Tips & Trends

Nam-ho Park often, blogs, speaks, and presents on mobile strategy. The Nonprofit Technology Network originally published this post online at NTEN.org and it is cross posted below with permission. 

Distraction is a basic fact of mobile that you have to work with. Mobile apps or websites need to be a small focused subset of the content or service you would normally offer on your full website.

New years invite new prognostication. In this post, 12 of our staff experts make predictions about what will gain momentum, inspire, or catch fire in 2012. Have better ideas? Tweet @ForumOne using the hashtag #12in2012.

Voting has begun to bring the Texas Content Massacre Panel to the 2012 SXSW Interactive Festival.

Are you as excited about the 2012 SXSW Interactive Festival as we are? We’ve already started counting down the days!

The dust has settled from SXSW 2011. I’ve had a chance to catch up on email, get over the conference crud I brought back, and my hearing in my right ear is slowly returning, so I thought now would be a good time to share some of the things that I learned at SXSW with you.

I’m on the plane to Austin for the “South by Southwest” (SXSW) interactive technology conference and getting hungry already – thanks to the SXSW iPad app! This Interactive event attracts thousands of people for a five day event about digital & interactive technologies and creative ways to use them.  It’s big – about ten concurrent sessions running throughout the day – about social change, online marketing, gaming, design, the future of journalism, online business strategies and more.

Originally posted on Geek Dad

At An Event Apart earlier this year, I saw many examples of CSS3 animations and transitions involving manipulating images and objects over time in exciting ways. Recently I was working on a site and saw an opportunity to possibly include a subtle CSS3 transition in the site’s primary navigation. I’d seen size, movement, and rotation animated before, but I’d never seen an exact demonstration of the effect I was looking for, which was a simple dissolve between two images.

 In the interactive world everyone has their own opinion and ideas on what makes a pleasant, effective user experience. Usually that leads to the exclusion of the real question, “what do users want /need?” When done correctly, A/B Testing can settle the argument, giving the audience an indirect voice.

We see it all over the Web: a beautifully designed site, but where’s the content? Many sites take an “If you build it, they will come” attitude towards content, as if it will magically appear. Social media sites can get away with that, because they don’t create their own content in the first place. But unless you are Facebook, creating your content is one of the most important success factors. Planning how that content gets created can become the cornerstone of your website strategy.

Those of us who sell strategy services for a living tend to rely on the desire for measured approaches to big problems. This taps into deep-seated wisdom about how to manage large, complex situations: plan first, then execute. Heck, our language is littered with support for this view. "Look before you leap" is a cherished nugget. "His approach is 'ready, fire, aim'" is used as a criticism, as is "flying by the seat of one's pants." There is a deep desire to instill deliberation in the face of big efforts.