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Your new product just launched. Congratulations! There’s just one problem. As you start tracking user data, you’ve noticed a significant dip in user retention. A good chunk of users aren’t even making it to your core offerings.
Essentially, users who download your app are likely not to use it beyond those first 24 hours. More specifically, the average app will lose 73% of potential users within 1 day, and roughly 90% within the first week.
How can you provide an experience that is informative, intuitive, and turns new users into long-time customers? That’s where user onboarding comes in.
The post Getting Started with User Onboarding: What You Need To Know appeared first on ADK Group.
Design Systems, UI Kits, and Style Guides. You may have heard these terms being thrown around whenever branding is brought up, and they perhaps bring up more questions than answers. What’s the difference between the three? Are they interchangeable? Which will be best for you and your organization?
The post Design Systems vs UI Kits vs Style Guides—What’s Best for My Organization? appeared first on ADK Group.
As designers and developers, we’re often asked how to approach design systems—and when to consider using them. And like many aspects of user experience design, the answer will depend on the specific scenario at hand. That being said, there are a few ways to tell whether your organization needs to invest in creating a design system. Let’s review some of the most common ones.
The post How to Tell if You Need a Design System appeared first on ADK Group.
User testing surveys conducted across diverse markets show clear and universal results. Information addressed to folks with dyslexia improves usability for all.
The post Improve Readability, Make Writing Accessible appeared first on ADK Group.
When creating design systems, we need to begin by considering our own real-world examples to craft a system that will support realistic use.
The post Accounting for Content in Design Systems appeared first on ADK Group.
Make sure to always follow these content-specific recommendations to ensure a pleasant browsing experience for all your visitors.
The post Accessibility Best Practices for Content Editors appeared first on ADK Group.
When getting started in accessibility, there are seemingly endless options, investments, and benefits of having a truly accessible digital product. But at the core, accessibility is a requirement for everyone. Many of the standards for one population are now so universal, many people who live without disabilities still benefit from and expect certain accessible services.
In fact, accessible design principles are often the same as good marketing or design principles. By making digital information and services accessible, we see tangible benefits for everyone.
What Is the Curb-cut Effect?You’re likely already familiar with the curb-cut effect and just don’t know it. But in fact, you likely experience this added benefit of a disability-friendly feature most everyday. The curb-cut effect is the widespread use and appreciation for disability-friendly features that benefit both people with disabilities and those without.
The original use of the phrase came from the curb cuts that exist on sidewalks. They act as miniature ramps for easier entrance and exit of the sidewalk for wheelchair users, but they are now universal and useful for strollers, bikes, scooters, shopping carts, and more.
You may also be familiar with closed captioning. Although your dad may hear perfectly fine, he still may prefer to read the TV than watch it in order to not miss a single word of his favorite “Vikings” show.
In an April 2019 study from Verizon Media, 80 percent of consumers are more likely to watch an entire video if it has captions. And 80 percent of people who use captions aren’t deaf or hard of hearing.
So while captioning all your videos helps people who can’t hear, it also lets the vast majority of other users get your message as well. Captions can also be helpful for users who may want to watch a video in a quiet space (like covertly watching a recipe video at your work desk, or while a toddler naps), or for users watching a video that may have dramatic accents or shifts in volume, or for users who are watching a video in a language they are still learning.
A more recent feature was added to Zoom added a recent feature that provides closed captioning during conference calls. This allows all users to participate in the digital workspace, even without audio.
Examples of the Curb-cut Effect in Web and Product DesignFurther examples of the curb-cut effect include color contrasts, alt text, and clean code.
Color ContrastColor contrast vitally serves people who may have vision impairments like color blindness, myopia, hypermetropia, diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, and more. For people with visual impairment, color alone is not enough to distinguish between two separate items. There needs to be enough contract between two items to more clearly see the difference between the two.
If you have 20/20 vision, you may think this doesn’t apply to you. However, color contrast on digital devices becomes important for all vision states in situations such as bright sunlight or other poor lighting conditions, very small screens like a smartwatch or phone, and low-quality monitors. (Remember that episode of “Game of Thrones” that was too dark for anyone with a normal TV to see who was winning the battle? That kind of issue can show up with low contrast text on screens, as well.)
Curious to learn more about color contrast? Here’s a fun way to test color combinations that simulates several vision impairments and environmental situations.
Alt text Alt text, short for alternative text, was originally meant to describe functional or informational images on a page to users who may not be able to see them. However, alt text has become useful for users who aren’t necessarily visually impaired.
In 2019, Facebook and Instagram experienced an outage that prevented images from loading. Every user saw alt text in place of images, some of which was generated by Facebook’s AI. Even if some of the alt tags were guesses on Facebook’s part, having some description of the missing images did help provide some context for users that weren’t visually impaired.
This also becomes relevant if users have a slow or unstable internet connection, or if your application or website’s server has a hiccup. Alt text can help all of your users have some frame of reference for images that aren’t loading properly.
Still not convinced? Alt text can also help search engines index your images correctly, and can even help improve your website’s SEO.
Ok, now that you’re all gung-ho about adding alt text to every image you upload, we do want to mention a couple caveats. First, not all images should have alt text. Decorative images don’t add new information to the content of a page, and therefore do not need alt text.
For example, the information provided by the image might already be given using adjacent text. Or perhaps the image is a graphical accent, included to make the website more visually attractive (such as the textured background in the image below). In the case of decorative images, use an empty alt attribute.
The second caveat is that you do not want to have duplicate alt text. In other words, if you’ve written a description in the body text or caption, you do not need to list the same description in alt text form. This causes “auditory clutter” for screen reader users.
Although there are plenty more examples of the curb-cut effect, the last one we’d like to cover here is something most users may not think about if they are not in the development business.
Clean CodeCleaner code describes best-practice techniques in a digital environment. This is often sought after simply to improve performance, which should be a goal for most any digital space. However, there are tricks built inside of clean code that also improve accessibility – for disabled and non-disabled folks alike.
Screen readers and other assistive technologies rely on the underlying HTML markup to convey meaningful information about the structure and content of web pages. This means that it’s very important to structure your site or product’s HTML correctly.
However, there are benefits beyond accessibility when your product is built cleanly and properly. Sites built semantically have cleaner code, load much faster, and perform better for all users. A clean semantic structure makes it a lot easier for search engines to crawl your website, which can lead to improved SEO performance.
And semantic HTML also makes it a lot easier for new developers to familiarize themselves with the product’s codebase more quickly. In other words, accessible code is clean code, which improves user experience, searchability, and ongoing development. Pretty cool!
Accessible products are not just for people with disabilities. The curb-cut effect has resulted in the widespread adoption of accessibility standards to the point where all user groups now expect this level of accessibility. Need help getting started? We’ve got you covered.
The post “Curb Cut” Your Digital Product with Accessible Features for All Users appeared first on ADK Group.
Digital personalization as a practice could be considered somewhat mainstream since the advent of the social network. Remember MySpace? What started with a single user profile template soon unlocked and gave rise to millions of instances of highly customized profiles and even small commercial businesses springing up to assist less tech savvy users with the design process.
Since then, personalization has been carefully rethought and adjusted to reign in some of that Wild West, anything-goes approach and has more effectively made use of not-so-obvious personalization patterns that go beyond things like colorful themes or profile settings.
Personalization is the act of designing and engineering a product in a way that it starts to feel personal or customized to individual users. There are a myriad of different ways that websites and applications can represent personalization ranging from displaying someone’s name upon logging in, to suggesting content based on past activity, to allowing a user to reorganize the actual interface itself.
In fact, according to an article on UX Planet,
The post User Experience and Personalization in Digital Products appeared first on ADK Group.
Editor’s note: In our Steering the Ship series, we chat with product leaders in various industries. Today, we’re sharing a conversation between Dan Tatar, CEO of ADK Group, and Michael VanRooyen, Chairman of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Emergency Department.
In this post, you’ll hear from Michael VanRooyen, Chairman of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Emergency Department and Director of Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He is also an entrepreneur, investor and lead singer of a 90’s cover rock band.
Some of the topics he’ll address include:
- How his technology is transforming the emergency room
- Changes to healthcare as a result of Covid-19
- Innovations that are improving the lives of patients and doctors
VanRooyen is also the author of the book, The World’s Emergency Room, which covers how digital health is helping to deliver care to places around the globe.
Brigham’s Grand Central StationHealthcare is changing rapidly. It’s reaching out to patients, it’s using new technology, and it’s trying to provide better and higher quality care. Most people think of the emergency department as chaotic, crazy, cram-packed, dangerous and difficult. And it’s true, 20 or 30 years ago, the emergency department was not a very fun place to be indeed. Michael VanRooyen is changing that. VanRooyen’s current mission at Brigham and Women’s Hospital is to change the way they manage emergency department patients, and to expand the role of emergency medicine in the healthcare system.
In the most basic sense, VanRooyen explains, “we are population rescue. We’re there 24/7 to take care of all kinds of patients, no matter what happens to you.” But the emergency room is more than that, too. They take care of the community as well as a larger network of transferred patients that can come in from all over to receive higher quality care. For this reason, VanRooyen views the emergency department as a “Grand Central Station of diagnostics and distribution of patients.”
Patients from all over are transferred to the Brigham emergency room from other hospitals, from nursing homes, from facilities, ambulances, and more. VanRooyen’s team conducts diagnostic testing and treatment, and then they decide if the patient should be admitted into the hospital, ICU, a skilled nursing facility, or go home and have home hospital or telemedicine contact.
What most people think the emergency department is, or was, is no longer the reality of today. Brigham in particular is very keen to change the model so that they can better serve as a hub of access for the healthcare system.
Brigham and Women’s hospital is located in the heart of Boston and is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. As a result, VanRooyen’s team sees about 65,000 patients a year. If you include their sister hospital, the Brigham Faulkner hospital, where they fluidly admit patients back and forth, it adds another 30,000 patients a year. In total, VanRooyen’s team sees roughly 100,000 patients a year.
The post Healthcare and the Digital Landscape with Michael VanRooyen appeared first on ADK Group.
Boston, MA – Today, Fresh Tilled Soil, one of the Northeast’s premier user-experience and digital design agencies, announced they have joined Boston digital product company, ADK Group. This move brings together two of the Northeast’s leading digital product companies, and deepens ADK’s…
The post Fresh Tilled Soil Joins ADK Group appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
A Fresh Tilled Soil & BTblock Collaboration Is Blockchain An Appropriate Technology For Today’s Product or Application Problems? Given the recent volatility in the crypto space, there is a growing sense that the underlying distributed ledger technology (DLT), or blockchain, is poorly…
The post Blockchain and Design Sprints: Complex Problems Need Structured Approaches appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
We have a lot to be grateful for this year: a wonderful team at Fresh Tilled Soil, amazing clients, and a great product community that we have been fortunate enough to collaborate with. And there’s one more thing to add to this…
The post Fresh Tilled Soil Joins the Clutch 1000 appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Pluralsight is looking to change the way the world learns, and they are using data and human-centered design to do it. That may sound like a big goal, because it is, but I wouldn’t count them out. James Aylward is the…
The post Data-Driven Design with James Aylward of Pluralsight appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Have you ever taken a training course or read a book to learn a new skill? Of course you have. Hopefully the instructor/author was interesting, engaging, and you learned exactly what you set out to learn. And then something happened between learning…
The post So You Want to Run an Enterprise Design Sprint? appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
7 use cases for product teams Prototyping has become best practice for teams exploring and vetting new concepts. The team could be a startup with a potentially disruptive business model or an established enterprise investigating innovation opportunities or exploring a redesign, but…
The post When and how to prototype a digital product [Infographic] appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
What product management is and why it’s so relevant today . . . This post is an excerpt from Chapter 1of “Product Leadership” by Richard Banfield, Nate Walkingshaw, and Martin Eriksson. Read the full book on Safari. . . . As Marty Cagan, founding partner of Silicon…
The post The evolving role of product management appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Maximize your chances of making something people actually want This is Chapter 1 from “Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products,” by Richard Banfield, C Todd Lombardo, and Trace Wax. Design Sprint was just recently named one of the 100 Best Product Design Books…
The post What is a Design Sprint? appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
What is the difference and when should I use them? Experience mapping has become a very popular approach to visualizing and aligning an organization around the experiences they are creating for their customers. A simple Google search will reveal several types of maps,…
The post User Experience Maps vs. Service Blueprints appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Design Sprints were once thought to be the exclusive province of startups and small organizations, but that is simply not the case. To the contrary, we are seeing massive organizations, public enterprises and government agencies rack up successes using this time-boxed method to…
The post Webinar: Learn fast and reduce risk with Enterprise Design Sprints appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Who should talk to users? The answer is EVERYONE should talk to users. That means designers, product managers, sales, marketing, and yes, engineers. Without user research, how will you know you are building products that people will want? But on small, cross-functional…
The post Better, Faster User Research Using AI and Machine Learning appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Did you know that the $700M GPS sports watch business was started by a fifth grader who created a lawnmower out of a coffee can, a fan, and a crutch? Well, sort of. Claudette Stevenson was on the forefront of the GPS-enabled…
The post An Interview with GPS Sports Watch Pioneer Claudette Stevenson appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Product managers mostly hate roadmaps, says Phil Terry, who put it even more bluntly in the title of his article product roadmapping sucks. Serial Boston entrepreneur and current Drift.com CEO David Cancel generally agrees: Some have even gone so far as to…
The post 8 Steps to a Successful Product Roadmap appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Ask any product manager how they got into the role, and they are likely to share some story about how it “happened by accident” or “they had some other job and they fell into product management.” Some even say “I didn’t know what…
The post The Hardest Part of Product Management and How To Overcome It appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
In their own words, clients tell us what they really want Disclaimer: For those of you who follow me here and have read my books, you’ll know I prefer to write from the perspective of a curious observer to the product space. Writing…
The post How Clients Describe Their Product Problems appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
UX Fest is scarcely more than two weeks in the rear view, but the memories of what we learned and what we all shared are still fresh and top of mind. For one day and through thirteen speakers, we were inspired to…
The post What We Learned From UX Fest appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Why more UX and design agencies need to get out of their fancy studios so they can deliver real value to their clients. The Problem With Diagnosis Consider the following scenario: A woman walks into her doctor’s office and sits down. The…
The post The UX House Call appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Why not “The Top 10 Reasons to Attend UX Fest”? Because I already wrote the top 3 reasons to attend, and I stand by that. But I needed to tell you more, so this was my excuse. Here are ten things that…
The post Ten Things That Make UX Fest Awesome appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Surviving by the narrowest of margins has been a big part of Paul Wylie’s life and has ultimately led to his greatest successes. He had never placed higher than 9th in three previous trips to the world championships, and people had…
The post How An Olympic Medalist Comes Back From Being Told He Was Done – Twice appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Have you ever received a text from a family member or a friend that read “I’m feeling lost,” or “I need help,” or “I don’t know what to do”? Or have you, yourself, expressed these feelings to someone via text? We may…
The post What Every Product Leader Should Do In Their First 60 Days On The Job appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
We interviewed UX Fest speaker Martin Eriksson as part of our Product Hero series highlighting outstanding members of the product management community. These industry leaders share tips on processes, team building, how to be a better product manager, and who they are outside of…
The post How Does the World’s Largest Product Management Community Get Started? appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
UX Fest is about connecting and celebrating the practitioners and leaders who are building great products and designing amazing experiences. We’ve managed to assemble a fantastic list of speakers who are doing just that! As part of introducing them to you, we…
The post What’s Your Favorite Product Experience? And Why? appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
UX Fest is coming on June 4th, and we couldn’t be more excited about it! And we think you should be too. We get it though, it’s a full day outside of the office. But it’s a full day outside of the…
The post The Top 3 Reasons to Attend UX Fest appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
UX Fest is just over six weeks away, and it’s time to talk about the schedule of speakers. We are excited to release the full schedule of sessions and topics for UX Fest! That’s thirteen sessions of inspiring talks and immersive experiences…
The post The UX Fest Schedule is Live! appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
For many of us, navigating through a digital product is relatively straightforward once we’ve used it a few times. You have your utility navigation, a primary nav menu, sub-navigation if applicable, and the act of moving around the product by using its…
The post Me, Myself, and I: Managing Multiple Product Profiles appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
What is User Interface Design? What does it entail? What does it mean? It’s not uncommon, even within product and design circles, to confuse or conflate the terms. They are different enough that we should define UI separately., What isn’t in question…
The post What is User Interface Design? appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
A guidebook for product teams to prioritize work and deliver the best possible value to users. When we started writing about prioritization, and our team produced the best seller Product Roadmaps Relaunched, we already had an idea that prioritization was on people’s…
The post New Book: Deciding What’s Next – Prioritization With Confidence appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
There are no shortage of articles and books on product management, most of which read more like another manifesto with tips and tricks that say product vision and product strategy are important. But few of these manifestos walk you through (in a…
The post The Four Product Diseases and How to Cure Them appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Hard Won Lessons From The Front Lines Of Product Management. Being a product manager is hard. Very hard. Let’s find out from the experts how to make it a little easier. Squeezed in between the intersection of business, technology and user experience,…
The post These Product Leaders Are Crushing It. What Do They Know That We Should? appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
David Delmar is looking for a fight. Not in the pugilistic sense, but rather the fight for social progress and income equality for those who just need an opportunity. His original plan coming out of the Boston University College of Fine Arts…
The post The Diversity Crisis and What That Means for the Tech Community appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Do you know who your doctor is? Chances are you do, even if you only see them once a year. But does your doctor’s hospital or health system know who they are? That may sound like an odd question, but it turns…
The post Organizing (and Reorganizing) People and Product Teams for Growth appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
There are currently 323 members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Of those, 257 were players who qualify as batters (excluding pitchers, managers, executives, and contributors). They all failed about 70% of the time. The average Hall of Fame inductee had a .302 lifetime…
The post The Five Mistakes All Product Managers Will Make appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
What are Jobs To Be Done, why are they important, and how do you use them? Done vs. Achieved Humans need to get stuff done. All day, and unfortunately, most nights, our brains auto-update a list of tasks, to-dos, needs, and wants. Good…
The post Designing Experiences People Need, Not Just What They Say They Want. appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
UX Fest is happening on June 4, 2018. A reasonable question to ask, especially for those not among the 2,000+ attendees of previous Fresh Tilled Soil events, is who comes to UX Fest and why? Will there be designers present? (Yes) How…
The post Who Attends UX Fest? And Why? appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Talking to users is one of the core activities of product teams looking to build beautiful experiences. Without the inquiry process, teams fail to understand the problems that need to be solved. But when we talk to users, are we really listening…
The post How Far Would You Walk For Answers? appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
And the biggest reasons why early-stage companies succeed (and fail) Julia Austin is a glutton for punishment. A quick scan of her LinkedIn profile reveals she is an investor, board member, or advisor to over a dozen companies – this…
The post What It Takes To Become a Great Product Manager appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
I have the opportunity to speak with a lot of our current and former clients in my role at Fresh Tilled Soil. I also get to meet a lot of awesome product and design leaders who attend our quarterly workshops and product…
The post We Are Bringing Back UX Fest! appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
A Design Sprint is a focused problem-solving framework for product teams to get answers quickly and effectively. It has become the go-to for timeboxed innovation sessions with an emphasis on collaborative ideation, solution sketching, prototype building, and user testing. The exercises embedded…
The post Getting The Most Out of Your Design Sprint appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Do you challenge the details of every product or experience around you? Do you wonder who designed those things and see opportunities for improvement? Do you love designing and creating innovative products? Fresh Tilled Soil has designed over 700 digital products and…
The post We’re seeking a UX/UI Designer with product experience appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
We say it in our workshops, we have a dedicated slide in our pitch deck, and we tell everyone who will listen: The biggest takeaway from a Design Sprint is (in)validation of your riskiest assumptions. Often at the end of a Design…
The post What do you get out of a Design Sprint? appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
The calendar stops for no one, and we are already busy working on new projects with our clients in 2018. But it’s always instructive to pause and take stock of all that happened in the prior year before the dust settles. We…
The post What We Learned from Over 100 Projects in 2017 appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
“Innovate or die.” It’s one of many famous quotes attributed to management guru Peter Drucker. 3M, Apple, and many others serve as examples of innovation rescuing companies from the brink of extinction. But innovation shouldn’t just be a lifeline to a failing…
The post Using Customer and Non-Customer Feedback to Deliver Value at Torchlight appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
As with our Top Product Posts, we took a look back at all of our content related to design to see which were the most consumed topics, posts, and podcasts. Whether product design, web design, design thinking, or some of the tools…
The post The Top 10 Design Posts of 2017 appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
We’ve written a lot about product management and leadership in 2017 and even published two books (Product Leadership and Product Roadmaps: Relaunched) along the way! But a few specific topics stand out based on their popularity according to our readers. Product roadmaps,…
The post The Top 10 Product Posts of 2017 appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
There’s reason for optimism when it comes to diversity in product roles – specifically, the percentage of women product managers has grown year-over-year. Though they are still a minority in product, particularly when it comes to leadership roles. This means fewer women…
The post The Dirt: Diversifying the Boston tech sector with Boston Women in Product appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
In Part 1 of this two-part blog series, we defined user onboarding and described the 4 most common approaches. In this post, we describe the results of testing two of these approaches with two of our clients—we’ll call them Client A…
The post User Onboarding: PART 2 – A Case Study appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
“Innovate or die.” It’s one of many famous quotes attributed to management guru Peter Drucker. 3M, Apple, and many others serve as examples of innovation rescuing companies from the brink of extinction. But innovation shouldn’t just be a lifeline to a…
The post Designing The Future Of Dental Health For Overall Health at DentaQuest appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
“User onboarding is the practice of making your product or service as easy as possible for new customers to get value from.” —Samuel Hulick of UserOnboard.com Why focus on onboarding? You never get a second chance to make a first impression is…
The post User Onboarding: PART 1 – The 4 most common approaches appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Natasha Jen thinks that Design Thinking is bullshit. At her 99U conference talk she makes a case for why traditional Design Thinking isn’t as useful as we’ve been lead to believe. Unfortunately, Jen’s case is pretty thin. Her talk title is clickbait and her…
The post “Design Thinking is BS”, is BS appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.
Product Hero is our bi-weekly series that highlights outstanding members of the product management community. These industry leaders share tips on processes, team building, how to be a better product manager, and who they are outside of their careers. This week our…
The post Product Hero: Benjamin Ho, Senior Engineering Manager at Everbridge appeared first on Fresh Tilled Soil.