“EffectiveUI came up with a clever design and super interface that has everyone talking!”
Michael J. Heneghan
Technology Director
Herff Jones Yearbook Products
Vidya L. Drego, Forrester Research
A growing number of user experience specialist agencies, like EffectiveUI, are capturing the attention of large firms because of their laser focus on customer experience and their ability to create compelling experiences across interaction points.
Jonathan Browne, Forrester Research
Design personas and customer journey maps are valuable tools that support companies’ tactical design decisions and the high-level strategic goal of progressing toward experience-based differentiation. This document provides answers to some common questions about personas and journey maps, and shows examples, including one from EffectiveUI.
Andrew McInnes, Forrester Research
Well-executed customer journey maps can help customer experience professionals plan improvement projects and communicate with employees across their organizations. However, many fall short due to missing content, overwhelming detail and poor visual design. Forrester’s methodology will help you assess the effectiveness of your journey map deliverables.
Ron Rogowski, Forrester Research
RIA technologies will be key to delivering online experiences that are increasingly customized, aggregated, relevant and social. Customer experience professionals should use RIAs for modernizing existing online functionality, building transformative new experiences and creating emotional connections with users.
Paul Hagen, Forrester Research
Most companies lack a customer experience strategy. As a result, their leaders struggle with decisions about funding and prioritizing projects meant to improve customer experience at the enterprise level.
Vidya L. Drego, Forrester Research
Selecting the right Web design vendor can be stressful and complicated. To help kick-start the vendor selection process, Forrester gathered self-reported data from 76 firms, including EffectiveUI, that have significant experience in designing and developing Web sites.
Julie A. Ask, Forrester Research
The browser-based mobile Web experience is more important than ever. In 2009, consumer brands built iPhone applications; they are now asking what’s next. The answer for many is to improve the quality of their mobile Web site. The first step is developing a business strategy to guide a vendor requirements document. Working through the mobile POST process forces brands to answer strategic questions before making technology decisions and thinking about vendors.
Lance Christmann, EffectiveUI
If you’re like most companies, your CEO or CMO is probably saying, “We need a mobile app!” Having a mobile presence is a good idea: 234 million Americans age 13 and older are mobile subscribers, and only three percent of mobile phones sold today do not have data capability. However, an even better idea is finding out whether a mobile app makes sense in meeting your customers’ needs and your own business goals. This article outlines the top five factors to consider when deciding whether your business needs a mobile application.
Ron Rogowski, Forrester Research
While HTML 5 has the potential to improve some user experiences, it comes with its own set of implementation challenges that can outweigh its benefits. Customer experience professionals should look to HTML 5 as a means to improve accessibility, design apps for Apple devices and build text-heavy sites.
Ron Rogowski, Forrester Research
As consumers increasingly look to connect with companies online, lackluster Web experiences will damage many brands. But better functional design won’t solve the problem. Instead, Forrester recommends that companies master the three principles of a new approach that we call Emotional Experience Design (EED): Address customers’ real goals, develop a coherent personality and engage a mix of senses.
Mike Gualtieri, Forrester Research
To retain and gain customers, you have to continually win their hearts and minds by providing them with a compelling user experience (UX) that is useful, usable and desirable. Application development professionals can take the user experience bull by the horns by following these best practices: become your users; design first; trust no one — test; and inject user experience design into your software development life cycle.
John McRee, EffectiveUI
Experience designers must develop a deep understanding of and empathy for their clients’ needs, frustrations and the constraints and challenges they face. While it’s critical that project teams invest heavily in user research to uncover user needs and interaction patterns, it’s equally important that designers reach out to project stake holders early in a partnership and establish a relationship of mutual respect and trust. You can do so by proving that you are both a user and client advocate.
Focusing on user experience (UX) reduces costs, increases customer loyalty and boosts revenue. In pleasing users and helping them better interact with your company, UX also drives adoption of your products and helps grow your customer base. In this article, we examine the top six ways to introduce the concept of UX to your organization and demonstrate how user-focused strategies can steer an organization away from practices detrimental to business and toward success.
Michelle Bagur, EffectiveUI
This article summarizes the basic principles of IT accessibility and how failure to make software available to people of varied abilities can affect enterprise. Ths article also highlights risks and rewards enterprise encounters when making accessibility part of its IT roadmap, and how accessible IT can help a company gain market share, extend brand and present a leadership image.
Chris Aron, EffectiveUI
As touch and multi-touch technology evolves, touch-enabled devices give users more meaningful interactions, personalized experiences and opportunities to achieve or exceed goals. In this article, we will explore touch technology’s path to widespread adoption and the powerful implications it has had for those businesses that have used it.
Rebecca Flavin and Joy Sykes, EffectiveUI
In this paper, we’ll explore why government must take a user-centered approach to its services to meet citizens’ increasingly high expectations of Web technologies. It must embrace the Web as a powerful citizen-engagement channel that integrates into its Web sites and applications UX practices that enhance citizens’ experiences with the democratic process.
Sean Christmann and John Blanco, EffectiveUI
Smartphones are now interacting with brands, Web sites and social networks in unprecedented ways. It is important for business executives to plan for and reach consumers in pervasive and accessible ways. This article will help you improve your business’ mobile strategy by providing perspectives on approaches you should entertain and on which platforms you should consider developing.
Beth Koloski, EffectiveUI
Incorporating user feedback throughout the entire development process is an essential and overlooked part of creating successful products. This article outlines many small, easy user research techniques you can incorporate throughout your entire process to help ensure you make the right tradeoffs among timeline, budget and user experience.
Ron Rogowski, Forrester Research
Firms looking to differentiate their brands through online functionality should start with a clear understanding of user goals, maintain a relentless focus on brand attributes, enlist expert help and test designs for compliance with brand positioning. This whitepaper includes examples of RIAs that provide top-notch user experiences and complement key brand attributes, including applications built by EffectiveUI.
Free Forrester Report download
Ron Rogowski, Forrester Research
Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) applications like eBay San Dimas (now known as eBay Desktop) take RIAs out of the browser and put them on the desktop. These applications enable occasionally connected use, customized content views and a branded experie
Free Forrester Report download
Anthony Franco, EffectiveUI
This whitepaper identifies the commonalities and differentiators between Flex and AJAX, discusses the pros and cons for using each framework for various implementations and provides a comparison between Flex and AJAX in situations where they are both relevant options.
Ron Rogowski, Forrester Research
RIAs attract site owners' attention because users like them, they enable interactions that HTML can't, and they get results. Our research and models show that well-designed RIAs can produce eye-popping results that can help prove the value of current investments and make the case for future RIA projects.
Ron Rogowski, Forrester Research
The business benefits of RIAs are clear and compelling. Yet many firms that could benefit greatly from RIAs talk themselves out of the investment because they believe the added complexity will be costly. Companies considering RIAs should consider all the costs and enlist help early in the planning process from companies like EffectiveUI.
Erica Driver and Ron Rogowski, Forrester Research
RIAs are emerging as vehicles to enable the next generation of Information Workplaces that are best suited for decision-makers and task-oriented workers who engage in complex, multi-step processes. Information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals should analyze roles to decide when RIAs are appropriate.
Jeffrey S. Hammond, Forrester Research
Practical steps that developers can take to significantly lower the security risk exposure for RIAs. Sean Christmann, senior developer at EffectiveUI, comments on general design guidelines for RIAs.
Simon Yates, Forrester Research
The use of RIA frameworks has sharply increased in the past year as more application development professionals embrace rich Internet development technologies like AJAX or Adobe Flash. But what does this mean for security and risk professionals? It's important to understand the potential security risks associated with RIAs and how to best mitigate them.
Jonathan Anderson, John McRee, Robb Wilson and the team at EffectiveUI
Demand for successful user experience strategy is on the rise as software users increasingly expect effortless, engaging interaction with desktop and Web applications. Effective UI will teach you how to drive business value and increase brand strength by creating software that generates superior user experiences, from concept to deployment.
Lucas L. Jordan, EffectiveUI
Learn what the JavaFX platform can really do for Java desktop and mobile front ends. The book presents a number of excellent visual effects and techniques that will make any JavaFX application stand out—whether it’s animation, multimedia, or a game.
Tony Hillerson, EffectiveUI; Danial Wanja
Written by developers with extensive experience using both frameworks, this book covers Adobe Flex 3 and Ruby on Rails 2 from the ground up. Even if you have minimal experience with Flex or Rails, you'll learn all you need to know to use them to build exceptional production applications.
Juan Sanchez and Andy McIntosh, EffectiveUI
Leading Flex developers show how to build stunning Flex and AIR applications. You'll learn how to take a design and translate it into Flex or AIR without sacrificing fidelity, and how to apply state-of-the-art branding that adds value to all your Flex applications.
EffectiveUI
Evaluating any new technology can be a challenge. This Short Cut is designed to help Web application developers (and their team managers) understand if Flex is the right technology for their company or client.
Tony Hillerson, EffectiveUI
This Short Cut covers a set of tools and technologies that work together to allow developers to build RIAs quickly and easily on top of proven enterprise technologies that are traditionally associated with long, complex development efforts.