Shocking user interfaces costs companies in productivity, training and even the customer experience. People are fed up with inadequate internal systems. Many of those interviewed had given up on the official software. Instead, they use tools like Dropbox, Google Docs and Evernote. Frustration will only increase as millennials enter the workforce. These people are digital natives, and they expect a certain standard of software. They expect software to adapt to them, not the other way around. In this article, Paul Boag will show you how to fix this.
Read more…
To fully realize that creativity, successful developers need to continually improve their skills. The web industry has grown from this desire to learn. You only need to look at the unwavering demand for conferences, workshops and training days for evidence of this, but the cost of continually sending your team to workshops and training days can quickly become unsustainable. Within your team lies a wealth of skills, knowledge and experience that can be shared and developed further. With a little effort and using resources freely available on the web, you can increase the technical competence of the team organically, with much lighter demands on time and cost.
Read more…
Over the last century, many incidents have provided examples that innovation and creativity can play an essential role for an organization in the midst of crisis. They can be applied to redesign a company’s structure and devise a more innovative process that leads to products that meet both creativity and business needs. In this article, Rafiq Elmansy will talk about one interesting example of this: LEGO, the world-famous toy manufacturer. By studying its crisis, lasting from 1993 to 2004, we’ll answer two main questions: Can creativity and innovation help an organization in its time of crisis? And can studying cases such as LEGO’s reveal a model for the broader role of creativity in an organization for other enterprises to follow?
Read more…
Communicating effectively can be quite difficult, especially when a project involves many people with different responsibilities and levels of authority. The problem compounds when the people involved belong to different organizations with different working guidelines. Effective communication happens when a message is delivered whose content has the same meaning for the recipient as it does for the sender. In this article, Krzysztof Rakowski will show us the rules he follows for a better communication. He hopes you find these insights useful to your work.
Read more…
As digital professionals, we like to complain that the organizations with which we work are a hindrance. But are they? Exactly how digitally-friendly are the companies we work for? Before Paul Boag helps a client go through the process of digital transformation, he needs to understand where the problems lie. He does this using a digital health check. Below is an outline of the areas that he investigates, the questions he asks and what those questions reveal. Paul’s hope is that this health check will help you better understand the organizations with which you work.
Read more…
A “workaholic” is someone who is addicted to work. Soon, they neglect their family, friends, health, sometimes damaging them all irrevocably. Some people who work on the Web seem not only to disregard the dangers of workaholism, but to actively promote it. They see it as a badge of honor—but it’s a serious issue that can damage Web teams. In contrast, people who simply “work hard” do not expose themselves to such dangers.
Read more…
Many large businesses had a chief electricity officer when electricity first started to power the industrial economy. Companies just couldn’t operate without power, but it wasn’t always that way. Over a decade after introducing electricity, many business leaders were still building factories by water, despite no longer needing it to power their machinery. They needed help integrating the new technology into their thinking and that is where the chief electricity officer came in.
Read more…
Jeremy Girard has had the opportunity to lead various Web design and development teams, including a number of professionals fresh out of school. Along the way, he learned some valuable lessons. So, he decided to make a list of some of those lessons, as a way to remind himself of what he needed to do to make sure his designers had the resources needed to succeed. Many of these lessons were actually common sense, and these common-sense lessons are exactly the ones that are easy to neglect and that we often need to be reminded of.
Read more…
We all make mistakes. Whether in our design and development work or just in life in general, we all do it. Thankfully, even the biggest mistakes carry valuable lessons. In this article, Jeremy Girard will share stories of some of the missteps he had made in the course of his career and the lessons he’d learned in the process.
Read more…
A front-end developer had just the few operations duties lumped into their role, and even then, many people chose to skip those steps. Alex Sexton thinks things are about to shift, and he’d (humbly) like to help guide that shift, because he thinks it’ll be great for the Web.
Read more…
