Entries tagged: interaction design

At the beginning of this month, I was fortunate enough to attend the Cooper UX Boot Camp. What is unique about this course is that Cooper partners with a non-profit to identify a need they have and, in turn, give the class a real-world problem to work towards resolving. In the end, teams may “compete” for the best idea, but everyone walks away with a clearer idea of the process and the chosen non-profit walks away with all of the ideas AND a donation in the name of the winning team.

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As Alice Cooper put it so eloquently, school may be out for summer, but it’s most certainly not forever. While kids are busy with summer activities and teachers are taking their much needed breaks, some of us have been busy. With our design help TCI, a K-12 publishing company, released their new online tools for students and teachers, primed and ready for the 2012-2013 school year.

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We’re so very proud and excited to announce that our project with partners iKare has launched! An idea that was more than a year in the making, the FamilyLink connects families and friends to their loved ones through a device that shares photos, videos chats, messages, but more importantly provide an ease of mind.

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At this point, we’ve gone through the early stages of our design strategy by researching, sketching ideas, and making a paper prototype. We then extended that strategy phase into a development of a mobile prototype to help explain how each page would function on the site. It was now time to complete the user’s experience by adding visuals to complement that functionality. Thanks to the extra work we did in the beginning, we knew what we wanted to see, so the transition from our quick and dirty prototype to a finished user experience adding visual design elements was practically seamless.

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In developing the Contiki mobile website, we thought it would be a good idea to provide them with a working prototype that they could actually click through on their mobile devices. Luckily, jQuery mobile was there to help make this a painless and useful process.

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Over 10% of Contiki’s traffic is coming from mobile devices, with over 58% being iOS, but the mobile bounce rate of 8.25% is more than the site average.

Why? Well…

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Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to meet the people you’re about to tour across a country with before you leave?

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When approached by one of Northwest’s icon, McMenamins, to help with their user experience, we knew we were in for something big. Something challenging, but rewarding. Learn how we took the first step towards better UXD by redesigning their navigation.

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A community needs a common passion or value, something that brings the members together. The Contiki Community is not about a passion for travel. It’s not about the product either. Much in the same way that you are not simply “buying a tour,” the Contiki Community is about the Contiki experience. It’s about the hunt for the perfect trip, the rush of making the decision and booking a trip, the buildup as you get closer to your departure, the letting go and immersing yourself in a new culture with new people, the high after you return where you can’t stop talking about what you saw and did, and the burning desire to do it again; or rather it’s about all the feelings you have as you go through the lifecycle of doing a Contiki.

– Allison Beckwith, Planet Argon, on the design vision for the new community pages

What began as a vision between Contiki and the Planet Argon Team became a reality this week as we launched the new Contiki Community pages.

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Contiki is the worldwide leader in tours for 18-35’s. This summer, they asked us to update their homepage to be more relevant for their users. They wanted more interaction and to organize many quick bits of information for potential travelers. The presentation near the bottom and middle parts of the homepage felt unorganized, and we sensed it wasn’t working as an introduction to Contiki.

Contiki’s homepage needs to create interest in the tours, draw potential travelers deeper into the site, and sell the brand as the best option for holidays. We spent a lot of time planning on how to help Contiki make a great first impression. Not everyone who lands on the Contiki homepage knows what Contiki is and what they have to offer.

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