The onset of mobility and BYOD in the enterprise has created an enormous opportunity for large-scale companies to take advantage of their employees’ eagerness to use their own technology in the doing of their jobs. In earlier blogs I’ve discussed some ways to identify the best opportunities for companies to increase profits with mobile apps. If you want to realize any [...] ]]>

The onset of mobility and BYOD in the enterprise has created an enormous opportunity for large-scale companies to take advantage of their employees’ eagerness to use their own technology in the doing of their jobs. In earlier blogs I’ve discussed some ways to identify the best opportunities for companies to increase profits with mobile apps. If you want to realize any app-related increases of revenue or decreases in costs at scale, however, you have to get hundreds – or thousands – of your employees to use it. Once you’ve identified that exploitable business opportunity, you have to take off your company hat and design with your users in mind!

You all have seen the stats about mobile – suffice it to say that you can count on almost all of your employees having (or soon having) a mobile device and looking for cool apps to download. Why? Because they all want to play games, have instant access to all their contacts, carry around their entire music libraries, and take and share photos. They want to be in touch and share and have fun and enjoy convenience. There are probably tens of unused apps on your iPad or smartphone to remind you that  If you forget about meeting the needs of your users and providing a great mobile user experience, then you’ll be doomed to disappointment by the results.

So what are some of the ways your you can tie your users’ core motivations back to improvements in your business processes to provide incremental value to your company?

Save time or make a process easier for your employees:  Perhaps your app can be designed so that tasks that your employees perform over and over again could be automated. Could predictive algorithms be used to make intelligent suggestions about what next steps your mobile users might take? Save steps by allowing the app to interface directly with the users’ calendar or contacts apps, adding appointments, reminders and customer information to their phone or tablet as appropriate. Develop ideas that will allow the native functions of your users’ devices, such as the touch screen, camera, microphone, GPS or gyroscope, to facilitate a critical process. Examples of these might be filling in forms, capturing documents and images, processing credit cards or checks, or facial ID recognition, to name just a few.

Provide an excellent user experience:  One thing is for certain, if your app doesn’t meet the standards of usability we expect from anything we can download for free, it will quickly be relegated to obscurity. Your app should be easily navigable and take advantage of well established gestures and workflows so that your employees can get what they need easily and quickly. Make sure that you provide spinners and other icons as appropriate so that users know that a process is actually happening, and provide definite feedback when a process has been completed. For bandwidth-intense processes, you might have all the response/feedback occur entirely within the app, and then cache the data to process in the background later,  when the user accesses a wireless network.

Make your app fun – give it some “wow” factor: Of course your purpose is to transact business with your custom mobile app, but that doesn’t mean you have to be stodgy. Perhaps you might incorporate a social gaming aspect to your business process, where there is friendly competition and commentary encouraged between your employees. Other ways to make the app fun might be to include Easter eggs or other quirky graphic elements that can add surprise and laughter to the experience. Perhaps you can develop a really cool and useful interaction model using a native device feature. However you choose to add fun to your app, be careful here not to encourage TOO much off-task activity as you may offset smaller productivity gains

Prevent your employees from making costly or time consuming mistakes: Depending on the scope of your business, your app could be used to provide on-location training and information for new employees, which can help to avoid mistakes and shorten the learning curve. You could save on up front training for advanced processes or special scenarios by providing on-demand or live video guidance.  You can even allow your employees to share their own best practices so that individual efficiencies can be scaled across your enterprise.

If all else fails, incentivize your employees to use your app: It could certainly be argued that within certain mobile business models, saving time (as suggested above) can correlate to increased earnings for the individual. Other ways that employees can be motivated to adopt your newly launched mobility app is to offer hard incentives for app use, whether these are in the form or monetary or career-based bonuses, or maybe in the form of credit towards time off or some discount of products and services. While incentives are no replacement for usefulness, fun and a great mobile experience, they can certainly help (especially if they are offset by the additional margins the app provides.)

The rate at which businesses are rushing to get their apps running on to the mobile platform is astounding, but more is not always better. According to a report released last year by Gartner, 61% of enterprises plan to enhance their mobility capability during the next 3 years, and 48% believe they will become leaders in their industries by adopting innovative mobility solutions[1]. Unfortunately, fewer than 25% of employee apps en [...] ]]>

The rate at which businesses are rushing to get their apps running on to the mobile platform is astounding, but more is not always better. According to a report released last year by Gartner, 61% of enterprises plan to enhance their mobility capability during the next 3 years, and 48% believe they will become leaders in their industries by adopting innovative mobility solutions[1]. Unfortunately, fewer than 25% of employee apps enjoy widespread adoption by their intended audience[2].

It’s not good enough anymore to be reactive to a perceived demand for mobility and implement solutions that are only an extension of your company’s desktop strategies. This might satisfy the boys upstairs for a second, but those smiles will quickly turn to frowns when your expensive new mobile app doesn’t deliver results. Statistics show that the growth in the rate of app downloads far exceeds the growth of mobile users, meaning that app competition is fierce and growing fiercer. At the end of the day, your mobile development project has to be driven by REAL employee needs and provide REAL business value in order to grab your audience and be considered a success.

In order to identify the best opportunities for your company in the mobility space, it’s important for you to have a defined set of corporate mobility goals. Increased revenue, increased employee productivity, and developing more efficient processes are some distinct measurable goals that can be chosen as a starting point for your mobile efforts. From there you’ll want to begin to identify the chokepoints that are limiting improvements in any of those areas, and identify whether any of the inherent qualities of mobile devices can speed up the value exchange. Some questions you might ask as part of this process are:

• Location based: How can I get value out of location agnosticism (the fact that my employees can be working from anywhere)? Is there specific value I can get from my employees being “On Location/On Site?”
• Device based: Is there anything unique about the native device sensors (Cameras, gyroscopes, GPS, touch interface) that will provide a heretofore unavailable solution to a problem, shorten the operations cycle, or improve data accuracy? Are there 3^rd party accessories (like the Square card reader or even medical sensing devices) that could contribute to any of the above?
• Communication based: Can I leverage mobile email, instant messaging technology, social media or videoconferencing to speed up a process, improve internal communications, or improve customer service?

Meeting your corporate mobility goals means matching your priorities up with your employee (or the app end users’) goals; user experience design is going to be critical to the success of your efforts. It means nothing for you to deploy innovative mobile apps if they aren’t easy to understand and use, and if they don’t make life a whole lot easier for the user. The user experience you provide will correlate directly with app adoption and usage; your employees will expect any app you deploy to be as good as something they’d buy for themselves in any app store.  If you pay attention, you can avoid being in that 75% of company apps that get downloaded with high hopes, then languish unused on the users' mobile desktop.

Competition in the mobile app space is fierce, yes, but businesses can’t afford to sit on the sidelines while their competitors are creating apps and mobile services that will erode their customer/user base. It’s important that companies get their mobile app development program started with a digital consultant that is experienced in identifying and implementing successful mobile strategies and helping their clients to avoid pitfalls and rookie mistakes. Nevertheless, the mobile marketplace is a swiftly moving target and your mobile development should be approached as an iterative process. Mistakes will be made and opportunities missed in version 1.0 that will have to be addressed in a later release  (rest assured there will always be later releases.) The worst you can do is to delay deployment in pursuit of perfection.

It’s like the Wild West out there. Mobile device technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, and mobile internet usage is expected to outpace desktop usage in the next year or two – depending on which analysts you subscribe to.  More workers are bringing their smartphones and iPads to work hoping for increased workplace efficiencies and more opportunities to be un-tethered from their desks - and more enterprises are making significant investments in IT to support these efforts.

It’s like the Wild West out there. Mobile device technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, and mobile internet usage is expected to outpace desktop usage in the next year or two – depending on which analysts you subscribe to.  More workers are bringing their smartphones and iPads to work hoping for increased workplace efficiencies and more opportunities to be un-tethered from their desks - and more enterprises are making significant investments in IT to support these efforts. Developing a custom mobility app that is fit for your business is one of the most effective strategies corporations are embracing to take advantage of the increased access to workers that the mobile internet has provided.

For the business, the most significant returns from mobility apps should be derived in the form of hard, measurable returns like increased revenue or decreased costs - achieving these goals is going to be critical to the success of the mobile program. There are some hard-to-measure impacts that could be tied to your mobile app, such as increased productivity or customer satisfaction, but those metrics will be harder to sell to the executives in the C-suite as a justification for future investments in mobile.

If your goal is to drive increases in revenue, then your opportunities are more likely to be found in the front of the shop – within the sales and marketing processes. Many businesses are making significant strides in using mobile in their marketing automation efforts – adding intelligence to their lead-qualification process and passing better information on to the sales team. Others are putting highly-specialized apps in the hands of their sales representatives with demonstrations, interactions, and real time access to customer data, all of which combine to speed customers along the buying process and shorten the sales cycle.

If on the other hand you’re looking to cut costs, then you should focus more on the back of the shop where on-location access to real time data or more immediate access to decision-making personnel can drive increased efficiency. The target systems that are most likely to deliver value in these cases will be in the ERP and CRM systems where off-site access to business-critical systems can streamline the business and also help to increase data accuracy (data entered in the field goes directly into the system reducing transposition errors).

In either case, enterprises can absolutely get great results on their bottom line by making investments in a mobility app. Company executives need to partner with a strategic consultant that can help to identify the best opportunities within their business for mobile to deliver value. Look for companies that have experience analyzing their clients’ businesses and isolating choke-points that can be cleared with the use of mobile. Look for companies that can help clients design a mobile user experience that will increase the odds of app usage and therefore increased revenue from your sales force. Each incremental user, each incremental business process improvement, will add up to a big mobile win.

What is your favorite thing about your smartphone; the music, the games, social media, email, camera, or the ability to have all the services you want all on the same device? Whatever benefits you derive from mobile technology as a consumer, they correlate directly to opportunities in the mobile space that one business or another is taking advantage of.  Is your company taking full advantage of its mobile opportunities?

What is your favorite thing about your smartphone; the music, the games, social media, email, camera, or the ability to have all the services you want all on the same device? Whatever benefits you derive from mobile technology as a consumer, they correlate directly to opportunities in the mobile space that one business or another is taking advantage of.  Is your company taking full advantage of its mobile opportunities?

In our earlier blog The Mobile Marketing Road Less Travelled, we referenced IDC[1] estimates that by 2015 more US broadband users will access the internet on a mobile device than on a PC-based/wired device. As we have seen over the past five years, usage of mobile phone technology has advanced dramatically and is continuing to do so. Including mobile in the marketing strategy is increasing ROI for many businesses that are discovering how best to engage with their customers wherever they are. Companies are also getting better at providing great customer service using mobile technology helping them to maintain a happy consumer base. Seeing the advancement in smart phones capabilities of just the last few years, it’s exciting to imagine what the future holds.

So, what’s in store for us this year? Let’s take a look at some statistics about how we use our smartphones and also some predictions about what we might expect to see in 2013.[2][3]

• Adults spend more time on mobile media than they do reading newspapers and magazines combined.
• 42.8% of marketing executives plan on increasing their mobile marketing spending budget in 2013.
• 80% of retailers will be making an investment in mobile commerce.
• 99% of smartphone owners use their mobile browser at least once a day.
• 3 out of every 5 searches are conducted on a mobile device.
• 9 out of 10 mobile phone searches result in a purchase or visit.
• 75% of mobile users use their device for shopping.
• 74% of mobile users use their devices to check their email.
• More than half of all emails will be opened on a mobile device.
• 52% of adult mobile phone owners use their devices while in a store to get help with purchasing.

In light of these unbelievable statistics, how best can we in the business world position ourselves to benefit from the world’s swiftly-growing dependence on their mobile device? Playing with their smartphone has become an addictive behavior for most users, so why not turn the behavior in to a strategy and a source of revenue? The best way to ensure that we maximize ROI from our mobile strategies is to listen to what consumers want and do our best to anticipate their needs. How do we appease every consumer on the market? The answer is we can’t, but looking at what most consumers want overall is a good place to start.

In Ayantek’s recent SMAC Stack conference, Jeff Takle, Director of the Innovation Lab at Abt associates offered up some tips on how mobile can benefit the business world. Jeff most recently led Abt’s mobile strategy, which helped teams in  40 different countries create and quickly launch custom apps and leverage mobile technology to drastically improve access to advanced medical care in sub-Saharan Africa.

Jeff’s strategies for pleasing at least 90% of mobile clients are as follows:

• When it comes to mobile development, integrate an existing team or technology into your current workflow, or hire custom developers. There is little return on building your own mobile team and a high risk of talent-obsolescence if you do so.
• “Fast” is more effective than “right.” Unless there are liability or compliance issues, having an up and running imperfect app (contributing to your bottom line) is better than taking longer to satisfy every need of every stakeholder; that’s what updates are for.
• Organizations have different “innovation appetites,” and so do consumers. Be aware that you keep your functionality simple and appropriate to the audiences you’re serving
• Create adequate space and flexibility to address future needs, this reduce the need to go back for redesigns when adding functionality in VX.0 releases.

Jeff shared a number of more specific strategies and tactics that contributed to his ability to improve medical outcomes in developing countries using mobile. Many of these are applicable to all industries, so I encourage you to check out the video of his presentation when it becomes available.

Predicting the needs of mobile customers as you are generating a strategy around mobile may seem stressful, however time spent in doing so should result in an improved possibility of return. All the statistics point to a continuing bright future for mobile - Now it’s time to take advantage of this great opportunity and put it to work for your company. Welcome to the future of mobile!

So, you’ve finally gotten approval on the budget you need to begin that long-awaited redesign of your corporate website – exciting news! Or perhaps your about to embark on your first entrepreneurial venture and you’re considering developing a custom website or mobile application? I know how tempting it is in cases like these to want to run straight to your interactive agency or web design team and start laying out your home page and choosing colors. In this blog I hope to convince you to [...] ]]>

So, you’ve finally gotten approval on the budget you need to begin that long-awaited redesign of your corporate website – exciting news! Or perhaps your about to embark on your first entrepreneurial venture and you’re considering developing a custom website or mobile application? I know how tempting it is in cases like these to want to run straight to your interactive agency or web design team and start laying out your home page and choosing colors. In this blog I hope to convince you to take a deep breath before you jump, and go through a thorough process of requirements analysis.

In my experience working with clients on numerous web and mobile design projects, I have found requirements analyses to be critical to success and I always perform them as my first step. Understanding the requirements in advance helps to ensure that business goals and user needs are met, and  that the solution achieves what it was designed to accomplish. In a website redesign project, your requirements should map directly to any point of pain or frustration that users experience with the current site. The new web or mobile experience should be customized to satisfy business goals and user needs; if you do not have a good understanding of those needs at the beginning of the project, you are likely to end up with a site or application that neither achieves your goals nor delights your users.

Requirements analysis is an iterative process that begins with an initial brainstorming session and continues throughout the development cycle; your requirements document will evolve and become more useful as a driver for design and implementation decisions with each iteration.  Once you’ve done your initial brainstorming and identified some high level requirements with your client, it’s useful to develop conceptual design wireframes that illustrate a potential approach. Having something concrete in your clients’ hands will make their target users’ experience more real to them and enable them to refine and clarify their requirements.

After the initial requirements have been formulated, reviewed, revised and prioritized by your clients, you should – if possible - follow up with “Wants and Needs” sessions. These sessions will allow prospective site or application users (or past users in the case of site redesigns) to validate your requirements findings and identify to what degree they’re on track with users’ needs. Bring that information back to your  analysis team to develop the appropriate web strategy.

In some cases, your clients will be prepared to quickly provide application requirements and to reach a consensus on which features or functions will take priority. More often however, clients may need some guidance to tease out the requirements at the level needed to be useful to your site or application development team. Gaining consensus on requirements can be tricky in a company with multiple stakeholders. This process requires careful management of the personalities involved, and asking focused questions about the importance of each requirement.

I find that getting stakeholders to clarify their rationale for requesting a certain requirement is an excellent way to generate discussions at the group level and to determine  whether or not it should be prioritized in the final design. Throughout the consensus-building phase, it is critical that all team members feel invested in owning the requirements as well as the analysis process.

One of the biggest challenges of any requirements analysis is getting the right amount of specificity from your stakeholders, so that the requirements become useful as drivers for design and implementation decisions. The most useful requirements analysis specifies in precise detail what the user should be able to accomplish on the site and provides guidance on designing site interactions.

Some requirements analysis tasks include:

• Producing various artifacts that provide different lenses on the system and its uses to elicit more detailed requirements, such as actor tables and use cases;
• Structuring requirements into categories;
• Negotiating priorities; and
• Evaluating requirements against established criteria.

So when is it time to start designing?

If you have created wireframes to elicit requirements from your client, you are well on the way to beginning the design process - even while the final requirements are being developed. Furthermore,  once you develop user flows to help derive requirements, you are ready to start designing after the steps are clearly outlined.

As your site design project continues to advance, it is necessary to institute a process to manage the change or evolution of your site or application’s requirements. After all, a changing requirement can have significant impact on the project. Managing changing requirements may require that you do the following:

• Document and evaluate the change justification
• Assess the impact of the change
• Accept, reject, or defer the change
• Implement the change if approved

During the design phase, it is essential to trace the design elements back to the requirements. Tracing requirements to each feature in the design ensures that it is indeed meeting the business and user needs and prevents the development of features for features’ sake and possibly overcomplicating the experience for users.

Requirements analysis is not sexy. It is not fun. There are no TV shows about requirements analysts. But how sexy and fun is it to go back to the drawing board after you’ve built a website that isn’t meeting the needs of your customers or achieving your business goals? Trust someone who’s done it both ways – iterating through a requirements analysis document is a LOT cheaper and more fun than iterating through generations of graphic comps, and in the process you’ll develop a deeper understanding for your clients business that will pay off over and over again.

At the opening of 2013, one thing is certain. Social Media can no longer be looked at as an experiment. According to a recent study done by comScore¹, social networking is ranked as the most popular content category for worldwide engagement, reaching more than 85% of the population in 41 out of 43 major countries that were surveyed. 

How are big companies reacting to the upsurge of social media? To cash in on this growing opportunity, according to a new study by the [...] ]]>

At the opening of 2013, one thing is certain. Social Media can no longer be looked at as an experiment. According to a recent study done by comScore¹, social networking is ranked as the most popular content category for worldwide engagement, reaching more than 85% of the population in 41 out of 43 major countries that were surveyed. 

How are big companies reacting to the upsurge of social media? To cash in on this growing opportunity, according to a new study by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth², 73% of all Fortune 500 companies used Twitter, 66% had a Corporate Facebook page and 28% had a public facing blog in 2012.

Small and medium-sized companies are still not using social media aggressively – a recent eMarketer³ report found that just 24 percent of small businesses and 33 percent of medium-size businesses have integrated social media in a structured way for their businesses. However, this trend is changing and more small and mid-sized companies are expected to jump on the social media bandwagon in 2013.

Here are some examples of how companies are using social media to drive their businesses. 

Brazilian fashion retailer displays Facebook ‘likes’ for items in its real-world stores

One of the problems brick-and-mortar retailers have with Facebook likes is that – by their very nature – they’re visible online, rather than in stores. In order to bring them into the real world, Brazilian fashion outlet C&A installed displays on their coat hangers to inform shoppers of the popularity of each item. This blurring of the boundaries between online and offline customer interaction is something that may set successful brands apart as the web integrates further into our daily lives.

Equine Dentist Builds Relationships with Facebook

This equine dentist has used Facebook to acquire at least 10-15 customers last year. How? "People do business with people who they're friends with. Period," he says. "And Facebook is a great way to get to know people. It allows people to see that I'm a person."

Dell drives traffic to its eCommerce website to increase online sales

To sell your products or services online, you have to increase traffic on your website where customers can buy your goods. How can you accomplish this? Just do what Dell does. Dell “tweets” about special promotions for its followers on Twitter. Right now, Dell outlet has 1.5 million followers. Even if 5% of that audience sees the promotional tweet (roughly 75,000 users), 1% of those who see it click on the tweet (roughly 750 users) and 10% of users who click on the promotion (roughly 75 users) make an average purchase of $500, Dell will make 75 * $500 = $37,500 in sales. Not too bad for a tweet, right?

Although many companies are adopting social media in many different ways, two major challenges still exist. First, though it is evident that consumers increasingly go online to discuss products, seek advice and offer guidance, it is often difficult to see where and how to influence these conversations which can take place at a lightning speed or over a gradual period of time across many diverse channels. Second, there is no easy way to show return of investment on social media and many companies find that it’s difficult to justify devoting significant resources to an activity whose precise effect remains unclear.

The key to success in leveraging social media is to accept these challenges and treat social media as a long-term investment to improve brand image, customer loyalty and increase sales as opposed to focusing on short-term gains or immediate return on investment. Social media is here to stay and it is up to you and your company to decide how you want to make the most out of it!

References
1 – ComScore report
2 – UMass Dartmouth
3 – eMarketer

How humans interact with computers is an integral facet of creating a user experience for websites and applications that will be engaging and memorable to users. Creating an experience that inhabits a user thoroughly requires developing a means of getting information to and from the computer that approac [...] ]]>

How humans interact with computers is an integral facet of creating a user experience for websites and applications that will be engaging and memorable to users. Creating an experience that inhabits a user thoroughly requires developing a means of getting information to and from the computer that approaches being imperceptible. The development of the original tethered mouse was a gigantic innovation as it incorporated natural

How humans interact with computers is an integral facet of creating a user experience for websites and applications that will be engaging and memorable to users. Creating an experience that inhabits a user thoroughly requires developing a means of getting information to and from the computer that approaches being imperceptible. The development of the original tethered mouse was a gigantic innovation as it incorporated natural, intuitive movement into the experience of user input, and IMO was really what began the “NUI” (Natural User Interface) revolution.

The ultimate goal of NUI is to make getting information into the computer as “human” as possible, and to blur the line between human and computer. The idea would be to remove the keyboard and mouse, and replace them with touch, speech, gestures, handwriting, and vision – allowing the user to escape more completely into the experience. The idea is not new – engineers have been messing around with voice recognition, eye movement and other biometric inputs for years. But it’s only been recently (with vastly increased computing power, innovations in materials development, software breakthroughs) that we have been able to see the beginnings of the UI revolutions that will create the next generation of immersive computer experiences.

In this issue of Video Voices, James and Victor talk about some great breakthroughs in NUI, and discuss how NUI will impact marketing strategy and development now and in the future.

I recently had the opportunity to implement an app for a client using HTML5.  Since I first began working with HTML5 I was impressed with its rich functionality. One of the aspects I like best about HTML5 development is that I can use the platform to produce a completely familiar reading expe [...] ]]>

I recently had the opportunity to implement an app for a client using HTML5.  Since I first began working with HTML5 I was impressed with its rich functionality. One of the aspects I like best about HTML5 development is that I can use the platform to produce a completely familiar reading experience and thus deliver excellent user experience for the app user and great results for the client.

While there are many reasons why internet marketers need to know about HTML5, I am going to focus for the rest of this article on discussing the features that I – as a developer – find most useful in the HTML5 platform. These are the innovative ways of handling processes and information that could make HTML5 development the big winner over other front-end technologies.

The <Video> Tag 
Embedding videos on a website is now much easier in HTML5 than it was in previous versions of HTML. You don’t need to depend any more on 3rd party plugins like Flash or Sliverlight to embed video or audio files. Now all you have to do is use HTML5′s built in coding to embed your media of choice, which is great because it circumvents all kinds of compatibility issues that come with 3rd party players.

You can customize the default image shown in the video player screen by including poster parameters inside the video tag that point to the image URL.

It’s not just the look of the player you can adjust; Customizing your HTML5 video player functionality is done through a number of DOM methods, properties and events which are available, that allow developers to control the video player using javascript or the javascript framework. Since each browser provides its own different look and feel for the player, we'll have to create our own controls using custom HTML and the DOM methods, properties and events mentioned above If we want to have tighter controls over the user experience and integrate our own design across all browsers.

Currently, there are 3 supported video formats for the <video> element in HTML5: MP4, WebM, and Ogg:

• MP4 = MPEG 4 files with H264 video codec and AAC audio codec
• WebM = WebM files with VP8 video codec and Vorbis audio codec
• Ogg = Ogg files with Theora video codec and Vorbis audio codec

Note: Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari support the <video> element. Internet Explorer 8 and earlier versions do not support the <video> element.

The <Canvas> Tag
We can use a <canvas> element as a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly. A canvas is a rectangle in your page where you can use JavaScript to draw anything you want. This allows web developers to easily create animation, rich interfaces and games.

The canvas tag supplies a space where a rich toolkit of drawing operations can occur – a functionality that may very well revolutionize the Web. If you want to see the canvas tag in action, check out the facebook developers section where a number of HTML5 games have been created that use the canvas tag (with JavaScript support).

Note: The canvas tag is supported by nearly all current browsers. The latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer (IE) 9. (IE8 and earlier don't support canvas.)

Semantic Structure
You no longer have to worry about the element ID’s to produce Semantic structure to the pages. HTML5 elements were created to help better explain the semantic structure of the content in an HTML document.  In HTML5 there is a great selection of new block level elements that help you to create a semantic structure quickly and of course your code becomes more readable and maintainable as a result.

With these new tags you can begin to forget about <div id=”header”> and <div id=”footer”> and start using the <header> and <footer> tags. These new tags will work the same as “div” tags, the difference being that there is less writing, and easier-to-read, more “semantic” code.

HTML5 comes with a few other new elements that are worth note. Tags such as <nav> <aside> <section> <article> <hgroup> <figure> and <figcaption>.

• The <nav> tag specifies the navigation links of our page replacing <div id=”navigation”>.
• The <aside> tag refers to a section of the page that is separated from the main content. It is mostly used for sidebars and some secondary information.
• The <section> tag is used to create different sections within the page and the <article> tag can contain a blog post, news post, comment etc.  A <section> can contain many <article> elements and an <article> element can contain many <section> elements.
• We also have a new container for the headings <h1> to <h6> which is the <hgroup>
• The <figure> and <figcaption> tags allow designers to associate images and other units of content with the main flow of content while keeping them separate

Note: All these tags are supported by nearly all current browsers. The latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer (IE) 9. (IE8 and earlier don't support these tags by default. HTML5Shiv is a JavaScript workaround to enable styling of HTML5 elements in versions of Internet Explorer prior to version 9)

Another notable features introduced in the HTML5 framework is the GeoLocation API which will capture the user’s location and allow developers to use the information  in different services like mapping.

There are updates in the form elements in HTML5 such as new form input types <input type="search"> and <input type="date"> and client-side form validation.  We don’t need to depend on the javascript for the simple validation like required fields. We just need to add an attribute “required” to the input fields and for the default value also we just add an attribute called “placeholder”

<input type="text" id="full_name" name="full_name" placeholder="Jane Doe" required>

We can use regular expressions also to control form field entries.
 
<input type="text" id="inputid" name="inputname" pattern="[A-Za-z0-9]{6}"
   title="field consist of 6 alphanumeric characters.">

This overview could go on and on. Suffice it to say there are hundreds of features in HTML5 that, when combined with CSS3 and Javascript/Javascript frameworks make this a powerful improvement over previous versions. Over all HTML5 is looking to be very promising and with constant development of ideas, will continue to provide developers with new ways to build the fastest and most robust applications.

Breadcrumbs and Site Navigation – the A >…> Z and everything in between.

Most websites employ the use of breadcrumbs in information architecture nowadays to help a site visitor know where [...] ]]>

Breadcrumbs and Site Navigation – the A >…> Z and everything in between.

Most websites employ the use of breadcrumbs in information architecture nowadays to help a site visitor know where he or she is relative to the home page and how they’ve gotten to where they are. I’m not talking about the Fairy Tale type of breadcrumb that birds can eat leaving you lost to get eaten by a evil cannibalistic witch, but breadcrumbs of the digital type. Still don’t know what I mean by breadcrumbs? They happen on lots of large ecommerce or content managed websites and they look something like this:

Home> Services> Website Design> Information Architecture> CMS selection and evaluation

Breadcrumbs in site navigation have become almost ubiquitous. If a site isn’t using breadcrumbs, it’s because of any one of the three reasons below:

1. the website is not very deep and navigation is clear enough without breadcrumbs;
2. there is secondary navigation on pages, but not in the breadcrumb form;
3. the site designer didn’t use breadcrumbs during the initial website design and now no one feels a need to add breadcrumbs; or unbelievably,
4. the site designers and information architects just did not know about breadcrumbs… It can happen. ( If that’s you, take a look at Breadcrumbs In Web Design: Examples And Best Practices article by Jacob Gube.)

Think of breadcrumbs as an important customer service tool. They show users a path of every page they have visited, giving them easy one-click access to prior pages Instead of forcing them to re-trace their steps using the back button. Using breadcrumbs is just one way of serving your online customers better and improving user experience. (for more information on how to improve customer service online check out 5 Tips to Improve Your Company's Customer Service on the Web by Brett Borgeson.)

As with everything, of course, implementing breadcrumbs on your site can have unintended consequences or cause user experience issues on the site.  Here’s an example: what if your site structure is so complex that your string of breadcrumbs exceed the width of the page layout and begin to wrap, thereby pushing other page elements out of their places and hence breaking your beautiful website design.

Following are a bunch of ideas and best practices for implementing breadcrumbs as part of your site navigation while hopefully avoiding pitfalls like the one mentioned above.

Simplify (shorten) Breadcrumb Links
Often times breadcrumbs duplicate the page titles word-for-word, causing width problems. Shortening the link titles is a great way to save space in the layout, but what do you do if you have thousands of pages?  Someone in your marketing, design and development team will have to decide what the new labels for each link will be. How long will it take that team to make a decision and fix the titles? If after thinking about it, shortening all the links is not an option for you, you’ll need another option.

Use Collapsible or Truncated BreadcrumbsThese types of breadcrumbs are friendly from both the site usability and SEO perspectives. The idea is that they will collapse when the length of the string exceed X number of symbols (including spaces). There are several ways how the breadcrumbs can be shortened:

• Replace part of the link text with ellipsis. Keep the first and the last links as the full title; all other titles in between can consist of the first word or two, and the rest will be replaced with an ellipsis. If the link is hovered over, the link will expand; otherwise the full link will be collapsed to keep the breadcrumbs within the space limit. Osram.com uses breadcrumbs with an interaction where hovering over the trimmed link expands, making the last link become shorter.

• Replace the entire link text with ellipsis. The resulting breadcrumbs would include the topmost and lowermost page links, leaving the in between links to be replaced with ellipsis. You can see below this type of structure is being used on the Confluence site. Clicking on the ellipsis in the breadcrumbs reveals all the in between page links, and making the whole string  wrap into two lines.

• Show a fraction of the link text. The Perkin Elmer website has implemented a technique whereby front-end web technology like HTML5 is used to physically layer breadcrumbs one on top of the other.  Hovering over the truncated link triggers a site interaction that reveals the complete link underneath. When the link is expanded, the rest of the links gets pushed to the right. This site only implements the interaction on one link, but sites with deep navigation could certainly implement the layering of breadcrumbs on multiple levels.

Note: When using truncated breadcrumbs in any form, you can improve user experiences by adding tool tips to breadcrumb links so that hovering over them will reveal the full link text to the user without the need to click.

Not every site needs breadcrumbs. After all, I hardly think Hansel and Gretel would have been at risk of getting too lost in their village garden. But, if your site is more than two or three layers deep, breadcrumbs are definitely worth thinking about. At least, it can save your site visitors some frustration about re-finding information they saw on previous pages, and at best breadcrumbs will help with the overall user experience and increase the searchability of your website.  They might even prevent your visitors from being tumbled into a hot oven and eaten by a hungry witch.