This Week’s Thoughts From The Web World

The Upward Brand Interactions interactive team is always keeping their eyes open for new trends in the web world from design ideas to content gathering. Here are some trends, ideas and fun snippets that have been on our minds this week…

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” -Albert Einstein

A key goal in designing a website is to make sure it is user friendly, but how do you do that when people have so many different perspectives and ways of learning? From people who are linguistic learners (e.g. someone who likes to read long essays) to those who are more visual spatial (e.g. learn by viewing images and interactivity), make sure you keep in mind who your audience is when designing and providing content.

“As long as it’s attention-grabbing, say whatever you want!”

Well, that’s not entirely true…but what’s on your page is just as important as what it looks like, if not more. When crafting copy for your website, you want to slowly draw the reader in and headlines are a great way to do this. Make sure they are strong and grab the reader’s attention, without deceiving them or telling the whole story.

“The web turned 20 this year. And as all young adults discover, it’s time to look a little more sophisticated.”

As we approach 2014, trends in web design and development are being discussed. Web designers are thinking more about the user experience than ever, and websites are becoming more sophisticated than flashy. Web designers are internalizing that users are becoming more sophisticated too—not only do users want to see a website on all devices, they want the experience to be great on all devices. Hence, the Responsive web design trend. They are realizing that users want simplicity, not “flash.” Users want to get in, retain the information they are looking for and get out. Trends such as flat design (vs. a 3-D experience) and single-page websites are occurring to make websites simple in design, and simple to use and navigate. Read more about the Six Hot Website Design Trends for 2014.

Instagram Researches Ad Effectiveness

Instagram’s focus is more on traditional metrics that brands actually care about, like frequency distributions, changes in brand recall, awareness and association, and eventually longer-term sentiment metrics and sales impact over time.

To deliver this kind of data, Instagram conducts studies and surveys the day after an ad runs to measure brand lift. The same polling questions about things like brand association and ad recall are asked to a sample of users who were exposed to the campaign and a control group of users who were purposefully not served ads from the given campaign. Instagram then looks at the difference in responses for those two groups, and those differences give advertisers a good idea of what kind of exposure their ads received and what kind of reactions they generated.

 “A Little Bit Goes a Long Way”

Creating a landing page for your brand is all about capturing those new leads and appealing to the masses. New trends are following the idea of minimalism: keep everything simple and focus on the core of the message. Use landing pages to inform your audience about your product and help them make the appropriate conversion (e.g. sign up for more information, like your Facebook page, etc.)

“Responsive design + content strategy = BFF 4 EVAH”

It’s time we acknowledged that every responsive web design project is also a content strategy project. When working on building your website it is important to understand that your content must be revised. Even though the long-term goal is to serve the same content to every platform, organizations can’t just use what they already have. Smart companies will seize this opportunity to do what they should have done years ago: clean up and pare down their desktop content. You’ll never get a better chance to fix your content and publishing processes.

Structured Content is “content [that] can be disassembled and reassembled to create new information products on-the-fly, based upon context.” -Cleve Gibbon, CTO Cognifide

Concretely this means content that is stored can adapt to the way in which it is consulted. This is because users have other needs, needs to see content on a tablet, smartphone or perhaps soon on Google Glass or iWatch, and they do not want to be fixed on the concept web. Or as Rachel Lovinger of Razorfish nicely describes: “Simply put, digital content needs to be free – to go where and when people want it most. The more structure you put content into the freer it will become. ” (source)

Target: Did they Miss the Mark?

The recently relaunched Target site is sparking quite a bit of backlash from the design community, primarily due to the site’s abundance of drop shadows and overall cluttered-as-crap vibe. The new look definitely puts a lot more product on the home page, but it sacrifices that minimalist “Target look” that the brand has spent so many years perfecting.

“There is no doubt that Instagram has released enormous creativity in people…”

Marketing agency Archrival recently teamed up with Red Bull to create #THESHOW, a digital project that allows users to turn their Instagram galleries into customized documentary videos and share them globally.

“Not only will the content be more informative, it will be interactive too.”

This year, infographics became a huge hit. An infographic is a visual display of data with the goal of making important facts and figures more digestible to the end-user. In 2013, we saw more static infographics in the form of image files. In 2014, you’ll see more interactive infographics with scrolling/hover effects to display information details & multi-pagniation so users can understand data in manageable parts rather than a complex sum. Effects like this will use programming language such as CSS, HTML & HTML5. See a fun example of an interactive infographic on the future of car sharing. (Source)

“Let’s go take the most popular Jquery widgets on Earth…and re-do them.” - Steve Newcomb

Famo.Us is expected to launch in full Beta in February 2014, and it is an Open Source platform with many similar attributes to WordPress. It is now offering widgets to gain notoriety among developers. Famo.Us was founded by Powerset founder Steve Newcomb, which was sold to Microsoft and recently merged with Bing.

Famo.Us’ widgets allow developers to use full 3D with the smart technology of physics. They also allow developers to expand on Lightboxes to allow for a more interactive look and a more fluid motion. This type of advanced technology will become more and more frequent, all while allowing websites to become a bigger better version of themselves.