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Category: Trends

Boost Your Online Store With These Ecommerce Hacks

Tuesday, 16 October 2018 by Media Something
Boost Your Online Store With These Ecommerce Hacks
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Does your ecommerce store need a little jumpstart? Maybe it’s ticking over well enough, but you would like it to do a lot better? Keeping an eye on the upcoming industry trends and adapting your business model to include them will help give you that edge over the competition.

Subscriptionly has given you the perfect place to start. It created the infographic below which shows the most important ecommerce trends to keep an eye on.

As you can see from the list, clients are expecting more from their ecommerce providers. They want more personalized service, faster delivery options, and alternative payment methods. Which area can you get started on so that you can boost your business?

Take a look through the infographic for inspiration and think about how you can apply some of the principles in your online store today. It could be as simple as adding another delivery option, or investing in new CRM software that enables to you customize your client experience.

Boost Your Online Store With These Ecommerce Hacks

Source: Subscriptionly

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WooCommerce and Its Functionalities

Saturday, 03 March 2018 by Media Something
WooCommerce and Its Functionalities
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If you own a WordPress e-commerce website, there is a probability that you are utilizing WooCommerce.

This is because it is one of the most recognized open source e-commerce plugins for WordPress – arguably the best content management system at the moment.

This powerful e-commerce plugin was developed by three WordPress enthusiasts in 2008. Their vision was to create a plugin which is easy to utilize, plus versatile and, eventually, trusted.

Released on September 27, 2011, WooCommerce is designed for large to small sized stores.

Because of its free base product and the ability to be installed and customized with ease, the plugin gained popularity rather quickly.

WooCommerce covers 42 percent of all the e-commerce websites. It comes with a remarkable choice of payment solutions alongside lots of useful tools (especially for SEO).

One of the most prominent features are the built-in analytics. That provide shop-owners with neat data analytics to aid them tracking and monitoring the flow of users of their website.

It was initially developed by WooThemes, a WordPress theme developer.

They were responsible for hiring some developers from Jigowatt – James and Jolley Koster – to work on a Jigoshop section which eventually became WooCommerce.

By August 2014, WooCommerce was already powering over 300,000 websites.

The skyrocketing popularity led to the first WooConf held in November 2014 in San Francisco. The conference placed emphasis on e-commerce utilizing WooCommerce, and there were 300 individuals in attendance.

Not much later, in May 2015, WooCommerce as well as WooThemes, were both purchased by Automattic — the major contributor to the core WordPress software.

Now, the expanding number of online retailers using WooCommerce draws in lots of traffic.

Some of the biggest sites using this e-commerce solution include Small Press Expo and Internet Systems Consortium.

In fact, statistical data shows that it was used on over 30 percent of e-commerce websites and had millions of active installations. No wonder, as this WordPress plugin covers absolutely all needs an online merchant might have.

It has attained recognition not only for its numerous plugins and extensions but because it is free and open source. Also, there are numerous add-ons which can be paid for at a fixed price.

Numerous premium themes now offer compatibility with WooCommerce alongside plugins that ensure a theme is compatible with the main WordPress framework.

If you desire to find out more, check out this infographic below which shows some interesting facts about WooCommerce and what it is all about.

WooCommerce Infographic

Source: Website Builder

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Google imagines an app-less future with Android Instant Apps

Friday, 19 May 2017 by Media Something
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One of the biggest challenges facing developers right now is the simple fact that the vast majority of people just don’t download that many new apps.

Google might have a solution: Android Instant Apps, which will allow people to use an app without ever having to download it from the Play Store. Instant Apps are now open to all developers, the company announced Wednesday at its I/O developer conference.

First introduced at last year’s I/O, Android Instant Apps essentially let you stream an app from Google’s Cloud. To the user, the experience feels the same as using a downloaded app from the Play Store, but everything is accessed via URLs.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Google has been experimenting with the feature for the last year and says developers who have had early access have had a lot of success with the feature.

For users, Instant Apps offer a few advantages. For one, you can more easily take advantage of apps you may need once or twice without cluttering your home screen. Likewise, if you’re worried about device storage, Instant Apps allow you to use a service without worrying about running out of space.

It’s also a win for developers because it encourages people to try new apps before they download them. Downloading a new app may not sound like a big hurdle but for new developers, persuading people to try out their services is one of the biggest challenges they face.

For developers, creating an “instant” version of their app is relatively simple. Instant Apps use the same code as existing Play Store apps with a few adjustments.

Of course, there are some limits on what kinds of apps can be turned into Instant Apps. Google limits Instant Apps to 4MB, so some complex apps may not be easily converted to the format. The company is also still working on ways for games to be available via Instant Apps.

Still, it offers an interesting look at a potentially app-less future.

Source: Mashable

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Imminent: Non-HTTPS Sites Labeled “Not Secure” by Chrome

Tuesday, 17 January 2017 by Media Something
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On approximately January 31st of this month, version 56 of the Chrome web browser will be released. There is a significant change in the way it displays websites that are not using HTTPS, also known as SSL. This change may confuse your site visitors or surprise you if you are not expecting it.

Starting with the release of Chrome 56 this month, any website that is not running HTTPS will have a message appear in the location bar that says “Not Secure” on pages that collect passwords or credit cards. It will look like this:

https-1

This is the first part of a staged rollout that encourages websites to get rid of plain old HTTP.

In an upcoming release Google Chrome will label all non-HTTPS pages in incognito mode as “Not secure” because users using this mode have an increased expectation of privacy.

The final step in the staged rollout will be that Chrome will label all plain HTTP pages as “Not secure”. It will look like this:

https-2

The impact on WordPress site owners

So, once again, starting on approximately January 31st of this month, any page on your website that is non-HTTPS and has a password form or credit card field will be labeled as “Not secure” in the location bar by Google Chrome. This includes your WordPress login page.

This may confuse your site visitors who sign in to your website because they may interpret the message to indicate that your website has been compromised. They could also interpret the message to mean that your site has some underlying security issue other than being non-HTTPS.

The current timeline for the release of Chrome 56 is unclear. The official statement from Google indicates it will be released some time in “January”. However, based on the Chromium development calendar it looks like Chrome 56 may be released on January 31st. You’ll notice that calendar says “Estimated stable dates” and is subject to change.

Assuming Chrome 56 will be released on January 31st, that gives you two weeks starting today to get your site running on 100% SSL to avoid the new “Not secure” message appearing on your login pages.

What to do if your site is not HTTPS

We recommend you start by looking at the support documentation that your hosting provider offers to find out how to set up SSL on their system. You will find that some hosting providers offer free SSL and others have a very easy installation method. If you ignore this and decide to configure things manually you may be making life more difficult for yourself.

Google has a technical description of how to implement SSL on your website. You will also find many guides describing how to set up SSL for WordPress with a simple Google search. But definitely start by visiting your hosting provider support documentation or doing a google search for your hosting provider name and ‘SSL installation’ without quotes.

If you have already set up SSL on your site, congratulations!  You are all set and ready for the new change in Chrome 56 coming later this month.

Please share this with the broader WordPress community to promote the use of SSL across all websites and to help other WordPress site owners stay secure.

Mark Maunder – Wordfence Founder/CEO.

Source: Wordfence

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Facebook Set to Launch ‘Facebook at Work’ Next Month

Thursday, 06 October 2016 by Media Something
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Back in November 2014, Facebook announced it was working on a new project tentatively titled “Facebook at Work”. Just as it sounds, Facebook at Work is a commercial version of Facebook, with an enclosed, private network for your business.

The main pitch for the platform is this: why use Slack or Yammer or other enterprise solutions for your company which require in-depth training when your employees are already familiar with Facebook and its various functions?

The system provides a new opportunity for Facebook, and could deliver significant benefits for brands – and now, almost two years on from that initial mention, Facebook at Work is about to be made available to all.

fbatwork2

The most important thing to note with Facebook at Work – and likely the biggest misconception The Social Network will need to overcome – is that Facebook at Work exists separately from your personal Facebook graph. It’s a separate app and a separate platform for employees and work-related discussion – businesses will have a contained work space, where employees will have to be logged in to interact, with their personal Facebook accounts and discussions kept separate from the process. In this sense, it’s not exactly Facebook in the workplace as some have suggested – it’s not likely to lead to a sudden increase in wasted time because employees will be caught up responding to posts from friends in amongst work-related content.

As you can see, in the above screenshot (published by BuzzFeed) Facebook at Work looks exactly like Facebook, but it’s contained within your company environment. Messages about business updates and collaborations will come through in your feed, enabling users to stay on top of internal matters through an interface with which they’re already familiar.

fbatwork21

The Information is reporting that Facebook at Work will be released within the next few weeks on a per seat pricing model – Business Insider has reported that the cost is projected to be between $1 and $5 per user, per month. Thesystem will offer Groups and Messenger, while audio and video calling options will also be included in the package.

Facebook at Work has been in closed beta since last January, with a range of businesses using the new system as part of the test pool. Those brands include The Royal Bank of Scotland and Heineken. The system’s also used by Facebook internally, which has enabled them to thoroughly test and understand the benefits and weaknesses of the system as they’ve gone about refining the product.

Given its ease of functionality and familiarity, it’s not hard to see why Facebook at Work would be appealing to business, and could quickly become a major player in the market. As noted, the issue many businesses will have is in perception – Facebook’s seen as a social app, not a business tool, and companies will be hesitant to enable any connection with Facebook till they can be assured that their employees won’t be using it as increased license to access their personal Facebook profiles throughout the working day.

But if they can overcome that initial stigma, and ensure that there’s a clear divide between ‘Facebook’ and ‘Facebook at Work’, the project could prove to be a big winner for Zuck and Co. And as per TechCrunch, the launch will come just as Microsoft scraps the Yammer Enterprise tier many companies currently use, which means there may be quite a few businesses on the look-out for a new option.

Source: SocialMediaToday

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Facebook Launches Improved “Live” With Snapchat-like Features

Friday, 08 April 2016 by Media Something
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Facebook Live has only been around for a few months in most countries, but it’s already a big success. Today, while releasing the feature to everyone across the globe, Facebook has also launched a bunch of new exciting features that will allow us to make the most of the live experience.

#BeatTheBuzz: The world’s greatest agencies and most exciting brands gather in London, on April 14th. Book your place now!

Whether it is about watching with friends, sharing with closed groups of people, or making live videos a bit more fun, Facebook has thought of it all.

The new and improved Facebook Live comes comes with live reactions, live filters, a discover tab, and the ability to watch with friends. Does this remind you of anything? A good mix of Snapchat, Meerkat and Periscope perhaps?

Live For Groups And Events

This is one of the big improvements to Facebook Live: the possibility to go live in Facebook Groups and Facebook Events.

This is massive, partly because these are the places where you really want to go live. In Groups, it allows you to control who you are broadcasting Live to: it could be your family Group, or your business Group, in any case, it will bring the privacy that can be missing from your profile.

Live in Facebook Events is obviously a big deal for everyone, but especially for brands which are making great use of Event Pages on Facebook. Plus, it allows you to offer something special only to the people who have accepted your invite. Not to all your usual followers.

Live Reactions + Live Filters

Adding Reactions to Live broadcasting was an important step for Facebook, because it brings that much-needed level of interactivity. Live Reactions appear in real-time, and disappear quickly, so broadcasters and viewers both get a feeling of what people’s reactions are to what they are viewing.

 The funniest add-on to the new Facebook Live, has to be live filters. In full Snapchat fashion, you can now add one of five Live filters to your broadcast, and very soon, you will also be able to draw on your video – live. Do you hear that Snapchat?

Live-creative-tools-ios

Watch With Friends

So you have found the funniest live video on Facebook… what you need know is how to bring in your best friends to have a lot of fun watching together. Consider it done: the new Facebook Live comes with the option to send an invitation to a friend to watch with you, from where they are.

Your friend will receive a push notification inviting them to join you.

Live-invite-friends-android

Discover More With The Live Hub

Much inspired by its “rival” Periscope, Facebook Live now also has its Discover hub where you can find Live videos to watch. The hub offers a Facebook Live map to explore all public live broadcasts that are currently happening in more than 60 countries around the world.

Facebook-live-map

There is a lot to be done with live video, and it seems Facebook is betting heavily on it.

Source: wersm

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Farewell, Google+, We Hardly Knew Ye

Wednesday, 29 July 2015 by Media Something
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Though it’s been declared over more times than we can count, it looks like Google’s social network is finally on death’s door.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now but Google is finally breaking up with Google+.

In a Monday morning post, Bradley Horowitz, Google’s VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing, announced that the company will continue to migrate Google+ features out of the social networking service and into other Google products. In March, Google Photos shed the Google+ name and soon, according to Horowitz, YouTube and several other Google services will no longer require a Google+ account.

By this point, Google’s social networking site has been falsely declared dead more times than Sir Paul McCartney but, with these latest changes, the social media network may well become a thing of yesterday. Google+ will remain online—Horowitz expressed his hope that the changes “will lead to a more focused, more useful, more engaging Google+”—but in essence, it has been thrown out of Google’s house with its clothes already strewn on the lawn.

But I can’t help but wonder: What if Google+ turns out to be the one that got away?

As Facebook and Twitter become increasingly cumbersome and borderline unusable, I find myself drawn to the serenity of the Google+ ghost town. It’s a serenity that, ironically, is only possible for the same reason that it’s being downsized: Almost no one is there.

There’s no denying that Google distancing itself from an unpopular brand makes sense from a business perspective. Touted during its 2011 introduction as a Facebook killer, Google+ only managed to acquire a small fraction of Zuckerberg’s 1.44 billion monthly active users. By last count, Google+ boasted a mere 300 million monthly active users. For the Google-owned YouTube—which, by some measures, may be more popular than Facebook—the Google+ requirement was dead weight that had to be dropped.

No amount of business acumen, however, can prevent me from wondering what life could have been like if we had only moved to Google+ when we had the chance.

But I can’t help but wonder: What if Google+ turns out to be the one that got away?

Google+ remains appealing for all the same reasons that it was back in the heady days of 2011. Sorting friends and family into “Circles” is easier than digging into the labyrinthine bowels of my Facebook settings to create a few custom “lists,” all so I can hide a few vacation photos from the distant cousins that I neglected to visit while I was in town. The Google+ user interface is also cleaner and less cluttered by creepy ads for egg donation and the takeout place from which I just ordered too many dumplings.

In the past four years, using Google+ has only grown more appealing from a tech perspective: Google Hangouts allows video calls with multiple friends at one time while Facebook’s video chat is stuck in the past. I keep up with my family on Facebook, sure, but when we need to do the annual Mother’s Day group call, everyone dusts off their Google+ login. When we want to go back to hollowly emoting at each other with meaningless streams of cartoon animals, Facebook’s always there.

Whatever its quirks, the problem with Google+ has always been a population problem, not a functionality problem. In fact, Google+ users have consistently reported greater satisfaction than Facebook users for the past three years, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Google+ is like the unpopular rich kid at school who had a hot tub that no one used because he didn’t have any friends. If you ever went over to his house, you probably would have enjoyed yourself but you never did because no one wanted to go with you.

As proof, ask any disgruntled Facebook user why they’re still on the service and the answer is usually the same: Everyone else is on it. From an economic perspective, that’s called a “network effect.” From a social perspective, it’s a silent, mutual, and simultaneous agreement to remain in the Internet equivalent of prison so long as enough people stay with you.

In the absence of a powerful-enough network effect, the only way Google+ may have ever boasted active user numbers above half a billion was by requiring some of the very cross-service integrations that Google is in the process of stripping away.

For those of us who do remain on Google+, the service is one of the last quiet and civil corners of an increasingly contentious Internet. I don’t post on it much myself but when I do read my feed or glance at a community, I’m always impressed by the abundance of quality discussion and the absence of people who make $1,000 per day working from home. People who disagree with each other on Google+ are more inclined to use strong words than slurs.

Google+ is like the unpopular rich kid at school who had a hot tub that no one used because he didn’t have any friends.

And while Twitter continues to struggle with its massive harassment problem, Google+ is relatively and mercifully free of the most vicious forms of abuse and dog piling. True, this is largely a result of the fact that there aren’t enough dogs to form a pile, but Google+ does have a key feature that Twitter should have implemented long ago: Blocked users on Twitter can still @ mention your handle, effectively creating a hyperlink for their followers—whom you likely haven’t blocked—to harass you in their stead. Blocked users on Google+ can’t mention you afterward. Their social media pit bulls could still look you up by name, sure, but the lazier ones tend not to type the few extra keystrokes necessary to reach you.

That’s not the only edge that a quickly shrinking Google+ has over larger competitors. Google+ completely abandoned its real name policy in 2014, while Facebook still asks some users to display ID to prove their identity—a requirement that has taken a disproportionate toll on domestic violence survivors, drag performers, Native American users, and transgender people.

The central stream on Google+ is also miles more cohesive than Facebook’salgorithm-driven News Feed nightmare. I still remember the golden age of Facebook when I could actually use it to keep up with my friends: I’d log in, scroll down to the last post I remembered seeing the day before, and sign off content in the knowledge that I hadn’t missed anything important. Now, I log into Facebook and I’m instantly lost in a discontinuous mess of cat photos and political arguments. Whatever devilish equation Facebook is using, it’s almost certainly designed to keep you on the website longer, not to let you see everything you want.

That old saying about looking for answers at the bottom of a glass is doubly true for your News Feed, which has no answers and no bottom.

But the golden age isn’t over on the less populous Google+, where you could stilltheoretically stay on top of your social life. The only problem is you’d have to actually use it. As its pieces get stripped away and sent elsewhere, that possibility seems less and less likely. Core users have been expressing their adoration for the service in comments on Horowitz’s original post but, in the future, their numbers are sure to shrink and they will be joined by fewer users who stumble onto Google+ after making a YouTube account.

Perhaps that’s for the best. Who knows? Maybe if we had all migrated in 2011, it would have become the unnavigable morass that Facebook is today. For now, we’ll only have the dream of what could have been if we had only embraced Circles and quit playing Farmville.

Goodbye, Google+. +1.

Source: The Daily Beast

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Web design is dead

Tuesday, 07 July 2015 by Media Something
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Web design is (finally!) dying of irrelevance. Web pages themselves are no longer the center of the Internet experience, which is why designers need to move on to the next challenges — products and ecosystems — if they want to stay relevant.

Web design has no future — a risky statement I know, but this article explains why it has no future and what we, as designers, can do about it. As a discipline, web design has already exhausted its possibilities, an emerging combination of tech and cultural trends highlight the need for a broader approach.

Let’s start with the symptoms of this imminent death.

Symptom 1: Commoditization by templates

Most of the content that you see on the web today is run by some framework or service — WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, you name it. Frameworks provide you a foundation and shortcuts so you spend less time struggling with the creation of a web site, and more time creating content.

As a consequence of the ubiquity of these frameworks, a whole world of free and paid templates lets you get started with a professional-looking design in minutes. Why hire a web designer if you can achieve a fairly acceptable design for a fraction of the cost using a template? Actually, many web designers (especially the ones on the cheaper side) just pick a pre-made template and make some minor branding customizations.

Either way, if your web page is a standard, informational one, there’s probably a template out there that can do the job for you.

Symptom 2: Web design patterns are mature

What is the latest web design innovation you can point a finger on? Responsive design? That’s digital ages old. Parallax? Useless eye-candy. The web has had all the user interface components and patterns you might need for a while now (and no, parallax is not something we really ever needed). And that’s why you don’t see much innovation in web patterns as of late.

This maturity is good for users: they will find consistency in their daily use of the web. Checkout forms, shopping carts, and login pages should all behave in a similar way. Trying to get creative at this point will probably be pointless or even harmful.

Symptom 3: Automation and artificial intelligence are already doing the job

There’s a new trend of automated web design services, arguably started by The Grid. It’s a service to build basic websites which makes design decisions — semantic ones — based on artificial intelligence. It analyzes your content to detect the best layouts, colors, fonts, and extra imagery for your site. Using cleverly chosen design basics (made by humans) as the foundation, it’s hard to go wrong with it, and the result will probably be better than what an average web designer can do.

When something can be successfully automated, it means that its practices and standards are established enough as not to need much human input. And this is obviously the beginning. There will be a fierce competition about which service can deliver better designs, faster, and with less human intervention.

Symptom 4: Facebook pages as the new small-business homepage

In the late 1990’s, future-minded businesses would buy their .com’s, purchase expensive hosting plans, and hire a “web master” in order to have The Web Page, the one that would make them visible to the rest of the Internet. By 2005, creating a site in Blogger or WordPress.com was more than enough for your new wedding photo business (it was also quick and free).

Today, this function has been completely overridden by Facebook pages. They are free, made to be viral out of the box, offer powerful tools only available to big businesses a decade ago (like subscription for updates or media posting), and are as easy to set up as your own profile page. They are so efficient in making a business visible that they are rendering basic web pages useless.

Symptom 5: Mobile is killing the web

How often do you visit a web site from your mobile device by directly typing the address? Only when you don’t have the app, right? People don’t seem to think much in terms of web pages these days: they think of digital brands, which mostly translate to apps or subscriptions (likes, follows, etc). That’s why most big websites, blogs, and portals are pushing their mobile apps to you — out of home screen, out of mind.

Mobile web has always been slow and cumbersome.

Mobile web has always been slow and cumbersome. Typing addresses is weird. Navigating between tabs is weird. Our underpowered mobile devices and saturated data networks don’t help create a smooth web experience like the one we have in our desktop machines.

As vital as responsive web design is (not adopting it is commiting digital suicide), it only guarantees that your user can view your page in a mobile device, if she ever finds it in first place. And the limited space in her mind is already mostly occupied by apps.

The rise of web services and the content that finds you

The truth is, we need fewer web pages, not more of them. There are already too many competing for our attention and assuming selfishly that we have all the time in the world to close pop-up ads, explore navigational hierarchies, and be dazzled by transitions, intros, and effects.

But what really matters is not how you arrange things on a page: it’s the content, in terms of a specific user need. That’s why Google is starting to display actual content in some search results, without you having to visit another page. Just an example: if you Google a nearby restaurant from your mobile device, the search results include a button to directly call the place. You don’t even need to visit the page. The page designer’s ego and the visits-counter may suffer a bit, but ultimately the user experience is improved.

Things are moving in the direction of digital assistants like Siri, and especially Google Now with the new changes announced for Android M: they aim to provide you the exact bit of information you need, when you need it. This implies a shift from web pages to web services: self-sufficient bits of information that can be combined to other services to deliver value. So if you are looking for a restaurant, you get the reviews from Foursquare or Yelp, the directions from Google Maps and the traffic conditions from Waze.

Even more:

we are transitioning to a push-based model of content consumption

we are transitioning to a push-based model of content consumption, where the right information arrives without you even requesting it. Google Now, for instance, warns you of how early you should depart in order to arrive on time to your meeting. All of this is already happening thanks to APIs — interfaces that let other services interact with your data. In this world, web pages are not required at all.

This is not to say that web pages will die — they will be around for a long time, because they are — and will continue to be — useful for certain purposes. But there’s nothing interesting there for designers anymore. They are a commodity and a medium, no longer the default state for digital products and businesses.

Web pages are static content that need to be found and visited (pull-based). But in the emerging push-based paradigm, the content finds you. Through data obtained from your context, your activity, and even your biometrics, content and tools will smartly present themselves to you when you are most likely to need them.

That’s the big thing about the new breed of smartwatches: they obtain data from your body and show you proactively tiny bits of information for your brain to chew on. Computer technology is already making big steps in order to dissapear from your sight.

Where does this leave us?

Web design is dead, long live UX design

Here’s the good news: designers are really far from being obsolete. Quite to the contrary, you can see that the demand for UX designers is still on the rise, and everyone seems to be redesigning their digital products these days.

This switch from web design to experience design is directly caused by the shift from web pages to digital products, tools, and ecosystems.

This switch from web design to experience design is directly caused by the shift from web pages to digital products, tools, and ecosystems. Web pages are just part of something much bigger: mobile apps, API’s, social media presence, search engine optimization, customer service channels, and physical locations all inform the experience a user has with a brand, product, or service. Pretending that you can run a business or deliver value just by taking care of the web channel is naïve at best and harmful at worst.

And all these touch points need to be designed, planned, and managed. This is a job that will continue to exist, regardless of the channel. We will still need cohesive experiences and valuable content across smart climatizers, virtual reality devices, electronic contact lenses, and whatever we invent in the decades to come.

In fact, as technology fades into the background, all we can see is the value transmitted by it. The designers who want to stay in business need to be experts in managing content and value across channels.

It’s time for us to grow up, because we have been part of the problem: We have helped to give birth to self-righteous web pages that assume they deserve to be watched and awarded just for the time we invested in crafting them. Now more than ever, in a world flooded with cognitive noise, the world needs simple, intelligent, integrated ecosystems of information. The sooner designers embrace this need, the better prepared we’ll be for the future.

Source: Mashable

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Google, Microsoft, Mozilla And Others Team Up To Launch WebAssembly, A New Binary Format For The Web

Friday, 19 June 2015 by Media Something
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Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and the engineers on the WebKit project today announced that they have teamed up to launch WebAssembly, a new binary format for compiling applications for the web.

The web thrives on standards and, for better or worse, JavaScript is its programming language. Over the years, however, we’ve seen more and more efforts that allow developers to work around some of the limitations of JavaScript by building compilers that transpile code in other languages to JavaScript. Some of these projects focus on adding new features to the language (like Microsoft’s TypeScript) or speeding up JavaScript (like Mozilla’s asm.jsproject). Now, many of these projects are starting to come together in the form of WebAssmbly.

The new format is meant to allow programmers to compile their code for the browser (currently the focus is on C/C++, with other languages to follow), where it is then executed inside the JavaScript engine. Instead of having to parse the full code, though, which can often take quite a while (especially on mobile), WebAssembly can be decoded significantly faster

The idea is that WebAssembly will provide developers with a single compilation target for the web that will, eventually, become a web standard that’s implemented in all browsers.

By default, JavaScript files are simple text files that are downloaded from the server and then parsed and compiled by the JavaScript engine in the browser. The WebAssembly team decided to go with a binary format because that code can be compressed even more than the standard JavaScript text files and because it’s much faster for the engine to decode the binary format (up to 23x faster in the current prototype) than parsing asm.js code, for example.

Mozilla’s asm.js has long aimed to bring near-native speeds to the web. Google’s Native Client project for running native code in the browser had similar aims, but got relatively little traction. It looks like WebAssemly may be able to bring the best of these projects to the browser now.

As a first step, the WebAssembly team aims to offer about the same functionality as asm.js (and developers will be able to use the same Emscripten tool for WebAssembly as they use for compiling asm.js code today).

In this early stage, the team also plans to launch a so-called polyfill library that will translate WebAssembly code into JavaScript so that it can run in any browser — even those without native WebAssembly support (that’s obviously a bit absurd, but that last step won’t be needed once browsers can run this code natively). Over time then, the teams will build more tools (compilers, debuggers, etc.) and add support for more languages (Rust, Go and C#, for example).

As JavaScript inventor (and short-term Mozilla CEO) Brendan Eich points out today, once the main browsers support the new format natively, JavaScript and WebAssembly will be able to diverge again.

The team notes that the idea here is not to replace JavaScript, by the way, but to allow many more languages to be compiled for the Web. Indeed, chances are that both JavaScript and WebAssembly will be used side-by-side and some parts of the application may use WebAssembly modules (animation, visualization, compression, etc.), while the user interface will still be mostly written in JavaScript, for example.

It’s not often that we see all the major browser vendors work together on a project like this, so this is definitely something worth watching in the months and years ahead.

Source: TechCrunch

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The Future Of Mobile May Not Look Like Apps

Monday, 16 March 2015 by Media Something
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The Web as we know it is about to fundamentally change, according to one its luminaries.

WordPress may power nearly a quarter of all websites, but Drupal is no slouch, either, running roughly 5% of all websites globally and 12% of the top 100,000 websites. So when Drupal founder Dries Buytaert declares the Web “will go through a massive re-architecture and re-platforming in the next decade,” it’s worth digging in to see what he means.

From Pull To Push

The Web has served us well for over two decades, serving up content that does everything from helping us become better people to teaching us to change diapers. (Hint: If you don’t usually help out around the house, the answer to the former may have much to do with the latter.)

But that content requires us to find it and, frankly, in an instant gratification society, the world of Google-esque searching may be far too hard for us.

At least, that’s the gist of what Buytaert argues:

The current Web is “pull-based,” meaning we visit websites or download mobile applications. The future of the Web is “push-based,” meaning the Web will be coming to us. In the next 10 years, we will witness a transformation from a pull-based Web to a push-based Web. When this “Big Reverse” is complete, the Web will disappear into the background much like our electricity or water supply.

As Facebook, Flipboard, and other modern Web services demonstrate, this “push-based Web” is all about catering to us, rather than waiting for us to search:

In the future, content, products and services will find you, rather than you having to find them. Puma will let us know to replace our shoes and Marriott will automatically present you room options if you missed your connecting flight. Instead of visiting a website, we will proactively be notified of what is relevant and asked to take action. The dominant function of the Web is to let us know what is happening or what is relevant, rather than us having to find out.

Awash In Notifications

Which means, of course, the way we interact with the Web will have to change. And, indeed, we already are. Anyone who’s received a push notification on their smartphone will find the idea of a push-based Web familiar.

This also applies to ad retargeting. While the initial interest is registered based on a Web search, the ongoing attempt to entice us back is all about push. (Someone needs to tell Backcountry.com that I already have alpine touring gear. I was just browsing for a friend!)

If you’re wondering where apps fit into this new Web, well, you should.

I’m not implying that apps aren’t important. Of course they are. But we’re already seeing legitimate questions raised about their utility in some contexts. (Phocuswright offers great insight into the whole “should I build for mobile Web or apps?” question.) And there’s an even larger question looming: if the future of the Web is about push, how do apps serve that purpose?

Or, as former Facebooker and Googler Paul Adams notes:

In a world where notifications are full experiences in and of themselves, the screen of app icons makes less and less sense. Apps as destinations makes less and less sense. Why open the Facebook app when you can get the content as a notification and take action—like something, comment on something—right there at the notification or OS level. I really believe screens of apps won’t exist in a few years, other than buried deep in the device UI as a secondary navigation.

It’s not really that apps aren’t useful. It’s just that they’re incomplete without interaction. Today that push notification depends upon an app installation so that users can grant permission for apps to push message them.

Tomorrow? Well, it’s doubtful that tomorrow’s mobile world will look like today’s.

Pushing And Pulling

Which brings us back to Buytaert’s thesis. The end result of the Web’s “Big Reverse” is a complete reordering of the global economy, Buytaert insists:

We are at the beginning of a transition bridging two distinctly different types of economies. First, a “push economy” that tries to anticipate consumer demand, creates standardized or generic products in large amounts, and “pushes” them into the market via global distribution channels and marketing. Now, a “pull economy” that—rather than creating standardized products—will create highly customized products and services produced on-demand and delivered to consumers through one-on-one relationships and truly personal experiences.

Developers who want to get ahead of the curve should follow Intercom’s advice and build systems, not destinations. If you want users to live in your app, and have that app be an island, separated from their other apps and the Web, your app is unlikely to succeed.

I suspect we’ll learn from the Apple Watch experience. As I’ve written, until the Apple Watch has built-in GPS it’s worse-than-useless for me, and it may not work for you, either.

But what it will do is teach us to think in terms of notifications, not apps. With such minuscule screen real estate, learning to engage users with notifications will become key. And, just as iOS has impacted the Mac OS X experience so, too, will the diminutive Apple Watch experience bleed into smartphone/tablet and even desktop development.

It’s a push-based future, but you can start on it now.

Lead photo by Jason Howie

Source: readwrite

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