Positive

Kinneir Dufort get festive!

It’s my favourite time of the year and the first digital Christmas card of the season is for Kinneir Dufort.

This year their fantastic artwork features no less than 80 Minis – all getting into the Christmas spirit. Now that's some party!

Super Stan

Super Stanley modelling his Shard suit...legend

Hope and Homes for Children goes live!

This week sees the launch of the Hope and Homes for Children website – and it’s well worth the wait!

We’ve taken the charity’s brand refresh and created a website with a warm and personal feel, perfectly representing their brand values. As an international charity working to ensure that all children have the chance to grow up in the love of a family, they naturally have a child-centered approach to all their work – with the use of bold colours, irregular shapes and hand-drawn elements this is now reflected throughout the website too.

The donate process has been streamlined and the whole site structured to bring the charity’s work to the forefront, and their audiences closer to the information they need (with a fantastic CMS to make the site easy to update and keep the content fresh). Add to this great photography and powerful films and you get a real insight into the amazing work of Hope and Homes for Children, and the families and children they help.

Visit the site to see for yourself (and don’t forget to stop by the donation page while you’re there too!).

Send a Cow say 'Thank you'

Today is an exciting day in the studio as we're launching the 'Thank you' campaign that we've created for Send a Cow. This is the first completely integrated campaign the charity have done which connects all of their digital communication channels, as well as some of the more traditional offline ones. 

The concept is to give a selection of their supporters a very special 'Thank you'. Nowadays, a simple ‘Thank you’ can often take us by surprise. Send a Cow wanted a campaign that was heartfelt and would give something back to their supporters to make them feel on top of the world. 

We've customised the Send a Cow brand and boldly taken over their digital channels. Each supporter will have their message promoted across the website, gift site, Facebook, Twitter, email etc. These 'Thank you' messages will be popping up throughout the Christmas period, so watch out for those happy faces! :)

It's Movember time!

During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces in the UK and around the world. The aim of which is to raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.

A few of us at Positive have set up 'Team Positashio Mustachio' to help support and raise money for this great cause.

We are still undecided as to which style moustache we are going to grow but 'The Regent' seems a popular choice.

Please click here if you would like to make a donation and help support our team.

Undercover User Experience Design - A Review

I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in user experience design, it is a fantastic resource for any seasoned professional or UX newbie.

Written by Cennydd Bowles and James Box from Clearleft the book is focused on teaching how to do great UX work with tiny budgets, no time and limited support, something we all face at times. It is also a great reference and insight into how to introduce UX into your projects and designing with users in mind.

It is written with real-life, commercial experience and helps to outline the importance of getting clients excited about UX. They believe, "Good design today is better than great design next year" and that our job should not be about impressing other designers but to maker users' life better. This is something which, I feel many websites fail to recognise. Form takes over function and sites look pretty but are frustrating to use.

I am inspired by the chapter on generating ideas, which demonstrates many activities that can be used to form a wide range of creative ideas, focusing on divergent thinking methods which I think can work effectively and also help demonstrate the value of collaboration to a team.

I love the convincing statement that was suggested when discussing the fact that cost is the main barrier to post-launch changes by clients, "Owning a website is like owning a house; with attention, repairs, and perhaps the odd extension, it can accommodate their changing needs for years".

I would rate this book a positive (excuse the pun) 7/10

Adopting a mobile first strategy

The times they are a-changin’ - we are all well aware of the explosion of the smartphone market, the increasing popularity of portable tablet devices, mirrored by a steady decline in the sales of desktop computers. This has rightly been cause for concern - we’ve been optimising our websites accordingly, and making sure they work as nicely on an iPad as they do on a desktop. We’ve even been making fantastic web experiences specifically for mobile and tablet. But is it time to fundamentally rethink the order in which we plan, create and deploy our projects across different devices?

It is widely predicted that by 2015 (or even sooner) mobile will exceed desktop usage of the web, yet almost every website recently created is desktop optimised. Mobile is all too often an afterthought, using the last few drops of budget. It is time to adapt and move our mind-sets from a “desktop first” strategy to a “mobile first” digital strategy.

By this I mean we need to stop thinking about mobile as a secondary concern to the desktop and put it at the core of our planning. This may seem radical, but it isn’t a new concept by any means; Google has claimed to be a mobile first company since 2010, and renowned strategist Luke Wroblewski led the way in arguing the case for a mobile first digital strategy as early as 2009. Looking at and segmenting your web traffic you may think that considering this now is jumping the gun, but it is a mind-set change that will have to be done by everyone eventually. The sooner we can adopt it, the better prepared we are for tomorrow, therefore keeping us one step ahead of the competition.

Thinking “mobile first” has further benefits. Designing for mobile forces us to focus on the core of our offering, and get that core right first before worrying about the peripheral. As a UX designer I take great pleasure in designing mobile experiences, the constraints of mobile (such as screen size and connection speed) mean that the first task is often to remove anything that is not completely necessary from the page or anything that could be considered to be visual clutter. This is a great exercise that enables us to work out the hierarchy of information and content.

So how can a mobile first digital strategy be applied to a typical website project?

"Responsive design" is one technique, and a healthy starting point for most new projects. The idea is that we plan and design from the mobile up. We start with a mobile optimised website (fits in a narrow viewport, has lean amounts of imagery, is fast to load). Next we allow the mobile site to scale up to the viewport of a tablet, adding graphics and other rich features as it scales. Finally we have the desktop version, which you might call all singing and all dancing. This way we don't have a "mobile website" and a "desktop website" we have one website which adapts to how it is being viewed, which has had its structure and content optimised to be as simple and usable as possible. This method isn't suited to every project, but is a good first port of call for any new brief.

New thinking often leads to new problems. Images need to work at different sizes with this methodology and we are yet to find the perfect way to scale them dynamically without affecting download speeds. Traditional banner advertising and other revenue sources such as PPC advertising are generally hidden on responsive designs when they are viewed on a mobile - this will surely mean that they are not seen by most of their intended audience soon. How can we make advertising work in this new medium?

The answers aren't all there yet, but that's one of the things that makes today an exciting time to be working in digital. We are at one of the great crossing points; a sea change is among us. It's time to adapt or lose out, and adopting a mobile first strategy is the key step in evolving your business to meet tomorrow's new challenges. Mobile first - a strategy for refinement, clarity, speed and a strategy for the future.

Bath Rugby goes live

After many months of hard work the new Bath Rugby sites - the main website, the shop website and the mobile site - have just launched!

User research has been fundamental to help ensure that we make sure that these new sites deliver exactly what the fans want - fast access to the important content. The home page of the main site gives direct access to the latest news, recent matches and critical information about the next match - when, where, ticket information, travel and weather - plus an overview of where Bath are in the Premiership table. Social media is, of course, a key consideration and we've intergrated Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter throughout.

The new shop has been designed to display products as their very best, without additional visual clutter. We now have free delivery, free returns and online discount for season ticket holders, as well as product specific sizing guides - all things that the fans said they wanted.

We've focused on making the design support the content rather than overwhelm it. Sports sites all tend to follow a similar look and feel and we really wanted to take the opportunity to break that mould and deliver something more usable.

Visit the Bath Rugby main website or the Bath Rugby shop website.