Getting a visitor to your website is only half the battle: how do you keep them? A lot of attention is put on the "action" items on a homepage but it's more likely a visitor is landing on an interior page from a Web search or link. Every visual element, content or cue makes an impression with your visitor and influences what next step they take. The last thing you want to do is leave your visitor at a dead end or continuously force them to use the “back” button. With each page having a defined “next step” it gives your visitor a forward moving Web experience. The idea is more than just bigger and brighter action buttons. Your goal is the design an experience to make your visitors care. This session will walk through real life examples to identify common pitfalls and successful approaches, provide techniques to objectively look at your communications from your audience’s point of view and highlight tools to measure and track success of your communications.
Flexible Web Branding, the Case Against Single Web Templates - CASEV 2010Nick DeNardis
Look at the use of single templates on higher education websites. Implementing an institution-wide template sounds like a good idea at first but how does it perform in the real world? Get insights into the pros and cons of implementing a single template across all institution websites. We will explore what works and what doesn't, from both the management and end-user prospective. Discover techniques to embrace the uniqueness of each area of your institution and how to engage your visitors along the way.
http://nickdenardis.com/
Presentation about social media tools to help start-up businesses utilize the space with the least amount of time. The presentation was given at the Wayne State University to students learning to start businesses through the Blackstone LaunchPad.
Complete website redesigns are a thing of the past, it's time to think beyond the launch it and leave it mentality. Learn how to discover the pain points of your website and successfully correct them. This interactive talk will walk you through your site as an end user. Learn about A/B and multivariate testing mechanisms, how to create effective tests, and how to publish results to build credibility and authority. This talk will leave you with the ability to take away a process to build upon.
Give Your Content Legs and Run With It - PSUWEB11Nick DeNardis
Nick DeNardis & Mallory Wood
Congratulations, you have a website and it is full of content. But... what are you (the human!) doing on the back-end to make sure that visitors are finding the info they came for? Happy Visitors = Happy You. Reacting to your visitors needs, or even better, being proactive will go a long way in enhancing a visitor’s experience with your website. This session will teach you to do just that, helping you think beyond “write it and leave it” by showing you how to transform what’s generally static into long lasting social and interactive content. Let’s redefine what it means to publish content, rethink where it gets published, and rework existing content to meet your visitor’s needs.
http://psuweb11.sched.org/event/5c3d1b9d1c9140abe6d64d06d4e2dc7c
Presentation made by Nick DeNardis at the Case V conference on December 15, 2009 in Chicago, IL. It details the Web site redesign process of Wayne State University and how we successfully launched 350 redesigned sites in 5 years.
http://wcs.wayne.edu/casev/
Flexible Web Branding, the Case Against Single Web Templates - CASEV 2010Nick DeNardis
Look at the use of single templates on higher education websites. Implementing an institution-wide template sounds like a good idea at first but how does it perform in the real world? Get insights into the pros and cons of implementing a single template across all institution websites. We will explore what works and what doesn't, from both the management and end-user prospective. Discover techniques to embrace the uniqueness of each area of your institution and how to engage your visitors along the way.
http://nickdenardis.com/
Presentation about social media tools to help start-up businesses utilize the space with the least amount of time. The presentation was given at the Wayne State University to students learning to start businesses through the Blackstone LaunchPad.
Complete website redesigns are a thing of the past, it's time to think beyond the launch it and leave it mentality. Learn how to discover the pain points of your website and successfully correct them. This interactive talk will walk you through your site as an end user. Learn about A/B and multivariate testing mechanisms, how to create effective tests, and how to publish results to build credibility and authority. This talk will leave you with the ability to take away a process to build upon.
Give Your Content Legs and Run With It - PSUWEB11Nick DeNardis
Nick DeNardis & Mallory Wood
Congratulations, you have a website and it is full of content. But... what are you (the human!) doing on the back-end to make sure that visitors are finding the info they came for? Happy Visitors = Happy You. Reacting to your visitors needs, or even better, being proactive will go a long way in enhancing a visitor’s experience with your website. This session will teach you to do just that, helping you think beyond “write it and leave it” by showing you how to transform what’s generally static into long lasting social and interactive content. Let’s redefine what it means to publish content, rethink where it gets published, and rework existing content to meet your visitor’s needs.
http://psuweb11.sched.org/event/5c3d1b9d1c9140abe6d64d06d4e2dc7c
Presentation made by Nick DeNardis at the Case V conference on December 15, 2009 in Chicago, IL. It details the Web site redesign process of Wayne State University and how we successfully launched 350 redesigned sites in 5 years.
http://wcs.wayne.edu/casev/
Designing for next steps: A forward moving Web experienceNick DeNardis
Getting a visitor to your website is only half the battle. How do you keep them? A lot of attention is put on the "action" items on a homepage, but it's more likely a visitor is landing on an interior page from a Web search or link. Every visual element, content or cue makes an impression with your visitor and influences what next step they take. The last thing you want to do is leave your visitor at a dead end or continuously force them to use the back button. With each page having a defined next step it gives your visitor a forward moving Web experience.
The idea is more than just bigger and brighter action buttons. No matter how large you make them your visitors are not going to click if they don't care. Your goal is the design an experience to make your visitors care.
What is quality code? From cruft to craftNick DeNardis
No one sets out to create crufty code, but too often the pressure to "push it out the door and we'll fix it later" gets the best of us all. Before you know it, it's three projects later, the sun is still shining and you're still getting a paycheck. So where is the incentive to go back and clean under the rug?
Poor core quality isn't just a developer problem, either. It bleeds into team moral, deters decision agility, and ultimately prevents team members from getting into flow.
Quality code isn't something that requires a complete rewrite either (which is likely impossible), but can be accomplished with style guides, code reviews and a devotion to team investment time.
The pressure to ship will always be there, but starting (or maintaining) projects with an agreed upon foundation alleviates developers and designers from making potentially hundreds of decisions each day. This leaves room for the decisions that actually matter.
Learn how to transform your team, regardless of your position, into a lean, mean standards machine. Develop a multi-tier style guide, workflow and practices that focus on knowledge and consensus building. Eliminate the mundane decisions and allow the team to focus on its craft.
Golden Rule for the Web - #eduGuruSummitNick DeNardis
Why you cannot outsource a sustainable redesign project, but jump starting it has to come from the outside. We all know what annoys us online, why do we keep doing it to our users?
Working internally you come across various motivations and keeping the users front and center can be difficult. Learn strategies and techniques to keep the end user top of mind and driving decisions.
Coworking, startups, innovation : du bullshit bingo à la réalité #web2day Nan...Yann Heurtaux
http://web2day.co/evenements/coworking-startups-innovation-bullshit-bingo-a-realite/
Quelques questions qui recevront une réponse complètement subjective, parfois brutale, mais toujours bienveillante :
- Dans quelles conditions mettre un politicien ou un journaliste dans un coworking est-il utile ? Pour qui ?
- L’acculturation et les startups : le fantasme de l’open space
- Puis-je trouver un co-fondateur, un premier employé ou l’amour dans un coworking ?
- Qui vide le lave-vaisselle ? ou : de l’usager au membre
- La grosse entreprise, le petit salarié, et le monde merveilleux de la collaboration magique : comment et pourquoi envoyer des télé-travailleurs dans un coworking ?
- Au-delà du travail, ou : faut-il faire l’apéro tous les vendredi avec ses coworkers ?
- Le cas suisse : l’union fait-elle la force ?
Strategies & Tactics For Overcoming Enterprise SEO ChallengesSam Marsden
You might have a standard set of processes and fixes when dealing with normal-sized sites, but how does that change when you start working with large enterprise sites? How do you adapt SEO processes to work effectively for clients with these needs? In this session, Sam will provide efficient and effective strategies on how to tackle complex SEO challenges for Enterprise level sites.
SEO & AJAX - problems or opportunities? - SMX Milan 2015Giuseppe Pastore
The latest in technical SEO, SMX Milan 2015 - A presentation about SEO and AJAX, to show how client side technologies can help Search Engine Optimization even if historically they have been a problem for search engines, including Google. Nowadays AJAX is an opportunity to handle duplications and achieve better SEO results, if properly used.
Confab Higher Ed 2016: Better Strategy Through StructureLisa Maria Martin
Information is at its most useful when it’s clear, consistent, orderly, organized—in other words, when it’s well-structured. And well-structured web content not only brings a bucketful of benefits to the user experience, but also delivers a deeper understanding of the content to us, the web professionals building that user experience.
Learning to focus on structural considerations—how content is built, organized, and connected across the experience—can change the way we work, fostering a more collaborative redesign process and enabling us to better execute our strategies. Using examples from several universities that recently overhauled their sites, this talk shows how structural approaches to content can:
* Make content easier to understand (and improve!)
* Enhance communications with stakeholders and across teams
* Lay a foundation to support future development, editorial work, and governance plans
Maturity Mapping - Intro to Wardley Mapping, Social Practice Theory and Matur...Chris McDermott
Talk delivered by Chris and Marc Burgauer to introduce Maturity Mapping. The talk was divided into 3 distinct talks. First an introduction the Wardley mapping followed by an introduction to Social Practice Theory. Then the bulk of the talk was on Maturity Mapping which integrates Wardley Mapping, Social Practice Theory and Cynefin to create context specific Maturity Models
Taming a beast - Cloudnative London 2018Mike Chernev
Deploying your application whenever you want is easy. Everyone does it nowadays. And that works great when you have a small group of people responsible for an application. But what if you have several teams working on the same application? What if you have almost 80 people committing more than 30 times a day? Can you face the challenge of deploying that application as often as you wish and succeed in keeping it stable? In this talk Mike will explore the journey from a conservative four week release cycle to full autonomy. What are the challenges you will face, how to tackled them and why this brings you closer to the clouds.
How to be better at getting things done in 2022Nick DeNardis
Focuses on changing habits, making time for focused attention, using tools to take back control of your time and using tools to keep track of ideas and decisions asynchronously.
Five-minute talk as part of the How To Be Better In 2022 event.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-be-better-in-2022-tickets-235361250837
Why #littlebigdetails Matter and What You Should Do About ThemNick DeNardis
The audience, structure and often the design of university websites are 90% the same (for the most part). Although your website is probably not the sole reason students enroll, it can be a detractor. The difference between a regular site and a rememberable one is the #littlebigdetails. A lot of time is spent on the “big details” of a website, like the centerpiece image, and things that everyone expects, frankly the easy decisions. The harder, but more memorable, are the little details that make a big difference in your user's experience. Learn why these details make such a large impact and how to take a step back to discover how to add a little joy to your user experience.
Producing a mobile presence. Timeline: Yesterday...Nick DeNardis
Having a comprehensive mobile strategy is great but your users aren’t waiting around till you have have a pixel perfect solution. Your users are on their mobile devices right now waiting to access your content, having something up is better than nothing. This talk is a look at creating a practical, agile and ever evolving mobile Web presence. A mobile presence can be created on a small budget and without a lot of time. An introduction to the tools, frameworks and testing strategies needed to get a mobile website up quickly and moving in a more useful and usable direction each day.
Creating a separate mobile website is a great idea until someone changes a data source on you. Your users don’t care if your LDAP is down or why they can’t pull up next the class schedule for next semester. In this session you will learn how to plan for the worst; network outages, slow response times and unorganized data. The mobile Web isn’t very useful without content and often that content is gathered from many sources that are out of the developers control. Gathering, protecting and organizing that data is the job of a smart developer and a successful mobile Web presence. This is accomplished by adding an API layer to everything you do. This session will walk you through the ins and outs of creating and maintaining a Web API that can extend far beyond your mobile presence.
More Related Content
Similar to Designing for next steps - A forward moving Web experience
Designing for next steps: A forward moving Web experienceNick DeNardis
Getting a visitor to your website is only half the battle. How do you keep them? A lot of attention is put on the "action" items on a homepage, but it's more likely a visitor is landing on an interior page from a Web search or link. Every visual element, content or cue makes an impression with your visitor and influences what next step they take. The last thing you want to do is leave your visitor at a dead end or continuously force them to use the back button. With each page having a defined next step it gives your visitor a forward moving Web experience.
The idea is more than just bigger and brighter action buttons. No matter how large you make them your visitors are not going to click if they don't care. Your goal is the design an experience to make your visitors care.
What is quality code? From cruft to craftNick DeNardis
No one sets out to create crufty code, but too often the pressure to "push it out the door and we'll fix it later" gets the best of us all. Before you know it, it's three projects later, the sun is still shining and you're still getting a paycheck. So where is the incentive to go back and clean under the rug?
Poor core quality isn't just a developer problem, either. It bleeds into team moral, deters decision agility, and ultimately prevents team members from getting into flow.
Quality code isn't something that requires a complete rewrite either (which is likely impossible), but can be accomplished with style guides, code reviews and a devotion to team investment time.
The pressure to ship will always be there, but starting (or maintaining) projects with an agreed upon foundation alleviates developers and designers from making potentially hundreds of decisions each day. This leaves room for the decisions that actually matter.
Learn how to transform your team, regardless of your position, into a lean, mean standards machine. Develop a multi-tier style guide, workflow and practices that focus on knowledge and consensus building. Eliminate the mundane decisions and allow the team to focus on its craft.
Golden Rule for the Web - #eduGuruSummitNick DeNardis
Why you cannot outsource a sustainable redesign project, but jump starting it has to come from the outside. We all know what annoys us online, why do we keep doing it to our users?
Working internally you come across various motivations and keeping the users front and center can be difficult. Learn strategies and techniques to keep the end user top of mind and driving decisions.
Coworking, startups, innovation : du bullshit bingo à la réalité #web2day Nan...Yann Heurtaux
http://web2day.co/evenements/coworking-startups-innovation-bullshit-bingo-a-realite/
Quelques questions qui recevront une réponse complètement subjective, parfois brutale, mais toujours bienveillante :
- Dans quelles conditions mettre un politicien ou un journaliste dans un coworking est-il utile ? Pour qui ?
- L’acculturation et les startups : le fantasme de l’open space
- Puis-je trouver un co-fondateur, un premier employé ou l’amour dans un coworking ?
- Qui vide le lave-vaisselle ? ou : de l’usager au membre
- La grosse entreprise, le petit salarié, et le monde merveilleux de la collaboration magique : comment et pourquoi envoyer des télé-travailleurs dans un coworking ?
- Au-delà du travail, ou : faut-il faire l’apéro tous les vendredi avec ses coworkers ?
- Le cas suisse : l’union fait-elle la force ?
Strategies & Tactics For Overcoming Enterprise SEO ChallengesSam Marsden
You might have a standard set of processes and fixes when dealing with normal-sized sites, but how does that change when you start working with large enterprise sites? How do you adapt SEO processes to work effectively for clients with these needs? In this session, Sam will provide efficient and effective strategies on how to tackle complex SEO challenges for Enterprise level sites.
SEO & AJAX - problems or opportunities? - SMX Milan 2015Giuseppe Pastore
The latest in technical SEO, SMX Milan 2015 - A presentation about SEO and AJAX, to show how client side technologies can help Search Engine Optimization even if historically they have been a problem for search engines, including Google. Nowadays AJAX is an opportunity to handle duplications and achieve better SEO results, if properly used.
Confab Higher Ed 2016: Better Strategy Through StructureLisa Maria Martin
Information is at its most useful when it’s clear, consistent, orderly, organized—in other words, when it’s well-structured. And well-structured web content not only brings a bucketful of benefits to the user experience, but also delivers a deeper understanding of the content to us, the web professionals building that user experience.
Learning to focus on structural considerations—how content is built, organized, and connected across the experience—can change the way we work, fostering a more collaborative redesign process and enabling us to better execute our strategies. Using examples from several universities that recently overhauled their sites, this talk shows how structural approaches to content can:
* Make content easier to understand (and improve!)
* Enhance communications with stakeholders and across teams
* Lay a foundation to support future development, editorial work, and governance plans
Maturity Mapping - Intro to Wardley Mapping, Social Practice Theory and Matur...Chris McDermott
Talk delivered by Chris and Marc Burgauer to introduce Maturity Mapping. The talk was divided into 3 distinct talks. First an introduction the Wardley mapping followed by an introduction to Social Practice Theory. Then the bulk of the talk was on Maturity Mapping which integrates Wardley Mapping, Social Practice Theory and Cynefin to create context specific Maturity Models
Taming a beast - Cloudnative London 2018Mike Chernev
Deploying your application whenever you want is easy. Everyone does it nowadays. And that works great when you have a small group of people responsible for an application. But what if you have several teams working on the same application? What if you have almost 80 people committing more than 30 times a day? Can you face the challenge of deploying that application as often as you wish and succeed in keeping it stable? In this talk Mike will explore the journey from a conservative four week release cycle to full autonomy. What are the challenges you will face, how to tackled them and why this brings you closer to the clouds.
Similar to Designing for next steps - A forward moving Web experience (17)
How to be better at getting things done in 2022Nick DeNardis
Focuses on changing habits, making time for focused attention, using tools to take back control of your time and using tools to keep track of ideas and decisions asynchronously.
Five-minute talk as part of the How To Be Better In 2022 event.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-be-better-in-2022-tickets-235361250837
Why #littlebigdetails Matter and What You Should Do About ThemNick DeNardis
The audience, structure and often the design of university websites are 90% the same (for the most part). Although your website is probably not the sole reason students enroll, it can be a detractor. The difference between a regular site and a rememberable one is the #littlebigdetails. A lot of time is spent on the “big details” of a website, like the centerpiece image, and things that everyone expects, frankly the easy decisions. The harder, but more memorable, are the little details that make a big difference in your user's experience. Learn why these details make such a large impact and how to take a step back to discover how to add a little joy to your user experience.
Producing a mobile presence. Timeline: Yesterday...Nick DeNardis
Having a comprehensive mobile strategy is great but your users aren’t waiting around till you have have a pixel perfect solution. Your users are on their mobile devices right now waiting to access your content, having something up is better than nothing. This talk is a look at creating a practical, agile and ever evolving mobile Web presence. A mobile presence can be created on a small budget and without a lot of time. An introduction to the tools, frameworks and testing strategies needed to get a mobile website up quickly and moving in a more useful and usable direction each day.
Creating a separate mobile website is a great idea until someone changes a data source on you. Your users don’t care if your LDAP is down or why they can’t pull up next the class schedule for next semester. In this session you will learn how to plan for the worst; network outages, slow response times and unorganized data. The mobile Web isn’t very useful without content and often that content is gathered from many sources that are out of the developers control. Gathering, protecting and organizing that data is the job of a smart developer and a successful mobile Web presence. This is accomplished by adding an API layer to everything you do. This session will walk you through the ins and outs of creating and maintaining a Web API that can extend far beyond your mobile presence.
Your visitors interact with content, not with your website. Content consistency is crucial to a successful user experience. Re-publishing is one option but it’s an inside-out action that relies on the authority controlling where the information goes. An API frees your data and the responsibility to where it is published and accessed. Mobile is a major consumer for your API but not every API is setup to handle the mass of requests coming from those devices. Learn how to mobile devices consume API’s with limited or low bandwidth and how to to tailor your API to be as efficient and effective as possible.
http://environmentsforhumans.com/2012/doteduguru-summit/
Better Design Through Analytics - #eduiconf 2010Nick DeNardis
It’s been said that “good designers redesign, great designers realign“. Design is a continual process of refinement, realignment and improvement. But how do you decide what needs refining? Do you make informed decisions or are you grasping at straws in the dark?
Web site statistics hold the key to making informed decisions, but throwing a little Google Analytics code on your site isn’t really enough.
In this half-day workshop you will learn how to use web statistics to better refine your designs. Get the basics of what all those analytics numbers mean, learn how to set measurable goals, and define conversions. Then take it to the next level with the Google Website Optimizer, A/B and multivariate testing.
Web Metrics: An Overview - #eduiconf 2010Nick DeNardis
Web site statistics hold the key to making informed decisions, but throwing a little Google Analytics code on your site isn’t really enough.
In this one hour session you will learn how to use web statistics to better refine your designs. Get the basics of what all those analytics numbers mean, learn how to set measurable goals, and define conversions.
Conference Wrap Up: http://doteduguru.com/id6217-edui-2010-conference-wrap-up.html
Analyzing Real-time User Visitor SearchesNick DeNardis
Higher education websites always have a steady supply of visitors. It's great to see the numbers in Google Analyics fluctuate each day and trend upwards over time, but are your visitors finding what they came for? This talk is a high-level-to-in-depth look at tracking what visitors are searching for in real time from your site. We'll go beyond the consolidated "popular keywords" list to an actual trend list with grouped phases and pages. The goal is peer into the visitor's mind and figure out why they are searching for "address" on the Contact Us page or "Professor Smith" on the Faculty Information page. Higher education websites always struggle to accommodate two audiences, internal and external. Search results based on location don't lie, it's easy to combine real internal searches with reasons why quicklinks and extra menus may or may not be functioning as optimally as they should. It's time to go beyond pageviews and user paths and look at real-time search analytics.
Break Through the Administrative Barriers and Focus on Your Users.
http://miupa.org/fresh/break-through-the-administrative-barriers-and-focus-on-your-users/
A presentation about web standards and accessibility I gave to the ASIS&T group at Wayne State University.
Full Explanation:
http://wsuasist.blogspot.com/2009/03/web-standards-and-accessibility.html
Internal presentation given by Nick DeNardis at Wayne State University to the Marketing and Communications creative group for internal employee development.
3. Associate Director of Web Communications
Wayne State University
hp://wayne.edu/
Host of EDU Checkup
hp://educheckup.com/
Curator of EDU Snippits
hp://edusnippits.com/
@nickdenardis #heweb12 #mcs5
4. Information Architecture
“the art and science of organizing and labeling
websites, intranets, online communities and soware
to support usability.”
- Information Architecture Institute
@nickdenardis #heweb12 #mcs5
8. User Experience
“a person's perceptions and responses that result from
the use or anticipated use of a product, system or
service"
- ISO 9241-210
@nickdenardis #heweb12 #mcs5
14. Can I trust this page?
Is the information up to date?
Can I use this page as a resource in the
future?
What do they want me to do on this
page?
@nickdenardis #heweb12 #mcs5
66. 1. Junk
Get a baseline understanding of your visitors
2. Good
Entice them to get just one step further
3. Great
Walk along their journey
4. Rememberable
Adding a few #lilebigdetails
@nickdenardis #heweb12 #mcs5