can also use them to write and execute queries.

These tools are great for schema migration, as they allow you to easily view and modify the structure of your database. However, they can be difficult to use for testing, as they don’t provide a way to easily execute multiple queries at once. Additionally, they can be slow when dealing with large databases.

Collaboration Database Platforms

Collaboration database platforms such as Liquibase, Flyway, and Redgate are designed to make database schema migration easier. These tools provide a graphical interface for viewing and modifying the structure of your database, as well as a way to execute multiple queries at once. They also provide version control, allowing you to easily track changes to your database schema.

These tools are great for both testing and schema migration. They provide an easy way to view and modify the structure of your database, as well as a way to easily execute multiple queries at once. Additionally, they provide version control, allowing you to easily track changes to your database schema.

Migration de schéma de base de données – un processus difficile et risqué

La migration de schéma de base de données est peut-être la zone la plus risquée dans le développement d’applications – c’est difficile, risqué et douloureux. Des outils de migration de schéma de base de données existent pour soulager la douleur et ont fait des progrès considérables : des outils en ligne de commande (CLI) aux outils graphiques (GUI), des clients SQL simples aux plateformes de collaboration tout-en-un.

Clients en ligne de commande (CLI) – MySQL / PSQL

MySQL et psql sont les CLI natifs pour MySQL et PostgreSQL respectivement. Vous pouvez envoyer des commandes ou des requêtes directement aux serveurs MySQL ou PostgreSQL à partir de la ligne de commande.

Ces outils sont excellents pour le test et le débogage, mais ils peuvent être difficiles à utiliser pour la migration de schéma. Vous devez comprendre la syntaxe du langage SQL et la structure de la base de données. Si vous n’avez pas les compétences nécessaires, vous risquez d’écrire des requêtes inefficaces ou de faire des erreurs dans vos modifications de schéma.

Clients graphiques (GUI) – MySQL Workbench / pgAdmin

MySQL Workbench et pgAdmin sont des clients d’interface utilisateur graphique (GUI) pour MySQL et PostgreSQL respectivement. Ils fournissent une représentation graphique de votre schéma de base de données, vous permettant de visualiser et de modifier facilement la structure. Vous pouvez également les utiliser pour écrire et exécuter des requêtes.

Ces outils sont excellents pour la migration de schéma, car ils vous permettent de visualiser et de modifier facilement la structure de votre base de données. Cependant, ils peuvent être difficiles à utiliser pour le test, car ils ne fournissent pas un moyen d’exécuter facilement plusieurs requêtes en même temps. De plus, ils peu

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Apprentissage profond en reconnaissance d'images: Techniques et défis

Apprentissage profond en reconnaissance d’images: Techniques et défis

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L’apprentissage profond en reconnaissance d’images est une technologie puissante qui permet de résoudre des problèmes complexes. Découvrez les techniques et les défis associés à cette technologie.

Dans le vaste royaume de l’intelligence artificielle, l’apprentissage profond est devenu un jeu-changer, en particulier dans le domaine de la reconnaissance d’images. La capacité des machines à reconnaître et à catégoriser des images, à la manière du cerveau humain, a ouvert une multitude d’opportunités et de défis. Plongeons-nous dans les techniques que l’apprentissage profond offre pour la reconnaissance d’images et les obstacles qui y sont associés.

Data: For CNNs to work, large amounts of data are required. The more data that is available, the more accurate the results will be. This is because the network needs to be trained on a variety of images, so it can learn to recognize patterns and distinguish between different objects.

Hurdles: The main challenge with CNNs is that they require a lot of data and computing power. This can be expensive and time-consuming, and it can also lead to overfitting if not enough data is available. Additionally, CNNs are not able to generalize well, meaning they are not able to recognize objects that they have not been trained on.

Réseaux de neurones convolutionnels (CNN)

Technique : Les CNN sont le pilier des systèmes de reconnaissance d’images modernes. Ils se composent de plusieurs couches de petites collections de neurones qui traitent des parties de l’image d’entrée, appelées champs réceptifs. Les résultats de ces collections sont ensuite assemblés de manière à se chevaucher, afin d’obtenir une meilleure représentation de l’image d’origine ; c’est une caractéristique distinctive des CNN.

Données : Pour que les CNN fonctionnent, des quantités importantes de données sont nécessaires. Plus il y a de données disponibles, plus les résultats seront précis. C’est parce que le réseau doit être formé sur une variété d’images, afin qu’il puisse apprendre à reconnaître des modèles et à distinguer différents objets.

Hurdles : Le principal défi avec les CNN est qu’ils nécessitent beaucoup de données et de puissance de calcul. Cela peut être coûteux et prendre du temps, et cela peut également entraîner un surajustement si pas assez de données sont disponibles. De plus, les CNN ne sont pas en mesure de généraliser bien, ce qui signifie qu’ils ne sont pas en mesure de reconnaître des objets qu’ils n’ont pas été formés.

Réseaux neuronaux profonds (DNN)

Technique : Les DNN sont une variante des CNN qui peuvent être utilisés pour la reconnaissance d’images. Ils sont constitués de plusieurs couches de neurones qui traitent des parties de l’image d’entrée et produisent des résultats plus précis que les CNN. Les DNN peuvent également être utilisés pour la classification d’images et la segmentation d’images.

Données : Les DNN nécessitent également des grandes quantités de données pour fonctionner correctement. Cependant, ils peuvent être entraînés sur des jeux de données plus petits que les CNN et peuvent donc être plus efficaces lorsqu’il n’y a pas assez de données disponibles.

Hurdles : Le principal défi avec les DNN est qu’ils nécessitent beaucoup de temps et de puissance de calcul pour être entraînés correctement. De plus, ils sont sensibles aux bruit et aux variations dans les données d’entrée, ce qui peut entraîner des résultats imprécis.

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?Test numérique et roadmap produit : comment ?

?Test numérique et roadmap produit : comment ?

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En tant qu’informaticien enthousiaste, je pense que les données sont essentielles à la feuille de route du produit. Les données peuvent aider à comprendre comment les utilisateurs interagissent avec le produit et à identifier les domaines à améliorer. Les données peuvent également aider à déterminer quelles fonctionnalités sont les plus importantes pour les utilisateurs et à prioriser leur développement. Les données peuvent également être utilisées pour mesurer l’efficacité des initiatives de produit et pour ajuster le plan en conséquence.

Les tests numériques sont un moyen efficace de collecter des données sur l’expérience utilisateur. En effectuant des tests d’utilisateurs, les entreprises peuvent recueillir des informations sur la façon dont les utilisateurs interagissent avec le produit, ce qui peut être intégré dans la feuille de route du produit. Les tests numériques peuvent également aider à identifier les domaines à améliorer et à informer les décisions de conception. En intégrant ces données dans la feuille de route du produit, les entreprises peuvent s’assurer que leurs produits répondent aux besoins et aux attentes de leurs utilisateurs, ce qui conduit à une satisfaction et une fidélité accrues.

En tant qu’informaticien enthousiaste, je pense que les données sont essentielles à la feuille de route du produit. Les données peuvent fournir une vue claire et concise de la vision, des objectifs et des initiatives du produit, ainsi qu’un calendrier pour leur livraison. Les données peuvent également aider à prioriser les fonctionnalités, à identifier les domaines à améliorer et à informer les décisions de conception. En intégrant ces données dans la feuille de route du produit, les entreprises peuvent s’assurer que leurs produits répondent aux besoins et aux attentes de leurs utilisateurs, ce qui conduit à une satisfaction et une fidélité accrues.

En tant qu’informaticien enthousiaste, je suis convaincu que les données sont essentielles pour la réussite d’une feuille de route de produit. Les tests numériques sont un moyen efficace de collecter des données sur l’expérience utilisateur et d’intégrer ces données dans la feuille de route du produit. Les données peuvent également aider à comprendre comment les utilisateurs interagissent avec le produit et à identifier les domaines à améliorer. En intégrant ces données dans la feuille de route du produit, les entreprises peuvent s’assurer que leurs produits répondent aux besoins et aux attentes de leurs utilisateurs, ce qui conduit à une satisfaction et une fidélité accrues.

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Conversion chaîne en énumération - CVE-2020-36620 (50 Go)

Conversion chaîne en énumération – CVE-2020-36620 (50 Go)

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Conversion chaîne en énumération – CVE-2020-36620 (50 Go): Découvrez comment convertir une chaîne en énumération avec 50 Go de données à l’aide de CVE-2020-36620.

## Discuter de la vulnérabilité CVE-2020-36620 et voir comment un package NuGet pour convertir une chaîne en énumération peut rendre une application C# vulnérable aux attaques DoS

En tant qu’informaticien enthousiaste, je vais discuter de la vulnérabilité CVE-2020-36620 et voir comment un package NuGet pour convertir une chaîne en énumération peut rendre une application C # vulnérable aux attaques DoS.

Imaginons une application serveur qui interagit avec un utilisateur. Dans l’un des scénarios, l’application reçoit des données de l’utilisateur sous forme de chaîne et les convertit en éléments d’énumération (chaîne -> énumération).

Le package NuGet en question est conçu pour faciliter ce processus de conversion. Cependant, le package ne vérifie pas si la chaîne reçue est valide et peut donc être exploité par un attaquant pour provoquer un déni de service. Lorsqu’un attaquant envoie une chaîne qui n’est pas valide, le package tente de convertir la chaîne en énumération et cela peut entraîner une exception et un plantage de l’application.

Pour résoudre ce problème, nous devons vérifier que la chaîne reçue est valide avant de l’utiliser. Nous pouvons le faire en utilisant le code C # pour vérifier si la chaîne est comprise dans l’énumération. Si ce n’est pas le cas, nous pouvons alors retourner une erreur à l’utilisateur et éviter ainsi tout plantage de l’application.

En résumé, le package NuGet pour convertir une chaîne en énumération peut être exploité par un attaquant pour provoquer un déni de service. Pour éviter cela, nous devons vérifier que la chaîne reçue est valide avant de l’utiliser. Nous pouvons le faire en codant une fonction qui vérifie si la chaîne est comprise dans l’énumération et retourne une erreur à l’utilisateur si ce n’est pas le cas. En appliquant cette méthode, nous pouvons éviter les attaques DoS et assurer la sécurité de notre application.

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Compliance Automated Standard Solution (COMPASS), Part 2: Trestle SDK

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In part 1 of this multi-part blog series on continuous compliance, we detailed the personas and their role in the compliance processes. We concluded that the key to achieving compliance automation and hence continuous compliance is the compliance artifacts programmatic representation, as code, expressed in generic and standard security language terms.

In this blog post, we introduce Trestle, our open-source implementation of the NIST Open Security Control Assessment Language (OSCAL) standard framework adopted as a workflow automation of compliance artifacts managed as compliance as code. Trestle enables those diverse personas to collaboratively author the compliance artifacts and offers a platform and OSCAL SDK for teams to automate their specific native processes and formats. Trestle implicitly provides a core opinionated workflow driven by its pipeline to allow standardized interlocks with other compliance tooling platforms.

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An Introduction to Graph Data

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This article is an excerpt from the book Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn from the best-selling Python Machine Learning series, updated and expanded to cover PyTorch, transformers, and graph neural networks.

Broadly speaking, graphs represent a certain way we describe and capture relationships in data. Graphs are a particular kind of data structure that is nonlinear and abstract. And since graphs are abstract objects, a concrete representation needs to be defined so the graphs can be operated on. Furthermore, graphs can be defined to have certain properties that may require different representations. Figure 1 summarizes the common types of graphs, which we will discuss in more detail in the following subsections:
Common types of graph

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Using Micro-Interactions to Drive UX

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Micro-interactions effectively communicate brand identity and ethos while strengthening ties with the customer. These habit-forming tools make for a fun and seamless user experience. Facebook’s ‘likes’ and Tinder’s ‘swipes’ are two classic examples. 

Micro-interactions originated with the need to guide customers who had hit a snag while using a service or a product. The goal was to ease customers into being more product-savvy via subtle reassurance and feedback. Micro-interactions are now employed by everything from washing machines, to coffee makers.

Along with feedback, prompts, and recommendations, they can also present customers with an appealing visual reward upon finishing a task. When used optimally, micro-interactions drastically enhance the navigation and simplify how users interact with sites and apps.

How Micro-Interactions Work

Here are the four structural elements to a simple micro-interaction: triggers, rules, feedback, and loops. Every micro-interaction has a significant component to organize the operational cycle. It lets you control feedback and runs, so the users understand the consequences of their performance and feel motivated to follow through.

Triggers

This feature begins micro-interactions of both the user-initiated (prompted by user) and system-initiated (driven by the system) kind. For example, a click, scroll, swipe, tap, and pull are common triggers that users carry out. So making a payment, booking a cab, and clicking or tapping on the hamburger menu all fall under this category. On the flip side, the user’s alert prompt upon entering a wrong password is a classic system-generated trigger. 

Rules

This element determines what happens after the user sets a prompt into motion via tapping, clicking, scrolling, or swiping. Rules refer to the fact that apps decide the triggers that users employ — Tinder’s ‘swipe’ feature illustrates this point. These rules gradually become a habit-forming action that users get accustomed to while regularly engaging with an app.

Feedback

During this process stage, the system informs the user via auditory, visual, or haptic cues. It engages the users and encourages them to proceed further in their process. For example, the progress bar of a download, the visual representation of steps cleared in a circle, or the visual, aural, and tactile indication upon the success or failure of payment are all a part of the feedback mechanism.

Loop/Modes

This final stage entails tiny meta-rules of the process and determines the frequency and duration. A classic example from an ecommerce app is the ‘Buy Now’ transformed to ‘Buy Another’ Before the user loses interest in the app, the app typically uses such a loop to get them to re-engage with the app. 

How to Use Micro-Interactions

We’ve established that micro-interactions are fabulous, but not every UX interaction on your app or site needs one throughout the wireframe. Overusing this tool could saturate the overall creative experience your design may want to offer. Worse, it might even end up confusing the information hierarchy. It undermines the design and unbalances the user experience of discomfort and irritability. So it’s crucial to know when exactly to use them.

Let’s find out how few quick tips on micro-interactions can elevate and humanize your mobile user experience:

  • Swipe right or left: A signature move made entirely on swiping micro-interaction featured in the famous Tinder app. Swiping is an easier action than clicking or tapping.
  • Call-to-action:  As part of the last step during payment or order, place a ‘Confirm Order’ or ‘Book Now’ prompt, which gives the task a sense of urgency. As a result, having acted on it feels like a minor achievement. 
  • System status: Your app user wants to know what’s happening. System status lets them know they are moving in the right direction and helps avoid confusion. Sometimes, users even run out of patience while uploading a picture, downloading a file, or filling up the registration form.
  • Classic notifications: Users need a quick reminder of products selected/wishlist in their abandoned cart with a reduced attention span. A simple notification can nudge them toward finalizing the purchase. 
  • Button animation: Animated buttons are not only cute, but they also help users navigate the mobile app swiftly. Try out attractive colors, fonts, sizes, shapes, and clipart elements corresponding to the animation and create that cool button to pop up when tapped or hovered on. 
  • Animated text inputs:  A simple process of a likable element like zooming in while entering data into a form or filling up card details for payment can enhance the user experience.
  • Reward an achievement:  Especially true for educational and health apps, micro-interactions celebrating big and small milestones with a badge or a compliment of encouragement can strengthen a user’s engagement with the app. 

Benefits of Micro-Interactions

  • Brand communication: A successful brand ensures that the transmission to the buyer is engaging, positive, and hassle-free. When micro-interactions show a process status clearly, it creates and reinforces a positive image for your brand.
  • Higher user engagement: Experts say micro-interactions engage users better. These tiny elements subconsciously create the urge to keep interacting with your app. For example, each push or nudge notification acts toward redirecting your customers back to your app.
  • Enhanced user experience: From shopping to banking to traveling to learning to staying healthy, there’s an app for everything. A wide range of activities elevates the overall user experience and stays ahead in the game. Micro-interactions can work that magic for your brand. 
  • Prompt feedback: It’s frustrating not to know what’s happening behind the blank screen, especially during a purchase. Instant feedback via visual, sound, or vibrating notifications makes for a pleasant user experience. 
  • Visual harmony: Micro-interactions initiated even with a tap, swipe, typing, or scrolling are all a part of the UX design’s overall appeal. The trick is to keep all the interface elements in perfect sync with the app’s visual features.

Micro-Interaction Best Practices

Here are a few basic principles you should follow when you introduce a micro-interaction to the user experience.

1. Keep it simple, stupid (KISS)

KISS is a famous design principle that becomes even more important in the case of micro-interactions. The goal is to make the user journey delightful and not be a distraction.

2. Keep it Short

It has ‘micro’ in the name itself. But, again, micro-interactions aren’t supposed to be show stars, and a lengthy micro-interaction only distracts the user. 

3. Pick the Right Place

You should always consider the options carefully before choosing the spot for any micro-interaction. The widely used user-interaction designs are popular for a reason. Many people have already approved them, so you can safely continue with them. The use of micro-interaction should also sit well with your brand image. 

See also if the placement of a micro-interaction is reaching your ideal customer or not. And even consider whether you need a micro-interaction to begin with. 

And That’s a Wrap!

As UX designers, we can profoundly impact the overall design of sites and apps, the user’s journey, their interactions with our product/service, their connection with the brand, and the ease of doing a transaction.

We want customers to connect to our brand, love our products, and experience our exceptional customer service. But most of all, we want to earn their trust and loyalty.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

Source

The post Using Micro-Interactions to Drive UX first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

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The UX of Maps in Web Design

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Maps are a fascinating method for delivering content. At their best, they can create an intuitive way of presenting information and interacting with it. This is the advantage that digital maps, through mobile apps and websites, have over print maps and images where no interactivity is possible.

But it’s important to understand that more data ≠ better experiences. We all now have so much data available to us through multiple services that, arguably, the greatest challenge isn’t sourcing information but filtering it out. We can only handle so much information input before we become overloaded. This issue risks being omnipresent with maps. There are so many potential points of interest on a map that it’s essential to be clear about what needs to be exposed to users.

Also, UX design, map design, and user interface are all critical. While maps can be a powerful way of drawing people in, if end-users feel that you didn’t even consider the visual design, they’ll ‘bounce off’ your site or app in moments.

Common Use Cases

When are maps useful, and what problems do they solve? Let’s dive right into the most common use cases for maps used in web design.

Navigation and Direction

Like Google Maps shows, navigation and direction are arguably the classic case study for interactive maps. You are in one place and need to get to another. You can enter your destination, your current location, and the map will present suggestions for getting there. You can select the method of travel and adjust desired departure or arrival times. But you need to understand first what functionality your users need. How these options are exposed to users is a critical piece of UX design.

Also, if users are searching for options such as somewhere to eat, it’s not so straightforward. Then, how your map handles panning in real-time as users swipe around a city is going to be a big issue.

Showing Relationships and Trends Geographically

This is something that you’ll see in every election in any western country. We’re all used to seeing maps that give us a state-of-play for which state or seat is held by which party. Then, we might see projections based on voter intentions and projected voting swings deriving from that. Then, exit poll data can be projected with the map updated on an ongoing basis until the final result is confirmed.

The capability to do this is essential because if a static map were used, it’d be out of date any time a new poll was released. Also, voting intentions can change over a campaign, so such maps need to be dynamic. Of course, such maps are only as accurate as the available data, as the US 2016 election map showed.

Show Points of Interest

As mentioned previously, there’s a lot of data that can be exposed to map users. However, that doesn’t automatically mean that it should be. Usability is key. For example, when you look at a map, you’ll typically first see key points of interest. Which points of interest are going to be presented to you can vary.

One variant is zoom level. If your map is currently showing an entire city, the level of detail the map presents is deliberately limited. You’ll see districts, large roads, or geographic features such as rivers. If more detailed information were presented, users on mobile devices, in particular, would be overwhelmed. Even at this level, you’ll notice typography differences. These can include the city name being in bold or the names of different areas in capital letters. So the level of detail is coupled with the scale of the map. Zooming in a few notches will expose significant points of interest, such as museums. Zooming in to specific districts will reveal restaurants, coffee shops, and universities. This visual hierarchy is a critical way of managing the exposed level of information.

But information is still being abstracted away. It’s not until you tap on the museum that you’ll see information on opening hours and busy times. This is also typically presented with user photos and reviews. Context is also taken into account, so you’ll start to see local hotels and restaurants. So it’s not just individual points of interest that are important, but the connections between them.

6 Tips For Improving Interactive Maps

What are the challenges of creating effective maps, and how do people address the data overload problem? We’ll answer this question and go over the must-know aspects of map creation.

1. Ensure Security and Brand Trust

GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation. This is a critically important European law that extends a wide range of legal protection to European citizens regarding personal data. It’s not possible here to cover the full extent of the law, but here are some quick key points:

  • Consent is required for the processing of personal data; it cannot be assumed
  • You need to have a retention policy for information that’s capable of identifying people

Be aware that the latter doesn’t just cover commercial purposes. Research students have to submit GDPR forms that address what kind of data they’re sourcing and how they’ll be retaining it.

But the most crucial context is commercial. If a business suffers a data breach, it can be fined up to 20 million euros or 4% of annual worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year, whichever is greater. Therefore, any business storing data that could identify their customers will need to assess risk and compliance. Remember: it’s 4% of worldwide turnover, not EU turnover.

Also, anything of your business that you expose to your customers or users is an extension of your brand. Therefore, you need to assess your maps for brand compliance too. If you have primary brand colors and your map doesn’t abide by them, that’s a very poor look. Source the color hex codes directly from your brand team and involve them in design.

2. Use the Appropriate Type of Map

It’s also important to consider what type of map is most appropriate for your use case. Think carefully about what your users need, what you’re trying to communicate, what information you need to present, and how best to present it.

For example, points of interest style maps in a tourist app will be way more helpful than heat maps: people want to know where something is, key data like opening hours, and how to get there. A heat map showing the number of visitors to each attraction or area of a city is unlikely to be useful to tourists. However, it could be useful to the attractions themselves to map their visitors by heat map over time. This could help larger museums chart which exhibits are most popular.

Transport for London is charting passenger movement on the London Underground by detecting when a device with Wi-Fi comes into range and then passes out of range. They’re using this to understand overall user journeys and movements within individual stations to better manage disruptions.

3. Avoid Pop-Ups

It should go without saying by now that auto pop-ups are despised. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing or what they’re offering; an unwanted pop-up can only get in the way. The level of impact is even greater on a phone where pop-ups take up even more screen space.

Given this, many users close them without even reading them. So if you’re using pop-ups, don’t kid yourself. You’re likely just irritating users and increasing the likelihood that they’ll ‘bounce off’ or uninstall.

4. Avoid Auto-Geolocation

Auto-geolocation sounds incredibly convenient but can result in some real problems. For example, if there are any bugs with auto-geolocation, you could get false results. If someone connects through public building Wi-Fi, you could get false results. If they’re connecting through a VPN then, unless you get the user’s IP address and check if it’s the exit portal of a VPN, you could get false results.

The problem is most significant with mobile maps. If a map user is looking at a points of interest map, they likely have a specific and immediate use. This means it’s in their best to get the most accurate results possible. So why not just ask them?

Precision and Accuracy

These terms have specific meanings in geolocation. ‘Precision’ is the exactness of the data. ‘Accuracy’ is how closely the information on a map matches the real world. So you want precision and accuracy to be spot on, or data risks losing value. This applies not just to the gathering of data but to the representation of it. For example, if you have street-level data but your maps don’t present individual streets, then any representation of data on that map is likely to have poor accuracy. That map might succeed in abstracting irrelevant information but presenting an imprecise and inaccurate view.

5. Avoid Map Legends as Much as Possible

In many cases, primarily points-of-interest maps, they’re just not needed anymore. An essential part of user experience design isn’t just visual hierarchy but information hierarchy. You can mouse over on a desktop or laptop to get the essentials of a location, e.g., the museum’s name and its opening hours. On a mobile device, you can tap on that location to get the essentials, and you can tap on another location to move on; you don’t even have to press back. Given that, a legend would get in the way. So this simple piece of information design solves information overload issues.

As with all rules, there are exceptions. A good one is a heat map where a density of what’s being measured needs to be communicated. It doesn’t matter what the data is; it just needs to be something where mapping provides greater insight, especially if it informs decision-making. Sales is an excellent example for a national or multinational company. Of course, weather forecasting can make use of literal heat maps.

6. Accessibility Compliance

Not everyone has perfect eyesight. Even if someone has excellent vision, they could still be colorblind (8% of men and 0.5% of women are). Given that, take the W3C’s accessibility standards into account and treat them as a baseline or minimum barrier to entry for compliance. You shouldn’t feel good about the possibility of excluding 8% of your potential audience or customers. Ensure you keep your UX designers involved and don’t shy away from creating senior-friendly web designs.

Put simply: imagine if you could appeal to a new demographic that’s not catered to. If your competitors ignore them, you could give them a real reason to choose you instead by taking some straightforward steps. If your competitors are catering to them, you also need to. If you don’t, you’re just giving potential customers a big reason to ignore you.

Conclusions

The key takeaway is that there’s far more to creating good maps than just good cartography. That can be critical, too, though this may vary depending on the use case.

This will be a team effort because your map will involve data sets, design decisions, and, yes, cartography. You’re going to need to involve brand and IT too. So think about design principles and development methodologies.

First and foremost, what are your users’ needs? If you haven’t done any user research or taken the time to understand the customer journey, are you adding anything or getting in the way? It’s easy to see the department that requested the map as stakeholders, but you should probably view your users as stakeholders too.

This sounds complex, but as you hopefully now appreciate, a map is probably more complicated than you thought.

 

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How To Leverage Social Proof Successfully

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Customer reviews are incredibly valuable to your company. Around 95% of customers say they read reviews before they make a purchase. Another 72% say that they won’t even consider buying your items until they’ve read the reviews associated with your business or product. 

No matter how good your marketing and promotion strategies might be, your audience will always turn to other customers for a credible insight into what buying from your brand is really like. That’s why it’s so important to leverage as much social proof as you can.

Unfortunately, gathering reviews and displaying them correctly on your website can be challenging.

In this article, we’re going to look at what you can do to make your reviews stand out when you’re ready to display them online. 

The Different Kinds of Review

Before we get into looking at all the different ways you can effectively display your reviews on your website, let’s get the basics out of the way. 

There’s more than one type of review. Some are simply comments left on the bottom of your product pages by customers that were impressed by whatever you sold. Other reviews are available in the form of videos or badges. When you want your website to look as credible as possible, the best thing you can do is decide which types of reviews will have the most impact. 

Ideally, you’ll want a combination of different review types to add depth to your site. Putting various kinds of reviews on your website increases your credibility while also boosting your SEO. 

Here are your main options:

The Testimonial

Testimonials are one of the most common types of review. Essentially, these are the messages shared by your customers that highlight the things they liked and didn’t like about your product. Testimonials often include a picture of the person leaving the message, and their name, to give them a greater sense of authenticity. You might also include a link to a website or case study with a testimonial to give it more depth. 

Most testimonials go at the bottom of pages. You can showcase these reviews on your home page to start generating credibility as soon as someone interacts with your brand. Alternatively, you could allow users to place their reviews on product pages. Here’s an example of what a testimonial might look like from ducttapemarketing.com:

Review Badges and Widgets

If your customers tend to leave reviews about your company on other sites, like Angie’s List or Yelp, then you can add a widget or badge to your website that makes it easier for other customers to find them. Sometimes, you’ll just include a small button on the bottom of a website pay that says, “find us on Yelp.” Other times, you can add your star rating too.

Some review sites will also give you the option to showcase the actual reviews in a widget that frequently updates with new messages. 

If you’re only showing reviews from one third-party site on your website, it’s best to focus on Google reviews, as it’s one of the most recognizable options. 

Provided that you’re using them correctly, badges and review widgets shouldn’t slow your website down too much, and many can be customized to suit the style of your site too. However, it’s essential to ensure that you don’t add too many widgets to your site if you want to avoid performance issues. 

Case Studies

Case studies go beyond the basics of the standard review and provide potential leads with a tremendous amount of information about how you’ve previously interacted with other companies. With a case study, you’ll often create a structured document that demonstrates a customer’s problem and your strategies to overcome those issues. 

Case studies often exist on their own pages, so you can go in-depth with sharing valuable information. For example, you’ll include an overview that introduces the customer you worked with and details on the outcomes you achieved together. 

Although it’s much harder to interview customers for complete case studies and get all the statistics and numbers that make these reviews appealing, it’s often worth the effort. Particularly if you’re running a B2B company, case studies demonstrate the effort you go through to support your customers. They also act as proof of your success and set valuable expectations for customers. Here’s an example of a case study page by Fabrikbrands.com:

The Rating

If you’re just posting basic five-star ratings on your website or asking your customers to give you a number between one and ten for how positively they’d rate your service, then you can use a few handy automation tools to create one of these visuals. 

All you need to do is add a little basic CSS to your website or use a star rating widget that automatically calculates your average score based on all of the reviews that you collect from customers. 

Just make sure that your star ratings are positive not just on your website but on other review sites too. For instance, if you give yourself five stars by adjusting the CSS and then get three stars from Yell, customers will begin questioning your authenticity. 

Notably, while star ratings grab customer attention, they are a little basic if you’re trying to convert people and convince them to buy an expensive product. Most customers will often need more information than a basic star rating can provide. 

How to Display Reviews on Your Website

Now that you know what kind of reviews customers can leave about your product or brand, you can start exploring ways to display them on your website. 

You could decide to let your reviews show up on other third-party sites and leave it at that. For instance, if you’re a hotel manager, you may know that your customers are already leaving reviews on Booking.com and TripAdvisor. However, leaving your audience to seek your reviews out for themselves means that they spend less time where you want them – on your website. 

There’s also a risk that failing to add reviews to your site will make you look less credible. If you don’t own your rating or score, customers might wonder what you have to hide. 

Fortunately, we’ve got some great options to help you get started.

1. Create a Testimonials Page

The first and perhaps most accessible option for showcasing your reviews and testimonials is to design a page where your customers can easily find all the information they need about your brand. Having a dedicated testimonials page can be a great way to demonstrate transparency as a brand and show your customers that you’re not hiding anything. 

You could even add a form at the bottom of your testimonials page that allows other customers to leave their reviews and information. Just make sure that you have a CAPTCHA or another security measure in place to prevent people from spamming your site. 

It makes sense to showcase some of your most positive reviews at the top of your page, so your customers see those first. However, it could also be a good idea to showcase some negative reviews alongside them. That’s because customers generally expect to see at least some negativity associated with your brand. If all your reviews are positive, they might assume that you’re hiding something.

When displaying your negative reviews, make sure you also show that you’ve responded to them and are working hard to address any issues. You can even publish the “thank you” you get from an unhappy customer after rectifying the problem. 

2. Show Reviews in Your Website Header

The great thing about using reviews and testimonials on your website is that if you have a little coding knowledge and the correct information, you can display them wherever you choose. Most companies leave the reviews at the bottom of the website, but this could mean you’re missing out on an excellent opportunity to connect with your audience as soon as they visit you. 

Having a positive review highlighted at the top of your page could immediately boost your credibility and give your audience a reason to keep reading. Remember that a picture of the person sharing the review and their name can make them look a lot more credible when you’re trying to build trust. 

3. Add Some Reviews to Your About Us Page

It’s best not to hide your reviews somewhere your customers will have to search for them, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t scatter a few testimonials around other pages. A great way to give more credibility to your brand and your website is to create a sidebar on your “About Us” page or just showcase a handful of reviews underneath the description of your business. 

Suppose you don’t want to show customer testimonials on your About Us page. In that case, you could always show different kinds of reviews, like badges that show your certification with certain industry bodies or awards and recognition you’ve received.

Showing that you’re connected with major industry groups and that you’ve been recognized in your sector is a kind of review in itself. It indicates that other people have already assessed your business and see you in a positive light. 

Every review doesn’t necessarily have to come from your customers. Any business or person who can give more credibility to your business deserves some representation too!

4. Embed a Carousel on Your Site

As your business begins to grow, the number of regular reviews and testimonials you get from happy customers should start to skyrocket too. You might even get to a point where you’re not sure how to fit all the reviews you want to showcase onto the same page of your website. If you already have a dedicated “reviews” page where people can go to get more insights into your growing collection of social proof, try a carousel. 

Carousels are a great and dynamic way to showcase customer reviews while getting your audience more involved with your website. Give them a button they can click so that they can browse through a broader range of reviews after they’ve seen the ones that show up straight away on your carousel. It’s also worth including a link nearby the carousel widget that the user can click to visit your review page or your company’s page on a dedicated review website. 

If you want to go beyond putting carousels on your home page, remember that you can add them to your product pages and menus too. Online reviews impact around 67.7% of purchasing decisions, so it makes sense to put them somewhere your customers will see them when they’re figuring out whether or not they should hit the buy button. 

5. Add Reviews to Your Social Media Ads

Reviews can be an excellent way to add an extra spark to your advertisements elsewhere in the digital landscape. Telling your audience on Facebook that you have the best steaks in the country is great – but it’s not going to make a significant impact on most of them. That’s because every business claims to be the best. Most of your clients expect you to speak well of yourself. 

However, if you can combine an attractive image on social media with a quoted review from one of your happy customers, your ads will make more of an impact. You can include the quote from your customer in the text above your Facebook ad or create an image to display it instead.

Remember to add any hashtags and extra information that might make your ad more appealing and share it as often as you can with the right audience. Targeting your audience carefully towards people who are in the “consideration” stage of the buyer journey may help you to get more conversions. 

While customers usually scroll past dozens of social media ads every day, a genuine statement from a real person still shakes up the status quo and grabs attention. Include a button below the ad so your customer can learn more about the product the customer is talking about. 

6. Link to Reviews in Email Signatures

Finally, social media ads aren’t the only way to bring attention to your reviews outside of your website. If you want to get more external customers to go and check out your products or rediscover what your business is all about, you can add review links to your email signature too. These links can go directly to the case study or review pages on your website, reminding customers what it is that makes your service or product special. Alternatively, you can get dedicated signatures for your email that link to specific review sites too. 

Showing your clients how many ratings you have on Yelp or how many stars your products have earned with Google Reviews gives every message you send a lot more credibility. Most email marketing software solutions make it relatively easy to add information like this to the footer of your email.

Remember, your signature shouldn’t take up too much space in your email, so don’t add any specific reviews from customers. A star rating and a link back to a page where consumers can get more information will spruce up your content without weighing down your emails. 

Show Off Your Social Proof

Successfully collecting positive reviews that show your prospects how much customers love your company can be challenging enough. However, that’s just the first piece of the puzzle. Once you’ve got all those great reviews, you also need to show them off in the most effective way. From dedicated pages on your website to scrolling carousels and Facebook ads, there are a million ways to prove your credibility to your customers with testimonials.

 

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