Creating a Simple Email Analytics Spreadsheet That Your Clients Will Love
The content of your emails communicates a story to your subscribers — and the behavior metrics of your subscribers communicates an important story back to you. Being able to track their open and click rates is one of the huge benefits of email marketing. In fact, put simply, if you’re not taking the time to stop and review your data , you may as well be sending a physical mailing. Luckily, nearly...
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...
How Being Myself Landed My Dream Agency Job
“ The Community Manager is a facilitator of all operations, as well as a key developer of company culture. As an experienced Office Manager, they will ensure that the office is kept in order and running smoothly … this person is expected to have acute attention to detail and an ability to anticipate and address any potential issue arising with the office. ” From the moment I saw this ad post, I...
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...
Why Tech Experts So Often Struggle to Become Leaders
There was a short essay published on the early Internet — 1986, to be exact — called " Hacker's Manifesto ". It's a cringe-worthy screed that would be right at home on the "I'm 14 and this is deep" subreddit, but there's a concept buried within it that has stuck with me over the years, even if my own teenage angst has faded (or evolved). Amidst its cyberpunk-inspired social commentary, the...
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...
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