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UX is money

User Experience (UX) is money – it’s as simple as that. Be in it, or you will lose out – one way or another.

In the current ‘Age of the Customer‘, UX can have an impact on virtually every part of your business – and if you don’t adapt, you risk getting left behind – and perhaps worse – not even satisfying your customers.

UX, done correctly, should impact all of the following money-related aspects of your business :

  • Customer Experience (CX) (of your company, and it’s services/products)
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Business strategy
  • Brand loyalty
  • Identifying innovation and new business opportunities
  • Product and service differentiation
  • Product and service design
  • Product development (as UX helps you identify the best options to be developed for your budget)
  • User interfaces – UX improves usability, usefulness and visual design, which in turns increases user satisfaction and loyalty.

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This app uses plugins from the PhoneGap Build repository. These plugins won’t be accessible after Nov 15th, 2016

If you’re using PhoneGap Build to build your mobile apps, and you’re getting this message when trying to build your apps, you are not alone. What is surprising is that it is hard to find any useful information on the web about what to do if faced with this scenario. The only solution for fixing it that I have come across is on a Spanish website that I needed Google Chrome to translate for me. Funnily enough, the website is called phonegapspain.com, which I first read as ‘phonegaps pain.com’, and which could be a more apt domain name  :lol:

The post is here: http://www.phonegapspain.com/topic/these-plugins-wont-be-accessible-after-nov-15th-2016/

I wanted to share an English version of it, given the lack of other resources on the web.

In short, what you need to do is replace any lines in your config.xml that contain ‘<gap:plugin …>’ with the new version of ‘<plugin name=… >’. Below is the same list from the Spanish ‘pain’ website, but with the whitespace tidied-up a little, and the alphabetical order of the plugins corrected a little to make it easier to find your plugin.

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A great Comms plan by Monash College for their new intranet launch

When launching a new service in a large organisation, having a communication plan regarding the planned roll-out of the changes will help with both user adoption as well as with change management within the organisation.

Monash College have done a great comms job for the launch of their new intranet, in a video created specifically for the occasion – check out the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqpjKjhsF6s&feature=youtu.be

I was part of the Kloud Solutions team that provided the solution for Monash College, and did the design and was part of the team that built this SharePoint Online solution.

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Visual Studio workspace does not exist (tf14061)

If you ever get the error from Visual Studio that: “Visual Studio workspace does not exist (Error tf14061)”.

Make sure to try all the steps in this article: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e8fb58cf-35fb-4653-8d00-93f51e7cda31/troubleshooting-connections-from-internet-explorer-visual-studio-to-visual-studio-online?forum=TFService

Note that you may need to update the Command line script to add the following:

  • IF EXIST “%AppDataTF%\6.0\Cache” MOVE “%AppDataTF%\6.0\Cache” “%AppDataTF%\6.0\Cache.OLD”
  • IF EXIST “%AppDataVS%\14.0\Team Explorer” MOVE “%AppDataVS%\14.0\Team Explorer” “%AppDataVS%\14.0\Team Explorer.OLD”

I was getting this error and thought my VS workspace was corrupt, but after trying all other options I came across this and it worked for me! Which saved me having to recreate the workspace and check out many projects again, for which I was very grateful. I didn’t find the article searching on the problem though, so thought posting about it might help someone else.

 

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Website project with node packages hanging Visual Studio on open of solution

If you’re like me and using Visual Studio as part of a website project connected to TFS, you’re trying to use Grunt tasks on the back of node package manager (NPM), and Visual Studio is hanging – read on.

I discovered a problem that after installing all the NPM packages, I could not open the Visual Studio solution for this project again – Visual Studio would just hang, evidently trying to process all the node_modules folders, and probably having this issue because many of the nested node_modules cause the ultimate Windows file path to be too long and exceed the maximum length of 260 characters. I think it was largely because of the ‘imagemin’ module, which has many nested dependencies, but there may have been others modules with issues.

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Just one CSS class for darker button hover states across your whole site

Today I figured out a simple and easy way to enable dark button hover states for all my HTML buttons, with the use of just one CSS class.

The one requirement is that your button HTML has another HTML element inside the actual button so that we can add the ‘darker hover’ to this inner element, and that this inner element is the full width of the ‘a’ tag. Say you have the following HTML for your button:

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“Make my website logo bigger”

“Make my logo bigger” is probably the most frequently requested change a web designer gets. There are many reasons why you shouldn’t make your logo bigger though – despite that fact that your logo is a very succinct encapsulation of your business and your brand.

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AngularJS, AngularUI, Maps Module and ‘page’ reload

I recently came across a painful issue with the Maps module part of AngularUI (the companion suite to the AngularJS framework), and have finally found a solution to it so thought I would share.

The issue is that if you use the <ng-view> directive to load a view with a Map module in it, and you navigate somewhere else within your Single Page App (SPA) and then return back to that map page, the map is off-centre and some maps tiles may not be loaded (instead you just see grey squares).

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Yeoman build slow due to ‘usemin’ of installed components

I also encountered another issue with the Yeoman build process, in that, with a few installed GitHub components, ‘building’ was very slow / took forever.

The easy way to solve this, in your Grunt.js file, is to be more ‘specific’ in the files that are run through ‘usemin’, like so:

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Minifying AngularJS code created from Yeoman

I recently ran in to a problem when minifying AngularJS code created by the very handy tool Yeoman, in that any dependencies injected in to the code (eg. in controllers, services, directives) etc.  stopped working because the names of the dependencies in the function arguments were minifed.

This is relatively well documented in the AngularJS documentation and questions on StackOverflow (eg. here), however, it was still unclear to me how to implement the annotations in Yeoman created controllers.

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Slides from Prototyping User Experience presentation, 12th Feb

Please find below my slides from the Melbourne Mobile Meetup group presentation on 12th Feb 2013.

Enjoy.

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Creating self signed certificates on <= IIS7 and assigning to a site using SelfSSL

Creating self-signed SSL certificates can be quite a pain when developing locally with IIS. I ended up collating a series of instructions for the process, and I thought I’d share in case someone finds it useful.

It’s important to note that when creating self-signed certificates on a local development machine running Windows (for example Windows 7), you can only have ONE site with the HTTPS binding.

So these instructions also particularly apply to when you want to swap between the sites that IIS has the HTTPS binding, as well as for setting up a Self-Signed SSL cert the first time.

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Responsive web design, dedicated mobile sites, or both?

Article by Matt Jensen, 23 March 2011

We all agree that a website should always be “responsive” to the needs of a user.

Responsive web design, dedicated mobile sites, or bothHowever, should it be responsively designed using the Responsive Web Design technique, or should we design the website to respond to users’ needs dependent on the scenario in which they are accessing the website (are they mobile? are they using a small screen? is the size of their browser window reduced?)

Read the full article where it originally appeared »

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