As engineers, we are always mindful of the need to minimize cost and time. Experience has taught us that while automation is valuable in reducing code, we must also preserve design flexibility and enable agile iterations. Let’s break that down a bit, and then illustrate with an example.
Automation (Reduce Routine Code — Executable Specifications)
To warrant the learning curve, automation must significantly reduce routine coding. 25% reduction in code is not compelling enough.
There are so many things to think about when first starting a business. What will your business offer? How will this differ from existing solutions? Who will benefit most from your offering? And why are you so passionate about this?
If you haven’t done so yet, work through this exercise to come up with your brand identity and business name.
Once you’ve figured out your brand identity, you have to create a visual identity — also referred to as brand imagery — to go along with it.
While you could easily throw together visual elements that speak to you, your goal should be to choose visuals that resonate with your audience. So, building your visual identity is going to require some work.
In the following post, we’re going to look at how your brand’s visual style can give off certain signals to those who encounter it (and how to use those to your advantage). We’ll also break down what you need, to piece together your visual identity.
Each of the design choices you make that website visitors, social media followers, and customers can see will impact how they approach your brand. Are you a fun-loving company that caters to a younger crowd? Do you create high-tech products that solve serious global problems? Are you a successful entrepreneur who’s reshaping the way we talk to one another?
When done right, our brand visuals convey our brand’s personality, values, and mission without having to use any words.
Think about your favorite clothing brand. What do you picture? Let’s use Athleta as an example.
The logo is probably the first visual element that comes to my mind:
The grey radial shape is one I’m very familiar with. It’s on their website, their social media, and it’s usually imprinted somewhere on their clothing.
The second thing I think about when I think of Athleta is its physical imagery:
Rather than include images of the clothing on its own, there’s often someone wearing Athleta clothes while hiking along a trail, walking on a beach, or working out in a studio.
There’s so much that just these two visual elements tell us about this brand:
There are overt ways to use visuals in your branding (usually through your choice of photos or illustrations). But there are also ways to subtly convey more about your company, what it does, and for whom you work through your choice of colors, fonts, structure, and more.
Let’s walk through each of the elements you need to pull together to create your visual identity:
Like with everything else in business, you’re here to give your audience something they need, so they have to be at the forefront of your decisions — including which colors you put into your brand’s palette.
So, where do you start in choosing a color palette for your site and other marketing channels?
Let’s take a systematic approach.
1. Choose a Primary Color
Go to the Canva color meanings and symbolism tool.
Have a look through the colors and find one that feels good to you. Open up the page and read more about what the color means:
You’ll find the following on each page:
While it’s important to consider how colors evoke different emotions, it shouldn’t be the only driving force. Your primary focus should be to choose colors that positively affect the user experience. In other words, you don’t want them to get in the way or distract prospects from getting to know your brand and eventually converting.
2. Create a Full Color Palette
Once you’ve picked a primary color, you need to come up with a color palette. You’ll want one or two colors to use in your logo and a full color palette for your website and other branded channels.
You can use Canva’s palette suggestions (in the top-right corner of the color page) to create a basic color palette.
For something a little more robust, use Material Design Palette:
Color options are a bit limited, but it does a good job of spelling out where you should use each color. You can then adjust the color palette as you see fit.
The design and pairing of your fonts can greatly impact the way people respond to your brand and the words you’ve written about it.
So, the goal with typography is to make your words easy to read while also giving hints about your company’s personality and style.
1. Understand Font Styles
Figure out what style of font goes best with your brand identity.
This is the simplest way to categorize fonts:
You can break these down even further and really get to the root of the style. Fonts.com has a great explainer page on each of these classifications:
Here are some sources to help you find fonts for your brand:
2. Settle on Two or Three Fonts
Choose two or three fonts for your brand. Max. Anything more than that will create a distracting and overwhelming interface for your audience.
You’ll need:
If you find that you need more variety in your fonts to create a clearer hierarchy on the page or to call out certain elements, use superfamilies with dozens or even over a hundred different styles. That way, your users’ eyes won’t get fatigued from having to switch between too many font types.
3. Learn Font Pairing Rules
To pair fonts, use styles that contrast yet complement one another. Ultimately, you want the pairing of your fonts to send a cohesive message to your audience.
For example, a sans serif header and serif body are a common way to combine fonts. Like this pairing of Fira Sans and Merriweather from the FontPair website:
This modern-looking duo sends the message that: “Your comfort is priority #1 for us. Take your time reading and enjoy.”
There are tons of ways to make varying styles play off one another while sending the right signals to your audience: A safe serif with a retro cursive header font to come off as a playful, yet professional brand; a futuristic header and a neutral sans serif body font to give your product pages a very techy feel; and so on…
Once you have one or two fonts you like the vibe of, use FontPair to track down a good complement to the one you want to use.
We can use this as a blanket category for any visual content you might use in your branding:
But just because there’s all this content to use, that doesn’t mean it should all appear on the same site to represent the same brand. You’ll want to narrow it down based on your company’s personality and how the style of imagery fits with it.
1. Photos vs. Illustrations
You can alter your brand’s voice and style based on the kind of imagery you use.
For instance, tech companies like Stripe often use illustration in their brand designs:
Even though SaaS companies sell one type of product, their audiences are usually quite vast, so it would be hard to find photos that represent everyone. And it’s not like users are focused on their relationships with the people behind the scenes. These companies put technology into the hands of their users, so it’s best to let the product shine and not the people. This opens up the door for some fun and creative possibilities with illustrations.
That said, choosing photos over illustrations doesn’t completely bar you from using vector graphics and icons. You can mix-and-match those visuals so long as they blend well with one another. What you don’t want to do is to mix two very different styles that say different things about your brand at once.
To decide what’s best for your brand, approach this from your users’ point-of-view. What kind of visuals will help them connect to your brand and what you sell?
2. Style
It’s not just the type of image you use that impacts your brand identity. It’s the style you apply to those visuals that can transform your visuals, putting visitors in a different time, place, or headspace.
Will you apply a filter to give your photos a similar look and feel?
Will you place each of your product photos against the same backdrop for a uniform look?
Will you use a completely new style of imagery for one of your product lines the way Apple has done for the iPhone 12?
There’s nothing wrong with using out-of-the-box imagery. However, if they don’t give off quite the right tone, don’t be afraid to use your design skills to make adjustments and cater them to your own style.
Your logo is the last of the visual elements you’ll need to invest some time in. The good news is that you’ve already done most of the legwork:
That’s really all you need to create a logo that is relevant, unique, attractive, potent, and memorable.
That and a way to bring it all together. You have a few options.
Option #1: If you’re a graphic designer, you can create your own from-scratch.
Option #2: If you want help getting started, you can use a tool like Wix Logo Maker:
You’ll fill out a short questionnaire and then receive dozens of pre-made logos to start with. You’ll later have the chance to customize the design to your liking.
Option #3: You can hire someone to design a totally custom logo.
In the next post in this three-part series, we’re going to look at the next step:
Getting your business online.
We’ll take everything you’ve done so far in coming up with a business name, brand identity, and now visual identity, and put it towards your website and the marketing channels that are best for your business.
Facebook and Twitter have left most other companies around the world far behind when it comes to using machine learning to improve their business model. And while their practices haven’t always resulted in the best reactions from end-users, there’s much to be learned from these companies on what to do–and what not to do–when it comes to scaling and applying data analytics.
While Facebook seemingly uses machine learning for everything — it is used for content detection and content integrity, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, and fraudulent account detection, as well as operating functions like facial recognition, language translation, and content search functions. The Facebook algorithm manages all this while offloading some computation to edge devices in order to reduce latency.
The world of search engine optimization was born with all sorts of different hacks and shortcuts that many people use in an effort to grow their business.
Knowing effective SEO tricks would be incredibly profitable, but unfortunately it’s not that easy
This becomes evident as soon as you do a Google search about anything SEO-related, only to find pages and more pages replete with blog posts and videos disclosing all the tips and tricks you “need to know” in order to achieve the best SEO results, in the fastest way possible.
Knowing effective SEO tricks would be incredibly profitable, but unfortunately it’s not that easy.
In its essence, SEO isn’t about hacks, shortcuts, and hidden optimizations, but rather about resource allocation. Keep reading to learn why!
Before we start talking about resources, it’s important to understand why the quick and easy SEO hacks we’ve all read about online aren’t as reliable as they might seem.
The reality is that yes, there are some traditional hacks and optimization tactics that many people swear by. However, SEO has become way too competitive for these hacks to still work.
Think about it: anyone can learn about these hacks and shortcuts in a matter of seconds, which means that anyone can use them, which means that they’re not going to help your website stand out. By way of example, when thinking about keyword usage, many websites simply decide to put them everywhere on their website, without actually planning and strategizing. Perhaps years ago, doing so would lead to excellent results, but that’s not the case anymore.
What I want to go over, and what I mean with this article, is that when developing your SEO plan, you should think less about hacks, and try to focus on strategy and resources instead.
As tempting as they might be, most SEO hacks won’t really go that far.
What does go far are those strategies and resource allocation decisions, which you can master as long as you know three things:
So, SEO is about resource allocation – we know that now…but what exactly does that mean?
Well, this logic is based on something you might have heard of before, and that is the three pillars of SEO.
As a refresher, everything in SEO revolves around three pillars:
Many businesses have a limited digital marketing budget and, as if that wasn’t enough, their SEO budget tends to be even more restricted.
This means that we can’t try every hack out there or do every campaign we can come up with, hoping it will lead to positive results. On the contrary, it means we need to be methodical and understand which strategies have the most potential and are actually worth exploring.
In summary, there’s one big challenge that every SEO team and company experiences, and that is the limitation of resources versus possible operations, and that leads us to a question: what mix of SEO pillars will give us a good shot at ranking high and surpassing our competitors?
The mistake that a lot of business owners make after reading SEO articles or hearing about amazing case studies is that they try and copy the strategies they learned about, from beginning to end.
However, contextually, each case study or article could refer to a strategy that was specifically optimized for a different type of business.
So, although copying what other successful businesses can work in certain situations when speaking about SEO, it’s best to borrow ideas and use the ones that fit your inherent strengths.
Based on the pillars of SEO that we discussed earlier, there are three strong points that a company can have:
Some businesses don’t have the resources to create an in-house content development team or outsource writing services.
However, they have another strong suit, which lies in their ability to go out into their community, speak, and be heard. They can do this because they have built a strong network over the years and, in cases like this, what we often do is use a backlinking approach.
When working with businesses that have a strong community presence, go out and double down on their network. Pitch their relevant contacts for guest speakership and guest posts, building thought leadership, while also driving links to their website.
Right now, some of you might be thinking: “Yeah, well, that’s easy when you’ve built the exposure, but not all of us are lucky enough to be well-known”.
Listen, I get it, we’ve all been in that position.
For clients and businesses that feel like they don’t have the brand equity or exposure to develop a strong backlinking strategy, opt for another route, and invest much more on content (and/or technical SEO, see below).
If the client has a team who’s ready to put its head down and get to work, then focus on producing a lot of content for their website.
Ultimately, the goal is to build a content library that is thorough and expansive, and that provides the client with more opportunities for keyword rankings, while also reinforcing the relevance of their website for those specific SEO keywords.
You may not like (or have time) to write and you may not have a strong community presence, but if you have advanced technical skills and the ability to create a strong website quickly, then there’s another approach you can take.
This leads us into the third pillar of SEO: technical SEO.
This solution is indicated for technical teams that can create large websites, databases and user experiences in no time, and it is typically adopted by tech startups that are trying to create an app that provides user value.
First and foremost, winning at technical SEO requires strong technical skills that will allow you to build the web assets that you need, but that’s not all. It also requires you to understand how you can double down on these skills and manage large websites in the rather complex Google ecosystem.
So you need, for example, to know how you can get Google to notice and properly index the new pages you create on your website, even if you already have 100,000 pre-existing pages.
Or to ensure that each of your new pages is properly optimized for the best keywords.
Needless to say, using technical SEO does become a complex operation. However, when done right, it can lead your SEO to grow by sheer size, with the hopes that certain relevant keywords will start to rank for your business naturally.
When it comes to SEO, honing in on your strengths and accepting the fact that you can’t do everything is definitely the way to go.
When you’re running an SEO campaign, you should always focus on what you’re good at, know your resources, and augment what you already master – and that will put you in the right direction.
By focusing your resources on any of the pillars of SEO (or even a mix of them), you substantially increase your chances of achieving long-term success, which will not happen if you go for hacks and shortcuts instead.
A long-term, highly-organized, resource-allocated SEO strategy won’t only guarantee continuous success, but it can ultimately become self-sustaining, meaning that it will allow you to keep growing and growing, becoming an organic part of your marketing plan.
I’ve seen a lot of people try SEO hacks for two weeks, only to realize that they didn’t work and that their efforts had been in vain.
It’s unfortunate because by doing so, you’re turning your back on a marketing channel that is very valuable to a lot of people, and these hacks trick people into thinking it’ll be overnight.
So remember, resource allocation over hacks and shortcuts!
We have become so used to using web sites just to buy stuff that it is easy to forget that the web has more to offer. So this month we’ve included some because-it’s-interesting sites, some micro-sites and some just-for-the-sake-of-it projects.
Many of these are about selling or promoting products and services too, but in a more oblique way that is frequently more engaging than a straightforward sales site.
Micro sites can be a great way of including content that doesn’t fit in neatly with the rest of the main site, or is temporary, or to show a lighter, more fun side of a brand. And a well thought out micro site can act as a gateway to pull in even more visitors to its ‘parent’ site.
Your World Your Way is an interactive portal for the University of Auckland. An optional questionnaire customizes the experience, and clearly a lot of effort has gone into this in terms of the questions and possible answers, and the presentation. It is engaging and enjoyable to use, and the information provides links to the main University of Auckland website.
This micro site is to celebrate 10 years of barber shop chain Blind Barber, which started as one shop with a bar in the back room, in New York’s East Village. An entirely black and white design provides a clean backdrop for color photos and videos, and some great scrolling animations give a pleasing flow to the content.
Brews & Grooves pairs records with different beer. Although a ‘fun’ project, it is still a well designed piece of work with some vintage style typography and some pleasing rollover animation effects. It is an effective advert for those involved in creating it, as listed in on its ‘credits’ page.
As part of a new campaign to promote it’s ‘Bloom’ perfumes, Gucci have created a Gucci Bloom game. The player has to pick up flowers and perfume bottles, but miss a flower and the vines get in your way.
808303Studio is a digital musical instrument that emulates a Roland TR-808 drum machine and TB-303 bass synthesizer, created in conjunction with the Design Museum (London). It’s fully programmable and there is even short video tutorial with A Guy Called Gerald on how to use it.
Aelfie is a home furnishings brand with a focus on bold patterns and bright color. Their site reflects this with its use of block color, irregular grid, drawings, and type that feels a little off-kilter. It creates a hand-made feel that embodies the brand aesthetic rather well.
As we approach one of the most significant, not to mention acrimonious, elections in US history, Media Election 2020 uses AI to analyze the volume of media attention each candidate receives, in real time.
Magazine website Curbed has now become a part of New York magazine, and had a redesign in the process. It follows a discernible grid, but distorts it just enough to create an edge. The highlighter color frames, and underlines on rollover, add movement and ‘cool’.
The WFN (Women’s Funding Network) is an alliance of funds and foundations working to promote gender equity and social change internationally. The site is clean, with strong typography and a sophisticated color palette.
Internet, telephone and TV service provider Xfinity is behind the Fabric of America project. It is a collection of voice recordings, the idea being that each voice, and each person’s story, is a thread that makes up the flag that we see on the screen.
Minimal Ceramics is a concept site, showcasing the work of London based potter, Tom Crew. The design of the site reflects the simplicity of the showcased work, using great photography and simple typography.
Normal Now is part of an awareness campaign to highlight to consumers the positives of electric cars. Taking a fun approach to engage consumers in a serious subject, it uses a fake retro tech style.
Superfood Gin is a gin made using superfood botanicals, that claims to be fruity and fresh rather than crisp and peppery. The soft color palette, along with the soft lines and curves in the background illustrations, reflect this well.
Maison Louis Marie is a natural fragrance company. While this site does nothing really groundbreaking, it does it well. Botanical drawings on a white background, along with clean typography, help create a refined, luxury feel.
Think Economia is a platform taking a fresh look at economics and the future of economic growth. It doesn’t sound like the most exciting subject, but it is presented here in a playful and intriguing way.
From Uprock, a Russian design studio that also offers courses in web design, Chernobyl is a thought provoking exposition of the Chernobyl disaster. The design aesthetic is muted, allowing the images their deserved impact, and the brief sections of text to be absorbed.
Declamatuus is a lingerie company selling gift sets. What stands out here is what you don’t see — live models in underwear. Instead the outline of the body is created with animated particles.
Odisea Expedition is a documentary series following two friends, a surfer and a snowboarder, as they explore remote parts of the world. The photographs and video are everything here, and all other elements are kept minimal to avoid detracting from them.
Riffyn Nexus is a ‘Process Data System’ for storing and analyzing scientific data for laboratories. It is a very corporate site and yet it is put together in such a way that doesn’t feel dull.
This site for digital design agency Maison du Net takes a risk mixing corporate with cutesy, but it works. Offset frames and underlines create interest without overdoing it, and the very bright green is used sparingly enough to liven things up without being overwhelming.
In the next couple of years, 5G will be available worldwide, but for many people, the technology remains incomprehensible. Let’s figure out what 5G Internet is and what advantages it has.
Research in the field of 5G technology has been conducted for several years. Since 2019, local operators of some countries have already launched the 5G Internet service for their clients. It is likely that in the next couple of years, a new generation of the Internet will become available around the world. However, the essence of 5G remains incomprehensible for many people, and this leads to extraordinary occurrences that can be quite sad sometimes. In this article, together with specialists from Andersen, we will analyze what 5G is, what advantages this technology has, and whether there are any reasons to be afraid of it.
Today, great design isn’t just about conveying the right amount of information in a certain number of pages.
There’s more to creating the perfect website than experimenting with visuals and sound. Designers need to think carefully about how each element of their site impacts the overall user experience.
After all, with billions of websites available to explore, it takes something truly immersive to convince your client’s audience that they should stay on their pages. The more convenient and attractive your websites are, the more likely it is that visitors will want to stick around.
Minimalism, one of the more popular styles of web design from the last few years, can sometimes assist designers in making attractive and effective websites more functional.
The less clutter and confusion there is on a page, the easier it is to navigate.
So, how do you embrace the benefits of functional minimalism?
Many webs designers are convinced that minimalism is all about aesthetics.
They see a website like Hugeinc.com and assume that the minimalist appearance is all about making the website as attractive as possible.
However, the underlying ideas of minimalism in web design go much deeper than this. The history of minimalist design begins with Japanese culture. Japan has long focused on balancing simplicity and beauty with its architecture, interior design, and even graphic design. In the Western world, minimalism got its day in the sun in the web design environment, after customers endured years of cluttered and complicated web pages with difficult navigation, overwhelming information and clashing graphics.
Designers began to experiment with the idea that less really could be more — particularly when it came to the digital landscape.
For a while, minimalism was the most popular style for a website. During 2018, in particular, minimalist web design soared to the top of the designer demand list, as companies fell in love with a combination of white space, simple navigation and bold text.
While now, there are other design trends stepping into the industry, designers can still benefit from exploring some of the essential rules of functional minimalism. After all, visual complexity has been proven to damage a person’s perception of a website.
Additionally, a study conducted by the EyeQuant group found that a clean and simple design can lead to a lower bounce rate. Minimalism gives viewers less to contend with on a page, which can allow for a simpler and more straightforward experience. Additionally, a clean website can also drive additional benefits, including faster loading times, better responsivity between screen sizes and more.
Because you’re only using a few images and well-spaced text, you can even experiment with different strategies, like graphics and dynamic fonts. Look at the Manuel Rueda website, for instance, it’s a great example of how a minimalist design can be brimming with activity.
So, how can any designer use the principles of functional minimalism?
First, just like when designing a landing page, designers need to ensure that they’re concentrating only on the elements in the page that really need to be there.
This means removing anything on the website that doesn’t support the end-goals of the specific page that the viewer is using. Any pictures, background noise, buttons, or even navigation features that aren’t going to support the initial experience that the visitor needs, must go.
Think about what’s going to distract your visitors from the things that are important and concentrate on giving everything a purpose. For instance, the Plus63.org website instantly introduces the visitors to the purpose of the website, then allows users to scroll down to get more information. The data is spread clearly through the home page, pulling the viewer into a story.
Negative space is one of the fundamental components of good minimalist web design.
Every part of a good website doesn’t need to be filled with noise to make a difference. White, or negative space can help to give your viewer the room they need to fully understand the experience that they’re getting.
From a functional perspective, it’s the difference between placing someone in an overflowing storage container and asking them to find what they need or placing them in a room where items are carefully spaced out, labelled, and waiting for discovery.
The Hatchinc.co website uses negative space to ensure that information is easy to consume. You can find the different pages of the site easily, the social media buttons, and the newsletter subscription tool. Plus, you get a chance to see some of the work behind the site.
One of the biggest problems that consumers have encountered in recent years, is the concept of “choice overload”.
Whether you’re in a store, or on a website, you’re never sure what to do first. Do you check out the blog posts on the site to learn more about the authority of the company? Do you visit the “About” page, to see where the brand come from? Do you head to their product pages?
As a designer, functional minimalism can help you to make it obvious what your audience should do next. As soon as you arrive on the AYR.com website, you’re not overwhelmed with choice. You can either head to your bag, “shop now”, or check the menu.
Since the “Shop Now” CTA is the biggest and most compelling, the chances are that most visitors will click that first, increasing the company’s chance of conversions.
The AYR.com example above brings us to another concept of functional minimalism.
While minimalism and simplicity aren’t always the same thing, they should go hand-in-hand. When you’re designing for functional minimalism, you should be concentrating on helping visitors to accomplish tasks as quickly and easily as possible, without distraction.
That means that rather than overwhelming your audience with a huge selection of pages that they can visit at the top or side of the screen, it may be worth looking into simpler navigation options. A single menu icon that expands into a full list of items remains a popular design choice – particularly in the era of mobile web design.
For instance, look at the simple menu on newvision-opticien.com.
With this basic approach, designers can ensure that visitors are more likely to click through to the pages that their clients want their customers to visit. They can still find what they need in the menu, but it’s not taking up space on the page, or distracting them.
Functional minimalism can also help today’s designers to more quickly capture the attention of their visitors from the moment they click into a website.
The content that’s visible at the top of the page for your visitors is what will encourage them to take the next step in their online experience. Make sure that you’re providing something that keeps your audience interested and gives them the information they need.
That way, you’ll lower the risk of high bounce rates for your clients, while also taking advantage of minimalism’s ability to deliver quick access to information for your audience.
At the top of the page, the Kerem.co website instantly introduces the visitor into what the website is all about, and what they should do next.
You can even deliver more information in one chunk at the top of the page, without cluttering the environment, by using good UI animation.
Consider implementing a slideshow of pictures that flip from one image to the next, or a font section that dynamically changes as your audience has chance to read each sentence.
Remember, functional minimalism isn’t just for home pages.
Depending on what you want to accomplish for your client, you could also embed the components of minimalism into landing pages, portfolios, and squeeze pages too.
After all, when there’s less clutter and confusion on a page to distract a potential audience, there’s a greater chance that your visitors will scroll to the bottom of the page and complete a conversion. For instance, look at how simple and attractive the Muzzleapp.com landing page is.
The page provides useful information and tells customers exactly what they need to do next. There’s no confusion, no complexity, and nothing to hold visitors back.
Just be careful. While functional minimalism can be very useful, it won’t be right for every website. A lack of elements can be harmful to websites that rely heavily on content. That’s because low information density will force your user to scroll excessively for the content that they need. Using functional minimalism correctly requires a careful evaluation of where this technique will be the most suitable.
A minimalist design isn’t just an aesthetic choice. The right aspects of minimalism can simplify interfaces on the web by eliminating unnecessary elements and reducing content that doesn’t support an end goal.
The key is to ensure that you’re focusing on a combination of aesthetics and usability when creating the right design. An easy-to-navigate and beautiful website can be a powerful tool for any business.
State Design Pattern — a behavioral design pattern that allows an object to change its behavior when its internal state changes.
Levallois – 8 octobre 2020 – SAP SE (NYSE : SAP) annonce une nouvelle version de SAP® Logistics Business Network, qui apporte de nouvelles capacités dans la gestion du réseaux des partenaires logistiques en termes de visibilité, de collaboration et intègre de nouveaux partenaires à sa plateforme logistique.
SAP Logistics Business Network est une plateforme cloud de business network dédiée à la logistique, conçue pour permettre aux clients SAP de connecter leur système d’information à leur réseau de partenaires pour étendre le suivi livraison des commandes et assurer la traçabilité des produits.
« Comme preuve supplémentaire de l’engagement de SAP, annoncé lors de SAPPHIRE NOW®, de proposer une offre complète de business networks : SAP Business Network, nous continuons d’ajouter de nouvelles capacités et d’étendre nos partenariats sur SAP Logistics Business Network notre business network dédié à la logistique », a déclaré Paige Cox, vice-président senior de SAP et responsable du SAP Business Network. « Les APIs ouvertes et les partenariats élargis sont des preuves de notre stratégie visant à créer un véritable réseau des réseaux. »
Cette nouvelle version constitue la prochaine étape de notre stratégie visant à permettre une visibilité de bout en bout, une efficacité accrue de la logistique et une collaboration transparente grâce à un réseau d’entreprises unifié qui inclut :
SAP Logistics Business Network étend la couverture de différents modes de transport grâce à des partenaires nouveaux et existants, tels que :
« Grâce à ces partenariats, les entreprises utilisatrices de SAP Logistics Business Network peuvent désormais accéder tout au long du transport terrestre et maritime à la localisation exacte, aux changements de statuts et à l’heure d’arrivée estimée (ETA) de leurs expéditions. La nouvelle connectivité avec les transporteurs maritimes et les ports, ainsi qu’avec les systèmes satellitaires, apporte une visibilité sur l’ensemble du fret maritime mondial, » explique Rémy Vernet, Directeur de l’activité Digital Supply Chain de SAP France. « Nous sommes également très heureux d’intégrer la startup Française Shippeo que nous avions accompagnée il y a deux ans via notre fonds d’investissement SAP.iO Fund. »
SAP Logistics Business Network fait partie intégrante de SAP Business Network. Ce réseau des réseaux met à profit les informations fournies par l’ERP en temps réel, permet de réaliser des analyses poussées et offre des synergies avec des solutions de business networks performants tels que Ariba® Network – qui relie plus de 5 millions d’entreprises dans le monde et où plus de 3 460 milliards de dollars US d’achat sont traités chaque année.
La fourniture d’une intelligence collective par le biais d’un réseau commercial ouvert et interopérable permet de mettre en place des chaînes d’approvisionnement durables et résilientes, de transformer les business modèles et d’offrir la souplesse nécessaire pour faire face aux crises mondiales.
The post SAP accélère sur sa plateforme collaborative : SAP Logistics Business Network – offrant plus de visibilité et de traçabilité des livraisons et un écosystème partenaire étendu appeared first on SAP France News.
It would be way too easy to answer this question with: “Whoever pays your bills.” And, honestly, I don’t think you can be a very successful web designer if you’re only driven by what the person paying you tells you to do.
Then again, that doesn’t mean you should swing to the exact opposite end and say that you only serve the end user.
When you take an extreme view or approach to this, you’re bound to leave someone or something important out. Everyone along the chain of command — your boss (if you work at an agency), your client, and their customers — matters.
So, what I’d suggest you do instead is approach the idea of who you really work for the way you would Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Who do web designers really work for? I think the true answer to this question is: “Everyone.” But there’s a catch…
Think about some of the requests you’ve received from superiors, or clients in the past. How many times have you rolled your eyes at their wacky requests?
You’re the design professional. That’s why they’re paying you to design their website and they’re not doing it themselves. So, there comes a point where you have to push aside what they want for what they need. And this will ultimately help you figure out who you work for and what you actually owe them (because fulfilling every nitpicky and unreasonable request will never lead to anything good).
So, here’s where the Hierarchy of Needs comes in. If we’re creating our own, it would look like this to start:
According to Dr. Neel Burton on Psychology Today:
Maslow called the bottom… levels of the pyramid ‘deficiency needs’ because we do not feel anything if they are met but become anxious or distressed if they are not.
I’d argue that these basic needs are like the ones we fulfill for bosses (or clients, if you’re a freelancer and work for yourself). It would look something like this:
Of course, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment by meeting these needs, but, as a creator, how important are these really to you? These are the basic things you have to do in order to make your boss happy and to stay gainfully employed. They also help to ensure that the client is happy with the boss and agency in the end.
Bottom line: Without these needs fulfilled, you won’t be able to move any deeper into the triangle/hierarchy. So, when focusing on working for your boss, make sure the basic needs are met so you can move on and serve others as they need you to.
Now, if your boss and client are two different people, you’ll have a second layer of needs to attend to here.
Just as your boss wants you to help them make more money and earn a strong reputation within their space, so too does your client. However, the work you owe them is different. Here’s how it would be represented in the triangle:
Again, you’ll be pleased if you can do and be all these things that your client needs, but is this ultimately what drives you as a designer? Sure, you want to build great relationships with clients so they return to you time and time again with all their website and marketing needs. But in terms of being fulfilled by being a good listener or a timely communicator? Probably not.
All the same, it’s important to be skilled in this type of work and to know how to serve your clients in order to get to that top level. It’ll also help you prioritize their needs accordingly, so you’re not jumping at every single thing or request they claim to “need” and blowing the budget or scope of the job.
For example, if they start demanding more of you (like bombarding you with emails every day wanting to know what’s going on), you can confidently remind them that things are under control (because you’re adhering to the project deadlines, per your boss) and you’ve already scheduled the next client check-in for this week (because you’ve been a good communicator, just as they need you to be).
Maslow refers to the top-level of the pyramid as the growth need. And here’s how Dr. Burton sums this one up for us:
Once we have met our deficiency needs, the focus of our anxiety shifts to self-actualization, and we begin, even if only at a sub- or semi-conscious level, to contemplate our bigger picture. However, only a small minority of people are able to self-actualize because self-actualization calls upon uncommon qualities such as independence, awareness, creativity, originality, and, of course, courage.
These characteristics perfectly sum up everything you want to and should be as a web designer. Unfortunately, it’s those employer and client needs that can stand in your way before you can truly flex your muscles as a creative.
Once you’ve attended to the basics, though, you’ll get your chance to design the kinds of user experiences you know will delight your client’s customers.
Here’s how their part of the triangle should look:
These are universally applicable needs and cannot be ignored.
After you’ve addressed them, though, you will have fulfilled your responsibility to all three parties: your boss, your client, and your end users. And once you’ve done that, you are free to be the creative designer that you are.
What I want you to take away from this, is that there are certain basic needs which you must fulfill when working as a web designer. These are the ones you’ll put into your own hierarchy of needs.
Take a systematic approach, starting with your boss and ending with the customer:
Once you’ve figured all this out, you’ll unlock the answer to whom you work for and, more importantly, how you should work for them.
Featured image via Pexels.
