Last week Google announced that they recommend responsive web design for websites that target smartphones. Responsive web design is a technique where the layout and content of a website adapt to the user’s environment, which includes screen size, platform, and even orientation. This type of design is great for making sure users can interact with your site from any device, and according to Google, it’s also great for SEO for several reasons:

Using a single URL for a piece of content makes it easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to your content, and a single URL for the content helps Google’s algorithms assign the indexing properties for the content.

No redirection is needed for users to get to the device-optimized view, which reduces loading time. Also, user-agent-based redirection is error-prone and can degrade your site’s user experience.

Responsive web design saves resources for both your site and Google’s crawlers. For responsive web design pages, any Googlebot user-agents needs to crawl your pages once, as opposed to crawling multiple times with different user-agents, to retrieve your content. This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh.

To read more about responsive web design and what it means for your website, check out my previous post Future-Proof Digital and consider whether responsive web design may be right for your business.

Facebook made a giant leap forward this week by adding a layer of desperately needed tools that let companies manage their pages in a more professional manner. They are also hitting up page owners to pay for better placement of their posts, but does it work?

First let’s dig in on the changes to the admin function of Facebook Pages.

Admin Roles: Not all admin rights are created equal (and shouldn’t be)

This week Facebook added the ability to set multiple admin roles for a business or organization’s page. Each role is allowed certain abilities such as viewing insights, posting as the page, or editing content.

This change allows page owners to be more efficient, because they can give the right amount of access to the right people. For example, a page owner may set up a team to moderate posts. This team needs the ability to delete inappropriate posts (such as spam or vulgar language), but they don’t need the ability to write new posts or add apps to the page. With this new change, page owners can assign admin roles based on need, instead of being forced into assigning all-or-nothing administrative rights.

The following table lists the available admin roles. More information is on Facebook’s Admin Roles help page.

This feature shows how Facebook is becoming more business-friendly. Setting up different admin roles is a no brainer for page owners (and a welcome addition to the platform!), but not all of Facebook’s features are necessarily great for business. For example, promoted posts is a feature page owners should test out before jumping in completely. Continue Reading

So you built a website and it seems to do everything you need. Then someone points out that it looks pretty terrible on a phone, so you build a mobile website. Then you realize that it isn’t optimized for touch screens and doesn’t work on an iPad, so you build an iPad version. Then you get a memo from the Chairman asking why it doesn’t work right on his wife’s new Kindle Fire, and your sales director calls and says it looks terrible on his Mac Mini, which he is viewing on his 42” living room TV, and then…well, you get the idea.

The moral of the story is that the one thing you can count on in our technology drenched world is change, which is why you need a better way to approach creating things for digital channels.  That better way is called Responsive Web Design. Not very catchy, but as you’ll see in a minute, the name pretty much sums it up. Continue Reading

“The very fact of exclusion from participation is a subtle form of suppression. It gives individuals no opportunity to reflect and decide upon what’s good for them.”

John Dewey (1939), philosopher, psychologist, and education reformer; quote via the Public Sphere Project

Dewey wasn’t talking specifically about experience design, but his comment still applies. I’d never thought of design as a way to control someone, but there’s some truth there. When we design something without the user’s input, we essentially say that we (as designers) know what’s best for them.

And to an extent, that’s true. We’re steeped in research about design principles, usability, and psychology. But there’s still that last piece we can’t learn from books – the user’s individual circumstance. People are both unique and predictable. Research can teach us how to design for the predictable behaviors, but we must talk to users to figure out their unique needs. This concept is nothing new; user-centered design is founded on talking to users.

Participatory design pushes us beyond talking. Remember English teachers telling us to “show, not tell”? Participatory design allows users to show us what they’re thinking instead of telling us. Instead of talking about what features, participatory design requires users to show us the how of features – how should it work? where does it fit? what does it look like? Participatory design gives voice to the users in a powerful way. Continue Reading