Strategy and Foresight: Finding Common Ground Between Chess and Design Systems
I was introduced to chess at a young age and have been a fan ever since. One of the best ways to learn chess when you're just getting started is to analyze the games of masters, to see how they approached a given situation. When doing so, you quickly learn that chess is a game of strategy, but that strategy rarely exists entirely within the present moment. Rather, the great players of chess have...
Solving UX Challenges for Hospitals and Health Systems
The public website ecosystem for large healthcare organizations often comes with uniquely complex challenges. Multiple physical locations in an organization’s network often leads to a scattered array of websites with separate databases, siloed content organization, different visual experiences for patients, and distinct brand identities. All of this confusion fights against the goals of a...
How to Choose a UI Color Palette
As a designer whose work spans advertising, illustration, user experience, and digital systems, I find that universal design principles generally hold true across mediums. Things like hierarchy, white space, and typography are applicable in more or less similar ways from printed page to screen interface. Color, though, is a trickier skill to translate. Not only does color play a critical role in...
Continuous Improvement: Why You Might Not Need a Ground-Up Website Redesign
I sell websites, but I might not want you to buy one. There are certainly circumstances where a ground-up redesign is the only option, but there’s an alternative that’s often eliminated without proper consideration: iterative, impactful improvement to an existing site. This option is overlooked because the perception is that it’s always easier to start from scratch than to clean up an existing...
Creating Better User Experiences Through Everyday Inspiration
There’s an expression in French for a specific cognitive bias: deformation professionelle . This is the bias that leads a person to see the world through the lens of their profession rather than from the perspective of a regular human. In my case, as a UX Design Strategist, it leads me to be more critical with some user experiences and interactions. And at times, more demanding of the products we...
Accessibility in Web Design
As a web designer, I know that most clients want their website to be engaging, forward-thinking, and usable. But the surface-level concept of usability often leaves many people out of the equation. Access to the Internet — now seen as a fundamental human right — is only accomplished if websites cater to all users, regardless of visual, auditory, motor, cognitive, learning, neurological, and/or...
How Prospective Undergraduates Navigate Websites — and What They Expect From College Content
At Eastern Standard, we do a lot of work in the higher education space. And, as a firm that is passionate about user-centric design and content strategy, we've done a lot of research into the browsing behavior of prospective undergraduates: the digital natives who have very different expectations and habits from the previous generation. Here are a few high-level takeaways from some of our...
Connecting to Instagram and Other Social Media in WordPress Using Advanced Custom Fields
As a web developer, it’s not a stretch to say that social media feed integration has become a de rigueur project spec for any new website I take on. Clients realize that when done right, these feeds can increase traffic, boost revenue, and improve engagement with their brand. When working on the WordPress platform, there are many different approaches to take — some of which are more desirable...
Black, White & Shades of Gray: Leveraging Discovery to Write a Better Brand Story
While product, market, and user research are all now widely recognized as key components of product design, this wasn’t always the case. For a long time, we thought good ideas automatically made good products, good brands, and good marketing. (Remember Mad Men’s “It’s Toasted” success?) But taking on product design without doing research is the equivalent of having a conversation without...
To Create a Web Component Library, Think Like a Lego Master Builder
To develop for the web is, by nature and necessity, to be a problem-solver. While my personal path to web development has taken many turns (including photography, 3D animation, and game design), none has been more foundational to my knowledge of good programming principles and problem-solving skills than Lego. My hobby of designing Lego cars — one that lives at the intersection of design,...
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