Digital Strategy with Firecat Studio

Preparing a Digital Feast: Remote Meetings that Engage

Our Firecat First Friday session for May 1 was a good one. With the coronavirus response, most of us are experiencing and leading many more remote meetings - and there are several tripping points, including what we call "the three Ds":

• Distance
• Distraction
• Disruption

My smart facilitator and workshop designer friends Abby Wilkymacky and Kate Hayward combined their talents with me (Susan Price) to create a workshop that demonstrates various ways to keep a remote audience engaged. So to combat those 3 D's, we offered a 3-part First Friday experience:

• Connect to combat Distance. Interact with and connect with your participants. Don't rush this part! We're all doing way too much "content consumption" and if you don't want your meeting to be another "Death by Zoom" (or your platform of choice)  experience, making the meeting a two-way exchange is key.
• Focus to combat Distraction.

Here's the full recording, including the interaction and Q&A. 

 

Brand New WordPress Website for Charger Roofing

New Wordpress website for San Antonio's Charger Roofing 

Firecat experts worked with Charger Roofing owner Jason Speights to provide comprehensive web strategy and a responsive, mobile-friendly, keyword-optimized WordPress website for this new San Antonio service company.

Jason appreciated our approach to create all digital assets in his name, under his control. We recommended WordPress to give Jason and his team a user-friendly, easy to maintain platform.

We were able to leverage the full branding package Jason had commissions for the site design. The Charger Roofing team made sure to take lots of photos of their activities and brand-new wrapped trucks.

Like many small, local businesses, the primary purpose of the website is visibility: generating qualified leads. Search engine optimization was top of mind After getting to know Jason and his team’s needs, we recommended they go with WordPress, so that they will be able to easily update the company website with new offerings and locations as they expand their services. The Firecat team worked with the Charger Roofing team to train them in how to manage their website’s content, ensuring success for years to come.

“We're very happy with the beautiful, full-featured website Firecat delivered in such a short span of time," Speights said. "Going with WordPress has allowed us to quickly add new services as we grow, and my video/SEO vendor was able to get in there and add content easily."

Check out the site at https://charger-roofing.com/. They do both commercial and residential roofing, siding, windows, gutters and more. Drop us a note to tell us what you think!

 

 

Segmenting for Success and other WordCamp 2020 goodness

If you missed WordCamp San Antonio 2020 - you missed a great couple days of interaction, but you did not miss all that great content!

Firecat CEO Susan Price spoke in the Marketing track on Segmenting for Success. You can watch the entire WordCamp San Antonio 2020 by going through the WordCamp San Antonio 2020 website. You'll need to log in and agree to terms. Here's a screenshot for finding Susan's track - it's the third one down in the Marketing Segment.

Check out all the other content! Get better at marketing, at WordPress, at business. 

Let's #BetheRecovery - it's a great time to "sharpen the saw" or improve our own business tactics and processes.

Firecat Sponsors Inaugural Mission UX Conference

At Firecat Studio, we're all about the power of community to make ourselves and our industry smarter and better. So we're happy to be founding sponsors of Mission UX, a new conference series in San Antonio.

Developed by Hector Carrillo and Bob Hotard, the first Mission UX conference will be held Saturday, June 2 at St Mary's University.

Firecat CEO Susan Price will give a talk on intentionally designing client interactions to make a UX career better. San Antonio's Chief Information Officer Craig Hopkins will give a keynote, Rackspace director of usability Laura Mozilla's Michael Verdi

If you're in central Texas, we hope to see you there. Register at Eventbrite.

Worlds Colliding: Sketchnoting and WordCamp

I love the synergy. Michael Clayton made this lovely #Sketchnote of my WordCamp San Antonio #WCSATX talk! If you missed it, I believe the videos will be posted soon, but in the meantime, this is a distillation. Sort of humbling that it took me 45 minutes to say!

 

#sketchnotes from @FirecatSue on "Usability Techniques To Enhance UX" during #wcsatx

A photo posted by Michael Clayton (@profclayton) on Jan 24, 2015 at 3:04pm PST

 

WordCamp San Antonio 2015: Usability Techniques for UX

Here are the slides from Firecat CEO Susan Price's presentation at WordCamp San Antonio 2015 — I'm showing several usability techniques and tools. If you know of new tools and techniques, please let us know; we love that stuff.

Susan provides presentations, training and consultations on Integrated Digital Strategy, Usability and User-Centered Design, Search Engine Optimization, Effective Social Media Marketing, and other digital business topics. 

If you live in San Antonio, join Firecat and other professionals responsible for digital marketing for business at our free Firecat First Friday sessions. 

When Clients Don't Need to See Your UX Deliverables

If you're looking to integrate usability in your digital design process, here's an article from 2011 that is well worth reading. 

I enjoy analyzing user behavior, coming up with marketing strategies, and other creative endeavors. I enjoy it more than my clients enjoy it — but sometimes I fall into the trap of showing clients too much of these activities, instead of doing them (my core competency and passion) and pulling out the important takeaways in a quick summary for the client. Or better yet — just expressing the learnings in the final product.

Jeff Gothelf's Getting Out of the Deliverables Business article on Smashing Magazine makes this case, and in the process, describes "Lean UX" — an analog to Lean/Agile development technology. Check it out.

At Firecat, we're still working out the best mix of deliverables and activities, which the client needs to see and approve, and of course, these vary by project. Some things I've learned while trying to make Lean UX work:

• There's no substitute for prototypes and documentation when using distributed teams, overseas contractors, and so forth. But the client doesn't always need to see them.
• Clients used to a traditional design agency relationship are used to a waterfall approach, but can become fans if you involve them in fun, collaborative sessions.
• It's even more vital to have a budget for emerging ideas and different scope. 
• User testing is so valuable. When clients can't afford it, do as much of it as you can, guerrilla style.

Which deliverables do you share with clients, and why?

Web Site Project Getting Off Track? We're here!

Firecat Studio's highest value to many of our clients comes at the beginning of a big project, when we're thinking through the strategy, getting clear on the goals, and creating clear, measurable requirements and success metrics.

It's the part of the project we love best, and where our experience with a huge variety of businesses and industries comes into play for the biggest ROI. We have wonderful, cutting-edge tools and methods to set a digital project on the right course; ask any of our clients — this is our secret sauce.

But you don't have to wait for a redesign or new project before getting our help. Anytime you want some fresh ideas, a translator between you and your agency or development team, or just a second opinion on your uneasy feeling that your website, email or social media program could be paying off more and moving your business faster, take us up on our free 15 minute consultation to explore what working with Firecat can do for you.

 

Easy Checks: Making Accessibility More Accessible

There are simple things web designers, developers and content specialists can do to make content and web technology accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. 

Why Is Web Accessibility Important?

If you're wondering why web accessibility should be on your radar, consider these reasons.

Reach. People who are blind, deaf or mobility impaired do use the Internet — in such large numbers that it doesn't make business sense to ignore them or shut them out. Shawn Henry opened my eyes to this many years ago; most of us are or will BE "disabled" at some time in our lives; it's a broader market than you probably think. Consider folks who need bigger text on pages (especially those over 40). People trying to hit a button or link on a mobile devices with one hand. Arm, wrist or hand in a cast, trying to use a mouse or keyboard shortcuts. I'm at work and my headphones are in the car, and I need to know what this video is saying without sharing with everyone in my office.

Legal protection. Federal and state codes require compliance with Section 508 or other accessibility guidelines, and the courts have awarded large settlements in suits brought against corporations and other service providers. 

SEO benefit. Making your web presence friendly to the blind and deaf includes these users you may care about: the Googlebot, the Bing Site Indexer and the Yahoo Web Crawler, to name a few.

Clean code saves time and money. Following the W3C's web standards for coding means your code is better structured, more workable, and more portable between platforms and devices.

It's the right thing to do. Even if the above weren't true — c'mon! 

Learning Web Accessibility

Web accessibility isn't brain surgery — but it can be complex, and a bit murky at times. I highly recommend any of the seminars, contests or other events from Knowbility. Some of the WCAG accessibility guidelines are clear cut, and some aren't. Some fixes are easy to implement, and some are a judgment call or require major reworking.

Enter Easy Checks

The W3C recently released Easy Checks — meant to be used by designers and developers to quickly check for "low-hanging fruit" accessibility issues they can address relatively easily, or at least get started evaluating the accessibility of sites and functionality they've created.

Web users with a variety of accessibility aids. Image courtesy Knowbility.org.

Sharron Rush, Firecat Friend and select partner, is the executive director of Knowbility — she led the W3C accessibility team through the creation of Easy Checks. Listen to Whitney Quisenbery's discussion with Sharron about the Easy Checks offering.

User Experience Design - Not Firecats, but Unicorns?

Jared Spool shared his thoughts on the UX/User Centered Design discipline, in this Slideshare, "It's a Great Time to be an Experience Designer.

 

It's A Great Time to be A Designer from Jared Spool

 

If you're not fond of Apple Computer analogies, you may need to skip past the loving paean to that company (especially if you don't enjoy the Genius Bar experience).

Jared makes the point that, unlike Orthopedic Surgeons, for example - while we UX designers can specialize in certain disciplines, it's career limiting to specialize too much - what he describes as a compartmentalist.

This reminds me strongly of why we at Firecat Studio are SO keen to sponsor and attend coworking sessions. We require the breezes and cross-pollination robustness that new people and their new ideas, methods and perspectives bring. It's why we love TED and sponsor TEDxSanAntonio. It's why we think Geekdom is so cool. And it's one reason why we prefer clients who want to collaborate with us in our work.

Spool suggests that UX designers need to be generalists. He and web design educator Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman embarked last year on a web design/UX education effort - the Unicorn Institute. Here's Jared's description of a UX designer:

The User Experience Designer

Our ideal UX Designer has general skills, compared to many of the folks working in UX jobs today. She has a good sense of the visual, understanding sophisticated use of layout, typography, and color. She can organize content and navigation, increasing the design’s findability. She knows how to craft persuasive microcopy and create publication tools for the organization’s content providers. She knows how to craft design flows and envision the microinteractions that deliver great experiences.

Having inhabited and consulted to many UX/web design teams, I know that these unicorns require:

• An interesting balance of left and right brained thinking - cross-hemispheric brain wiring.
• A visceral craving for novelty and the challenges of problem solving.
• Encouragement to continue to challenge and question.
• Ability to see problems from multiple perspectives.

I'm very proud to say we have several "unicorns" already on the Firecat core team. But I'm in full support of there being more educational opportunities to create more of us.

Read more about all this on the Unicorn Institute blog.