Discovery

When is it time to panic?

“God help us, we're in the hands of engineers.” – Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park

We’ve recently had the opportunity to streamline the donation page and form UX for a client. There’s a good amount of information out there on how to do it well, but a lot of it is scattered, and one often has to sleuth up chains of citations to get to the source material. As is to be expected, applying general UX best practices and basic heuristics to any user flow gets us a good part of the way there, but the donation process—an important conversion for any organization looking to receive funds online— has some unique particulars, some of which might even be counter-intuitive. 

We were honored to have two members of our team present sessions at Drupal North this past June in the beautiful and vibrant city of Montreal, Canada.  Drupal North is an annual,  free, three-day conference focusing on Drupal-related topics and the community that drives the Drupal Project forward.

We were pleased to make new connections while also reconnecting with friends and peers. As always, it was also a privilege to be given the opportunity to share our expertise.

Do a search for "personas" on the web and you’ll get a smorgasbord of smiling faces of all ages and from all backgrounds - and top results are all related to design, user experience, and agile. Demographic-based and often marketing-driven, personas are pretty mainstream and relatable - except when they’re not.

And like the web, personas are evolving.

When organizations talk about what they believe in, it’s weird. A company, nonprofit, university, etc. isn’t a person, it has no singular moral “self” who would value anything. So how can a group’s values communicate anything authentic? How do you faithfully articulate the shared values of a set of co-workers?

What can’t be measured can’t be managed. Now, you don't need to be a data scientist to make decisions based on your users’ activity, but it’s crucial that your configuration is top-notch. As they say, garbage in, garbage out. Google Analytics provides an easy-to-use platform that’s able to go very granular with the data we need to collect. In this series, I will discuss how to configure Google Analytics, how to make sure the data you receive is actionable, and some common misconceptions about the platform.

Are you a marketing or IT manager who’s confused when navigating Google Analytics? Wish you could see only key performance indicators in one place? Or, do you want to share only some of your data in an automatically updated report? Kalamuna has created a Google Data Studio (GDS) report template to help our clients better visualize their data, and because part of our mission is to help colleges and universities meet their goals through technology, we’re creating free reports for higher-ed professionals now until April 30.

Every year I try to attend as many industry conferences as possible, but over the years I’ve become more selective about which ones I go to. I find them to be incredibly valuable and insightful, but they also cost money and take time, so I grade them pretty hard. This year I had the pleasure of attending several UX-focused conferences. Each was great in different ways, and I came away leaving inspired each time, and wanting to share some of the lessons I learned, so I wrote this blog post.

This Friday, November 4, I’ll be playing XCOM 2 for 24 hours to raise money for Extra Life, a charity that benefits Hospitals in the Children's Miracle Network. My game of choice also happens to be a very sneaky way to secretly train up project managers, like some kind of modern day The Last Starfighter. So how can fighting aliens make you a better project manager? Read more

A long time ago, in an agency far, far away…

Darth Salesman has just handed over a long-winded statement of work to the green project manager and beleaguered discovery team. Confusion and despair ensue. How is the team supposed to know exactly how to proceed? What kind of promises, parameters and expectations were made beforehand? What tone should they take as they work with the client? How can we bridge the gap between the sales process and discovery phase?