The designer’s role is continuously evolving in this ever-changing world. Being a designer now-a-days is daunting and much more stressful in comparison to the designers of yesteryears. In my opinion, the design industry is one of the fields that evolve faster than any other profession — technically and creatively. That does not mean that the designers of earlier years had no challenges at all but the set of challenges they used to face was much more less than today. There was a time when designers had to just focus only on creativity or creation of graphics/art.

Now-a-days having only ‘creative mind’ is not sufficient. Along with all talents they used to possess, now today’s designers have to learn, keep up and update themselves with various latest technologies and tool to produce digital art that being used by the industry. In addition, being only ‘technologically savvy’ is not the only requirement but along with all these above skills, one should posses additional essential skills such as communication skills, people skills, and business skills that enable them to become successful in the current market.

That being said, let me cite some of the challenges the designers are facing today:

The designers are expected to produce more with less
In today’s competitive environment, the business owners are becoming well aware of how to find inexpensive work, globally, at their finger tips. You don’t need to find a designer in the same area you live in. The labor cost varies across the countries so it is possible that they can find same work done cheaper. Say if you they want to create a logo for their company, there are so many options available out there which offers starts from $5. Think about what kind of mediocre logo you would get if it cost you $5! Think what if your company logo designed by an amateur, who doesn’t have the required skill set, quality or professionalism. I am not saying that you can never get quality work in cheap price but have they researched about your company or the company goals, the service or product being offered? Have they followed the guidelines or principles needs to be followed to create the logo? Have you thought about security and confidentiality? When you want to create quality work, it is unlikely that it can be done this cheap. However, accept the fact that there are lots of competitions out there. The result, the designers are being forced to work more in less money to survive in this world.

The designers are hired not for their creativity but for their ability to copy
The business owners today are aware of their competition and want the similar design of their competition. They compel the designers to copy other designer’s work. The consequence to this limits the designer choice and creativity. You might have seen so many logos or websites that look identical. When you see similar logos for two corporations, the reason is not that the designers already at the last drop of their creative juice but most likely either it’s designed by an amateur designer or being compelled. In essence, this trend has created a whole new breed of ‘copy and paste’ designers.

Designing has become a ‘high tech’ profession
Those days are gone where designers used to sketch on the paper or clipboard. Now that platform is shifting to digital. Along with the ‘creative mind’ the designers used to posses, the designers now have to learn and stay ahead of the curve of emerging trends, technologies, tools and softwares. It becomes very essential to stay competitive in the real world. Trust me, I believe in ‘lifelong learning’ but the way this field is growing, it is almost impossible to proactively keep up with so many trends. Even if you do keep up with all these technology, there is no guarantee of success.

Customers think they ARE the designers
A website just used to be a one-way communication; however, that trend has changed. Websites used to be nice to have but now they have become a must have marketing tool. The internet has changed the way we think, live and do business. To realize that we are living in the innovation age, one does not have to look any further than how search engines have completely displaced the traditional yellow pages. A consequence is that today’s businessperson is not only aware but keenly familiar with what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) means and the power that it provides. Every business leaders want to be seen on the top of the search list. That being said, clients are becoming much more aware of their needs and wants, which make designers life harder. Furthermore, these days there are so many free web editors, softwares and tools available in the market. Everybody wants to design their own websites with the help of these freebies. They think they are designer themselves without any background education, design-driven mindset or knowledge.

As you can see, there are numerous challenges designers have to deal with today. With the rapid pace at which technology keeps evolving, it is hard to visualize what challenges (and opportunities) today’s designers will face in the coming years.

What I did it. What did I learn.

I recently transformed my personal website from HTML4 to next generation of HTML – HTML5 (Hyper Text Markup Language version 5). Read my earlier post if you are interested to learn more about Evaluation of HTML. There are lots of hype about this new version. I thought I should adopt new standard and learn this new way of coding HTML page. If you are thinking to switch to HTML5 like me or in process of adapting, following few important points to bear in mind.

First and foremost question. what is HTML5 contains? HTML5 contains HTML5 markup + CSS3 + JavaScript APIs. HTML5 is not yet an official standard, and no browsers have full HTML5 support. Before you completely switch your pages in HTML5, significant point to keep in a mind that HTML5 is not a W3C recommendation yet. it is ongoing and making a great progress day by day.

Following what I learned while switching from HTML4 to HTML5:

1.) Internet Explorer (IE) still commands a large percentage usage share of web browsers. With this high usage percentage it is important to ensure that your webpage functions correctly in IE. Regardless what browsers your visitors are using it should work fine. Good news is that you can implement this HTML5 IE enabling JavaScript code into your page and bingo! This is the JavaScript workaround to enable HTML5 elements in earlier versions before IE 9 that do not support all elements. It is an excellent way to get IE to acknowledge the new HTML5 elements at this point. Keep in a mind that it may change tomorrow. I was unable to view my page in earlier versions of IE 9 but once I implemented this code in my page, now I be able to view my webpage accurate even in IE6.

2.) All coding structure elements such as doctype, navigation, footer, article, etc. became more simpler, clean and has now more meaning to it. If you are like me who like to hand code HTML then you will love this trait. For example, the doctype. The doctype declaration should be the very first object in an HTML document, even before html tag. You don’t have to remember writing long and different declaration codes so that browser knows what type of document to expect. It is important that you specify doctype in all HTML documents. There are three different doctypes in HTML 4, now in HTML5 there is only one. Isn’t this amazing?

3.) One of the popular elements of HTML5 is the canvas element. The canvas element is used to draw graphics on a web page. It has several methods for drawing paths, boxes, circles, characters, and adding images. It uses JavaScript to draw graphics on the web page. But, if you are one of those who absolutely hate JavaScript or coding, this is not must feature. This is good to have not must have element. So don’t get confused that you have to learn JavaScript. You can still use images in your webpage. If you are using image as a background image like I am using on my webpage, you don’t have to add image in the canvas element. You can still use as a body background image.

4.) One of the common misconception is that HTML5 will kill Flash. HTML5 cannot generate animation or interactive elements like Flash does. It should not be considered a replacement technology for flash. Currently the majority videos are shown through a Flash plug-in and that will change as HTML5 has native capability for playing videos and audios. You don’t need to choose, because they can work together. At the moment, I have not deployed any interactive element such as video or audio on my server but I will do it in future so stay tuned.

5.) Common tags such as center, font, u, big, etc are not supported in HTML5. Instead of spending lot of hours troubleshooting, I would suggest that you read a good book or authorized online websites. I used w3schools.com as my quick resource. I also found lists which contains supported tags, descriptions, attributes, etc. See below links in the reference section.

Fortunately, that day is not far when HTML5 will be one-size-fits-all solution means all browsers will support HTML5 and designers/developers do not have to spend their half life working on browser workarounds.

References:
There are actually three sites from W3C pertaining to HTML5 that you can use. There is the main draft (http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/spec.html), a reference guide (http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author), and a comparison document (http://dev.w3.org/html5/html4-differences/) that points out the differences between HTML5 and the current standard HTML4.

Working Draft (WHATWG)
This is the Editor’s Draft from WHATWG. You can use it online or print the available PDF version. (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage)

Wouldn’t be nice if there would be a way you can find out which webpage design your visitors like the most if we provide design alternatives to them?
Isn’t it amazing if we can directly find out from our visitors which look-&-feel they prefer and we can eliminate all guess work?
Absolutely, now you can test these variations by performing A/B testing.

What is A/B testing?
It is exactly what it sounds like. You have two versions of one element, A and B. To determine which element is better, you test them simultaneously and split your traffic between these two versions. In the end, you measure which version got more click; select the version which performs the best and use that version in your webpage.

How does A/B testing works?
It is very simple. First, you need to decide what you want to test. Then, you need to create two or may be three versions of your webpage or element, depending on your requirements. It can be any element or module from your webpage, which is uniquely created and stand alone. It can be just simple call-to-action ‘submit’ button by changing color red vs. green. Next step is to select tool for this job. Set up your conversation goal. Typically, you will get a JavaScript code, which you would implement in your webpage or element. Test these alternatives with your visitors concurrently. Website optimizer will then show these alternatives to your visitors randomly while monitoring which combinations lead to the highest conversion rates. The tool records the variations that were shown to the visitor. Finally, instead of all speculations now you have proven findings statistics in front of you.

Even though, A/B testing concept is very simple to understand, one important thing you need to keep in a mind.
Always test these variations simultaneously. If you are testing version A for one week and version B for another, than you are doing it wrong. It is possible that when you tested worst version B, but it’s just happen to have better sales that week. Obviously, it is hard to control external factors such as search traffic, seasonality, etc. so you cannot be 100% confident of the result. Heard this phrase, “compare Apples to Apples”? Always split the traffic between two versions. Let the tool randomly select the version.

What are the benefits?
• It’s easy.
• It increases website conversation rates. Users’ loyalty and conversion rates are more important than number of click-thru rates.
• It eliminates guess work because you can find outcome directly from your visitor
• It’s an easy way to find what change drives more conversions.
• It increases visitor satisfaction overall
• It might be a cheapest way of doing testing since you will be using same resources and tools.
• It helps increase sales. This is directly tied in to your company ROI and more importantly increased revenue of your company

Many well-known companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and BBC use the designed experiment approach to making marketing decisions. There are several free tool such as Google Website Optimizer and paid tools such as Optimizely, Visual website optimizer, etc. available out there in the market to perform these tests.

On the whole, you can A/B test everything. But, resist the urge to nit-pick every tiny portion of your site and change something every time by performing this test. One player is never more accurate and reliable than other players, so always look for other significant ways to improve your website goals.

May be you sit in one of those meetings where a variety of stakeholders are arguing about how to attain user-centric interface. Every stakeholder is busy throwing their own ideas. They are not reaching to the position where one can have clear picture what another is talking about. You can see frustration on everybody’s face. Have you experienced the same? Instead of flipping coin to reach to a conclusion, Prototype might be your/project’s life saver. Let me explain today why I believe Prototype is a vital component of the website design process.

As per Wikipedia, It is an early sample or model built to test a concept or process to be replicated or learned from. The word prototype comes from the Latin words proto, meaning original, and typus, meaning form or model. A prototype is a rudimentary working model of a product or information system, usually built for demonstration purposes or as part of the development process. For example, a company might want to create an innovative website. A creative team works on design features, typically producing couple of ideas to illustrate how the end web page will look like. This prototype or model can be used to gather stakeholder feedback to ensure that their requirements have been met, ultimately to deliver successful projects/products.

All of us have experienced that when we use visual aids while giving a speech, it can be more powerful and effective. ‘Don’t explain, show them’. For audience it becomes easier to connect with the message what speaker is conveying. Single visual can be much more powerful than an extremely long conversation. Same logic applies with Prototype. It provides valuable insight to look-&-feel and general workflow of application. A mockup is, simply put, a visual representation of your interpretation of the customer needs.

Prototype can be as simple & quick as on paper (shown in example below) or it can be rich and detailed through using variety of free as well as paid softwares/tools.

Doesn’t matter if you are working on large corporation 500+ web pages project or 10-pages small personal website, one should not avoid this process. Why? Following are few of many pragmatic reasons:
• Early visibility gives users/stakeholders an idea what the final project/product will look like
• Check for usability flaws and business to confirm their requirements
• Extremely useful to visualize project requirements to tie together to user needs
• Encourage active participation between stakeholders
• Quick feedback is extremely helpful in further project-life-cycle
• Helpful to refine potential risk associated with the project
• Cost effective as it prevents rework, save time, and most importantly budget
• All stakeholders can be on the same page. I have seen where Client/Business cannot understand creative team language and it becomes extremely convenient.
• Save implementation cycle time

Use iterative development approach while developing prototype and also build it as early as possible. It is beneficial to stakeholders who are working on the project – business, creative team, implement team, etc. Prototyping can avoid lot of frustration throughout the life-cycle of the project.

User acceptance can make or break an application/project. Then why not get users’ feedback early?

“Content is king.”
“You need to create killer content to be visible on the web.”

How many times you have heard these or similar to these sentences before? So many times, right? Marketers and entrepreneurs from all around the planet have been telling us the same every day. Tells us why content is important. We already know this. We don’t need convincing. But how do you know the content you are creating is engaging?

Think about this. A great movie or a good novel you like, has great story in it right? Successful stories are stories which are able to capture the imagination of large audience and convey message across. How would you know that your story has engaging plot in it?

Let me give you two different scenarios.
First scenario,
Boy meets Girl
They fall in love
They got married

Second scenario,
Boy meets Girl
They fall in love
Boy loses girl for some reason or vice versa. Some twist here how and why they got separated or break up? What did they do to get back together?
What and how they got back together
They got married

Among these two which one interests you? Second one. Because in the first scenario there is no story to tell so it becomes boring or has no excitement. While in the second scenario; a classic story example which has twist inside which makes story more appealing to audience. This story has emotions in it. It connected through our sentiments which touch our heart.

You must hear all marketers or business writers say every day: ‘we are great.’ ‘Here are our products.’ ‘Our customers’ says that we are the great.’ Now, buy our products. Sadly, this story doesn’t sales. Learn how to engage your audience. Introduce storytelling in your website, blog, videos and other marketing campaign strategy and make content more interesting like a great movie or a novel.

Lately I have been listening to this word Innovation all over. I became very curious to find out what is the actual meaning of Innovation.

As per Merriam-Webster Innovation means ‘introduction of something new’. Let me state my perspective. Innovation is an introduction of new product, or new service, or new idea, or new culture shift, and so on. Innovation is how you influence community in a positive way where everyone accepts and starts using that development. Let’s take Apple’s example. Apple has introduced products such as iPad, iPhone, iPod, etc in recent years. Apple has made changes in existing products and wows the world with the Introduction of all these ground-breaking products. Wow-factor features such as touch screen, Facetime, photo slideshow, etc are widely become popular. It is not that no one has thought about these technologies before. Apple did not introduce the ‘screen-touch’ thought nor implemented first. Same way, Apple was not the first one who has introduced the world that you can take photos from your mobile device and photos can be stored on your mobile devices. These technologies were here from years. But the combination of sliding photos; the way it was moving left from right with the touch of your finger was unique. People loved the concept; loved the finger touching a phone display and they can play with the photos. No one has thought about implementing these technologies in mobile device before; now that modification in existing product is Innovation.

I call Innovation when you take an idea from concept to launch and become ubiquitous. That’s when you know that you become successful. Innovation creates new trend, new standards, or new processes which becomes wide in practice by community. What you guys think what Innovation means?