Archive for year: 2018

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-select-the-right-copywriting-gig-on-fiverr-for-marketing-copy/

This article was created in partnership with Fiverr. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

In this article, we are going to educate SitePoint readers on how to select the right gig on Fiverr for marketing copy.

As a worldwide verified freelancing platform, Fiverr is a 100% safe and productive site where you can buy and sell services. Boasting one of the fastest customer service departments available today, Fiverr's team immediately responds to questions and inquiries for a seamless customer usability experience.

In this guide you will learn:

The top tips for success when shopping around Fiverr
How to select blogging, email, and editing gigs
How to select a marketing copy gig that is right for you
Pros and cons of cheap versus expensive Fiverr writers

The Top Tips for Success When Shopping Around Fiverr

We are going to go over how to select the right gig every time when shopping on Fiverr.

/1. Be realistic about your expectations regarding the price you need to pay for a required writing job. Quality work costs more, even at Fiverr. Although it's still more affordable than any other freelancing marketplace, you're not going to get published on Forbes, or publish a high-quality e-book with custom illustrations, if you don't invest several hundred dollars.

Think of Fiverr as your go-to marketplace where you can always find the most affordable deals on writing services and more. Projects range from short blog post editing that will cost you only a few bucks, to top quality e-book writing services that will cost you several hundred dollars.

/2. Know how to clearly communicate. A good and bad point of Fiverr is that it's a global marketplace with every nationality selling and buying services. That means you need to be able to clearly articulate what it is that you want, in basic English, without the complexities.

If you can't clearly explain what it is that you need, do not try and outsource the project. That's a sign that you need to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate what it is that you need, first and foremost. When approaching a freelancer, you need to have an adept understanding of the task at hand, and the details required to make it happen.

It's ok to be a pain – the writers expect it. Now is the time to be safe, rather than sorry, and get all the information out in the open. It's up to the writer if they want to take on the task or not.

Be comprehensive.

Selecting Blogging, Emailing, and Editing Gigs

Now that you're ready to address your marketing copy, first understand that there are a variety of gigs out there related to content marketing. You can work on a press release, e-mail copy, newsletter, blog, product description, website page, and the list goes on.

For the sake of this piece, we're going to look at the 3 most important marketing copy gigs for our business: blogging, emailing, and editing & proofreading.

1. Blog writing gigs

Blogs are applicable for B2C, B2B, and personal posts, providing brands with an easy way to communicate a message, announcement, or feature to their followers. You want to find a writer that matches your personal style.

Within basic gigs, you can reasonably expect a Fiverr writer to provide 100-300 word blog posts, with titles and references.

When communicating with these writers regarding your blog, we recommend you use the following steps to ensure they have everything they need to write an awesome blog for you:

Your Blog URL: Firstly, send the writer your blog URL. They need to be able to familiarize themselves with your blog tone. Your blog might be informal with a little humor, or it could be incredibly serious and fact-based. Your ghostwriter will know how to take on your tone, but they need the right information first to make it happen.

If you don't have an existing blog, do your best to find at least 1-2 links to other blogs that have the tone you want. Your blog writer is not a mind-reader, and needs some kind of starting point in understanding your overall goal. The more examples you can provide them, the better.

Your Topic: Although blog writers can come up with completely original topics just based on your industry, if you do have a topic in mind, now is the time to communicate it to them (and not after the blog has been written). Let's say you own a social media management company. There is plenty to write on, but where do you want them to begin? Are you looking for more conversions regarding your SEO service? Tell the blog writer you want a blog on the benefits of SEO with a call-to-action at the end pushing the reader to sign up for your SEO services.

Although some of this might seem self-explanatory, be sure to articulate exactly what topic you want if that's your end goal. If not, you can let the blog writer do their thing.

Any Secret Specifications: When we find reliable Fiverr providers, it can be easy to assume they know how to do everything. Ghostwriters can select topics, research them, and write amazing marketing copy for your business. However, they can’t know that your company is only six months old and doesn’t actually provide SEO services (but will in two months). These secret specifications need to be communicated from the onset. It's not fair to surprise them after the entire blog has been crafted.

2. Email copy gigs

Email copy gigs on Fiverr will help you draft one or multiple emails for luring customers and patrons to your website.

Within the basic gigs, providers on Fiverr will vet your platform and draft up one or two emails that you can send to your subscriber list.

If you explore gig add-ons, email writers can write a series of emails, with release dates, so you continue to string on your leads.

3. Editing & proofreading gigs

A variety of editors are able to provide rewrites, proofing for grammar, syntax, spelling, and capitalization, as well as feedback on the copy.

Within the basic gigs, editors will proofread up to 1k or 2k words on your behalf, tracking their changes in a Word document. You can choose to accept or reject the changes, as well as request that a tracked changes and accepted changes document is provided at the end of the order.

How to Select a Marketing Copy Gig That Is Right for You

Now that we've explored the types of marketing copy gigs available to you on Fiverr, we're going to look at 5 steps for selecting the right marketing copy gig. There are many writers and editors available to you through the site, so where do you begin? How do you weed out the faulty providers? Here are our recommendations.

1. Reviews

As a review-based platform, you want to use Fiverr's publicly stated reviews to your advantage. If a gig only has 2 reviews, and one of them is not 5 stars, chances are you're not going to gamble. But if you see a gig with 300 reviews and a 5 star average, you know you're working with a serious provider.

The post How to Select the Right Copywriting Gig on Fiverr for Marketing Copy appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/gZMcIB_Bf74/the-future-of-design-ar-will-be-bigger-than-the-internet

Soon, a new era of experimental design and design thinking will be upon us. We’ll have entirely augmented experiences everywhere we walk, and voice design is the next big horizon for creatives. 

They’re just two predictions into the future of design shared by Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance, and Adobe's chief product officer and executive vice president of Creative Cloud. 

Belsky took to the stage in London at an exclusive Adobe event earlier this summer to talk through the challenges and opportunities presented by emerging technologies – and to forecast the future for designers.

Scott Belsky at Adobe’s Future of Design event in London

As the future becomes increasingly commoditised, he said, creativity – and the role of user experience designers, particularly – will become increasingly important. 

"Companies are putting designers at the head of the table," he explained. "The user’s experience of technology these days is even more important than the tech itself. The UI is what distinguishes a product; a company. That’s one reason why designers are being employed across industries.”

Get 15% off Adobe Creative Cloud with our exclusive offer

In fact, when Adobe spoke to hiring managers at a range of top companies, 87 per cent of them said that UX designers are some of their most critical hires right now. 

So aside from a bright future for UX designers, what else is next for design? Here are five predictions Belsky made at the event – followed by an exclusive conversation with Creative Bloq, in which he explores the biggest new challenges and opportunities designers should prepare for.

Jump straight to the Scott Belsky interview
01. Augmented reality

We’ll soon have entirely augmented experiences everywhere we walk. AR will be as critical as the web,” Belsky predicted, adding that this is why Adobe has developed Project Aero, a powerful new augmented reality tool that makes it easier for designers and developers to create immersive content, and bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds. More on that below.

02. Voice design

“It’s the simplest interface of all, so we need to be able to design for it,” he said. Voice design tools are being brought into Adobe XD because we’re moving into a voice-driven world (think: Amazon Echo and Google Home) – and it’s raising many questions for designers, not least ethical ones.  

03. Artificial intelligence

Labour will become increasingly automated, with AI and machine learning helping creatives work smarter and faster by taking on repetitive tasks. “AI is a vertical of creativity,” said Belsky. “Think of it as a creative assistant.” 

04. Connected creativity

New tools like Adobe Capture – which turns photos on your phone or tablet into creative assets – will continue to deliver on the creative freedom promised by Creative Cloud in increasingly unique ways. “There’s an idea that in some ways we’re still chained to desktop – we expect to do our professional work there,” he said. “But that’s not where creativity happens.”

05. Ethics in design

What are our responsibilities for the end customer experience? What is the responsibility of the designer in preserving a consumer choice? When using visual search, such as Google, you're presented with a lot of options. Using a voice interface, this might not be the case – so who chooses which option you get, and how can you ensure the consumer’s best interests are served? Ethical questions have always been important, but in this new age of design they're even more so.

New challenges and opportunities for designers

Project Aero: immersive media is poised to become the next disruptive platform. Welcome to the first wave of mainstream AR

So will AR really be bigger than the web? What sorts of questions is voice design raising? And what skills will designers need to meet the future of design head-on? We caught up with Belsky after the event to find out more…

What are the biggest opportunities of AR for designers?

Scott Belsky: I believe AR will do almost everything the web does for us, but in the context of our physical world, rather than on a screen. It will change the way we do everything from finding our way around cities, to reviewing the menu in restaurants, to dating, to fixing appliances in our homes. 

AR will do almost everything the web does for us, but in the context of our physical world, rather than on a screen. It will change the way we do everything.

Scott Belsky

Augmented Reality will enrich these experiences in ways we can barely imagine. However, none of this is possible without designers creating compelling three-dimensional interactive content and being able to collaborate with developers across platforms. 

AR and voice have the greatest potential to disrupt the way we experience the world. Every business group across Adobe is thinking about and building for AR because we strongly believe that it’s a transformative medium. AR is at the intersection of our physical and digital worlds, and requires a fundamentally different paradigm for interaction and design beyond the traditional screen experience. Designers will have the opportunity to literally design a new reality, and that’s going to be fun and challenging. 

How soon will AR be everywhere?

SB: We’re at the beginning of a journey with augmented reality. We believe that Project Aero is breaking new ground, with the goal of simplifying the development of AR content, delivering an even more powerful medium for storytelling for artists and designers around the world. Through our collaboration with Apple, Pixar and other partners, Project Aero will give creative professionals the ability to create more authentic experiences. 

What’s compelling is the quality and depth of the imagery, which makes the experience real and even more vivid. The industry is evolving at a rapid pace and there will be commercial and consumer demand for these types of experiences.

We see the potential of AR experiences to enable new forms of creative expression, spawn new customer experiences, and ignite new business models that we can’t even imagine today. We envision immersive media ultimately becoming ubiquitous in everyday life.  We’ll have a new interface through which we interact with a range of retail, news, search and other common applications.

What are the biggest challenges of AR for designers? How will Project Aero help?

SB: Most designers I speak with are excited about AR, but have no idea where to get started designing immersive experiences and how to work with developers to make them a reality. 

Our challenge is to help designers work with the tools they know and love, like Photoshop or Adobe XD for screen design, and then import their work to new tools like Adobe Dimension to make their creations 3D. And then, with Project Aero, designers will be able to make their creations interactive and easily 'published' to locations in augmented reality.  

For the first time, designers will be able to lay out and manipulate designs in physical spaces with a ‘what you see is what you get’ tool, making AR creation more fluid and intuitive. What’s more, delivering these immersive experiences to audiences on mobile devices will become faster, easier and safer. 

How can designers get ahead in voice design?

SB: Design is becoming more immersive and voice has become more important. Increasing numbers of people use a voice interface to order dinner, choose music, set reminders, and so many other tasks, thanks in large part to consumer products like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. 

Smart speakers will be installed in more than 70 million U.S. households by 2022, according to a Juniper Research report, and consumers have high expectations of voice technology because they’re used to naturally interacting and talking to people. For designers, creating voice user interface (VUI) experiences requires new skills that transcend the keyboard, mouse and screen.

For designers to be successful in the future, they’ll need to know how to create a voice interface that is efficient and intuitive.

Scott Belsky

For designers to be successful in the future, they’ll need to know how to create a voice interface that is efficient and intuitive. Our goal is to help designers succeed in this medium and in the broader world of immersive and interaction design. That’s one of the reasons we’ve invested so heavily in Adobe XD as an experience design platform that can adapt to new modalities over time.  

Adobe XD brings prototyping and design together, which has unlocked new capabilities including allowing designers to easily switch from wireframes to prototypes and use tools such as After Effects to add deeper animations to their UX/UI designs. Unfortunately, I can’t share more now, but you’ll see a massive amount of innovation from us as it relates to XD in the coming months. 

What are the biggest hurdles posed by voice design? 

SB: As I mentioned, there has been a tremendous growth in voice-enabled devices. For designers, creating VUI experiences requires new skills since you cannot simply apply the same design guidelines to VUI, as you would a graphical app or web experience. Designers must have a deep understanding of human communication and natural conversation flow to design for VUIs.

Additionally, it requires a mindset shift to design for this medium. VUIs need to contain the right amount of information to meet users’ expectations and provide users with information on what they can do with the technology. For example, proactive prompting along the lines of, 'What can I help you with today?' might help a user get started. Without visual guidance, it’s easy for the user to get lost.

There are, of course, ethical considerations when it comes to VUI design too. For example, designers will need to carefully consider how often the technology is listening or recording, and clearly spell that out for the user. Companies and their designers will need to ensure privacy is baked into the product from the start. 

Another important issue in voice is the default settings. When you ask your voice assistant to order flowers, what service does it default to using? Making tasks easy is great for consumers, but the design will have to make it transparent how those tasks are happening and give users the option of changing the defaults so they can personalise the experience.

Related articles:

How to future-proof yourself as a designer10 huge graphic design trends to know for 2018The ultimate guide to design trends

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/gXjVXQFPctg/ux-for-emerging-experiences

As the web landscape changes so does user experience and to stay competitive you need to embrace the new. One thing that doesn't change is the user. If they have a poor user experience they will simply look elsewhere. So what are the emerging experiences that you need to consider today?

The theory of UX

These are the seven key themes that you should be designing for: inclusivity and accessibility, immersion, trust and transparency, coherence, conversation, collaboration and efficiency. Alongside these key themes we reveal the tools that you will need to ensure design success.

Design for inclusivity

Sometimes referred to as 'Universal Design', inclusive design considers as many people's needs and abilities as possible, instead of a 'one size fits all' approach to the experience.

As designers it can be easy to unwittingly design for those that are just like us, or prioritise these considerations due to tight budgets or deadlines. As designers we should be aiming to include people with varying ranges of cognitive or physical disability, rather than exclude them. Designers should do this by removing the barriers that create extra effort and separation, enabling the end user of your product or service to have the confidence to participate equally, and without support. 

Tech For Good also has a podcast

Over the next year, expect to see inclusive and ethical design become an expected part of the UX Design process. Fortunately, there are plenty of other people getting involved in the digital community, with social movements such as The A11Y Project, AXSChat and Tech For Good gathering rapid momentum over the past 12 months. These groups provide a supportive space for designers to learn more about the inclusive design process and the problems that different people face when using technology. 

Inclusive design shouldn’t be confused with accessible design.

Inclusive design shouldn't be confused with accessible design. Products and services are usually made accessible as an afterthought; for example, a watch might be retrospectively made accessible for blind people by including braille numbering on top of the watch face. This modification to a device designed for those with sight may solve one technical problem, but introduce many more issues for those that are blind. Inclusive design seeks to fundamentally redesign a product from scratch, removing barriers from the start. Inclusive design is proactive, not reactive.

When starting any new project, one of the most important questions UX designers should ask themselves at all stages of the design process is, 'Who will this design exclude?'

Top tools
Funkify Disability Simulator
Funkify is an extension for Chrome that helps you experience the web and interfaces through the eyes of users with different abilities and disabilities. Funkify is created by a team of usability and accessibility experts in Sweden. Stark
The colour-blind simulator and contrast checker for Sketch. Simulate the various forms of colour-blindness by quickly previewing your Sketch designs and make adjustments as needed.Contrast
A macOS app that provides access to WCAG colour contrast ratios. The entire app UI updates instantly when picking colours, making it easy to get the colour contrast information you need to make informed decisions about the colour of your text.
Design for immersion

Traditionally, UX designers had a clear separation of realities to design for: real life, and the experience delivered on screen by the person's device. Now the lines have been well and truly blurred with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) entering into mainstream use. It's not enough to design for screens, pages and offline touchpoints anymore, now the concept of multiple dimensions opens up a plethora of ways to enhance the experience. 

A whole host of interactions can be incorporated into designs, such as picking up, pinching, pushing and pulling, facial expressions, and even air tapping for Microsoft's HoloLens. To get them to do this, you must also think about the cues you will give users that are used to interacting with flat screens, how will you encourage them to look around in the space? 

Microsoft HoloLens brings holograms into the real world

With new immersive technologies you can now use audio to grab attention, or display elements just off screen to prompt them to move left and right. This new technology also gives you the opportunity to play around with objects in a 3D space, so it's important that designers become comfortable in how shadow and light can be used to create the illusion of depth and mass for objects in the interface.

Designers also need to be conscious of the right context to use these interactions. As a user interacting with an Augmented Reality app whilst driving would be entirely inappropriate, and it might be that a voice interaction is more suitable in this type of scenario. Thorough research and testing is required of the UX practitioner to find and understand these contexts and user goals.

Overall, expect the prevalence of AR and VR to increase rapidly over the next few years as businesses and organisations find ways for this technology to fit their business models.

Top tools
A-Frame
A-Frame is a web framework for building VR experiences. Originally developed by Mozilla, it is an independent open source project. A-Frame is HTML, making it simple to get started.Microsoft HoloLens
Microsoft's 'mixed-reality' product, HoloLens, is the first self-contained, holographic computer, enabling you to engage with your digital content and interact with holograms in the world around you.
Design for collaboration

As UX Designer and its many permutations become more ubiquitous as a role, teams are growing and they have a bigger seat at the table. As a result, more business stakeholders are interested in knowing – or even being involved – in what you're doing. 

The UX role has now matured, and there are plenty of online communities, tools, conferences, and books aimed specifically for the UX designer. To complete the perfect storm, the digital marketplace is also saturated with multiple offerings for a single type of product, and organisations are more willing to invest the time in creating unique user experiences to make them stand out in a fiercely competitive crowd. Suddenly, UX practitioners find they not only have a voice, but are influential in navigating a product or service to market. 

Use RealtimeBoard to design journey maps, personas and other planning canvases

Superior soft skills are the secret weapon behind superior UX teams. This includes communication, listening, empathy, workshop facilitation, teamwork and storytelling. These provide the foundation that all other deliverables are based on. How do you know if the prototype you are testing will meet a user need if you have not listened properly in the research phase of the project? 

These skills are not an innate talent and need to be practised just like any other skill. Not only that, but developing your soft skills as a team enables you all to communicate properly with one another, forming a common strategy so you can all aim for the same goal. There are many good UX practitioners, but great ones have exceptional soft skills to help them do their job.

Collaborating with the customer or client is also essential to a smooth-running project. There are many tools such as Marvel, InVision and Axure that will enable you to quickly prototype up your work to show them the 'Promised Land', instead of sending emails back and forth you can now make your solutions come alive. The benefit of this approach is increased buy-in from clients and customers, and frictionless collaboration.

Some of the biggest obstacles to collaboration come from people not understanding what UX activities entail.

Some of the biggest obstacles to collaboration on a project can come from other business stakeholders and departments not understanding what UX activities entail. The solution here is to be as transparent and as open as possible. As a team you can pique people's interest by creating exciting areas of wall space in high traffic areas where deliverables such as personas, journey maps and wireframes can be displayed to spark conversations between different people within the business.

Even the rise of remote working and distributed teams is a waning threat to any UX team. There's a tool for every stage of the process, and you don't even need to be in the same room as each other. Project planning and management can be organised through tools such as Slack or Flock or Asana. Visual deliverables can be taken care of using collaborative whiteboards such as RealtimeBoard. Teams can work simultaneously to create fully fledged prototypes using one of the new generation of tools like Figma or InVision.

Top tools
Figma
Figma is a browser-based design tool that makes it easier for teams to create software. Present and prototype in the same tool as you design. Version control your team designs.Float
Float enables you to visualise your team's project assignments, overtime and time off in one place. Collaborate on project plans and resolve conflicts with real-time drag-and-drop scheduling.Loop11
Loop11 is integrated with JustInMind.com and is used to create prototypes that can then be used to run online usability tests, with the results shown in detailed reports and in-test videos. 
Design for trust

Trust is a human emotion that can be designed for, and can make or break the user's experience, but why is it so hard? Well, there's a lot out there to put off even the most savvy digital user, with dark UX patterns, fake news and clickbait rife. Emerging technologies such as blockchain and self-driving vehicles will put the majority of UX designers' skills to the test. 

In recent years trust has shifted from being controlled from the top-down by the business or organisation, to being collectively controlled by users via social media about how trustworthy (or untrustworthy) their experiences with a brand have been. It's fair to say that companies are not in control of this aspect of how they are viewed anymore, and so it's imperative that a brand's actions speak louder than its words. 

To gain the trust of the user, the experience must become as transparent as possible, with businesses being open about their motives, beliefs and activities. Designers can enable that relationship by not hiding away this information from the user, removing any anxieties they may have.

UserTesting.com is a great online tool for unmoderated testing

When a customer takes a leap of faith and invests their time, and possibly their money in your product or service, you suddenly have a social responsibility to make good on that relationship. So despite all that, how can trust be designed for? Thankfully there are a few techniques UX designers can use to instil confidence in the end user throughout their journey.

We all judge a book by its cover, and it's also well known that a user is more likely to trust a site that is more aesthetically pleasing. This is called the aesthetic-usability effect, and is described as us perceiving beautiful things as easier to use over ugly ones (even if that is not the case). Included in the look and feel of the site aesthetic should be the tone of voice and type of imagery that are used to convey a professional, reliable impression of the business or organisation. 

Of course, the ultimate indicator of trust should always be in the user testing results, along with observations of the user's reactions to sites. Subjective measures like trust can also be captured at the end of tests. Moderated user testing will always provide much greater insights, but there are tools online to run unmoderated tests such as UserTesting.com.

Top tools
Dark Patterns
Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn't mean to. The purpose of the Dark Pattern Library site is to spread awareness and to document the companies that use such techniques.Government Research Consent Guidelines
The UK government website contains an entire manual on service design and the consent forms you need signed to ensure you can be trusted with a person's data gathered during user research.
Design for coherence

With more and more touchpoints emerging, organisations are in danger of their user's journey becoming so heavily fragmented that it could become an incoherent mess. To add to the omnichannel experience there are now chatbots and other voice interfaces to consider in the user's journey, so the experiences and conversations people have with them need carefully designing.

Planning is key, taking a 'helicopter view' of the entire user's journey with the business. This should include doing as much user research as possible to make sure the touchpoints you design align with their goals, and what they're doing in real life. Turning this research into user journey maps and personas will help guide designers on which touchpoints should be used for different audiences. Many tools exist for supporting these activities; Smaply caters for all of the above, and Xtensio can be used to create simple personas and diagrams, but there are also more traditional offline tools such as Axure that you can use to get the job done. 

With MockFlow you can plan and create better user interfaces

It's also important to consider which touchpoints shouldn't be designed for, especially if it is discovered during the research that it would be inappropriate to use certain methods to contact certain audiences. For example, on a digital experience dealing with a homeless person registering for support services, would it be appropriate to ask for an address? 

Designing a coherent experience means not just designing for screens and apps anymore, but every means of contact the customer has with that organisation, so that a unified message can be delivered, regardless of the type of touchpoint. It's imperative that this key message is decided on from the start. The entire UX team should know from research what message to deliver. 

It's a common belief that the more material you present to the user, the greater chance that some of it will be remembered. It's the old adage of throwing a load of mud in the hope some will stick, but this isn't true. Your audience will end up confused about the message you are trying to deliver.

Top tools
Axure
Create simple click-through diagrams or highly functional, rich prototypes with conditional logic, dynamic content, animations, math functions, and data-driven interactions. Use Axure Share to upload content to share with your team.Asana
Asana is an online project management tool, designed to help teams track their work. Asana gives you everything you need to stay in sync, hit deadlines, and reach your goals.MockFlow
MockFlow provides a full solution for design teams, which includes wireframing, sitemaps, UI spec systems, design workflow and more. Enables you to plan and create better user interfaces together within a single suite.Storyboard That
Storyboards are a fun and engaging way to relay research findings and user journeys to stakeholders. Use the extensive image library and flexible templates to create storyboards of this information.Smaply
This website has an online editor which enables you to integrate basic service design tools into your daily work, such as user journey maps, stakeholder maps and personas. Your designs can be downloaded as PDFs and image files.
Design for efficiency

With Kaktus you can implement version control without having to learn a new set of tools

As UX teams grow, there are smarter ways of managing the multitude of design assets created by a team. No more naming your work 'homepage_wireframe_finalFinal14.pdf', or taking it in turns to work on the same document in your team. Thankfully now there are tools aimed specifically at design teams to version control design work. The majority are based on Git, the same technology used by developers to manage their application code.

There are so many advantages to using this sort of software to manage your designs. Not only can multiple designers work on the same project at the same time, but you can roll back to a previous version if needed.  Although you will only see the current version of a file, a full version history is kept and reviewing the changes made between versions of a file are even possible. These features of version control mean problems like losing work when a file is accidentally overwritten, or two people decide to make changes to the same thing are now a thing of the past.

Once changes are made, many tools let you communicate those changes to the team. This is a step forward in terms of productivity and efficiency, enabling projects to be completed as quickly as possible. Lots of the larger web-based design tools like Figma and UXPin provide this as part of the subscription, but there are standalone tools like Kaktus, Abstract and Folio for Mac.

Design for conversation

The rise of chatbots and other conversational devices such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home has been all pervasive over the past few years, and many companies are still trying to work out where this new technology can be inserted into their strategy with customers. But where does traditional experience design fit in, especially when there will be no physical interface to design? This is a new frontier for service design, with endless possibilities for designing intuitive and human-centred experiences that people love.

Conversations between human beings are intricate, complex and heavily nuanced. Not to mention the cultural and semantic differences that are commonly observed in humans across the world. How do you anticipate and plan for the vast array of possible questions and reactions a human being might have? Designers will need to spend time designing all the possible flows and outcomes these conversations might take. And the more human the experience can be the better, but how can you make a machine appear human? How do you build a relationship with a machine?  These are questions the UX designer must consider to create an effective outcome for the end user.

Conversational interfaces bring a whole new set of challenges with them

Understanding the context that your designs will be used in is also important, so rigorous and in-depth research is essential. Would your target audience use a voice interface walking down the street? Would it be usable if it was a noisy street? All this can be answered by spending time understanding your users and capturing what their goals are.

Another essential part of the UX practitioner's role will be in planning for and testing these conversational interfaces. This will be very different to traditional testing of apps and sites, and will require much more rigorous planning of scripts and testing sessions. 

There are a few tools for designing the proposed chatbot conversations and also the UI, such as BotPreview and Botsociety, which then enable you to go and test these conversations out on real people before you release your chatbot or conversational UI. As a result of this frenzied focus given to this emerging technology, expect to see new roles created as offshoots of the standard UX Designer and – relatively new – UX Writer titles, such as 'Conversational Designer' (catering for research, testing, behaviours and personality of the interface) and 'Conversational Strategist' (a niche role dedicated to designing the flows and logic of the conversations).

Top tools
BotPreview
Sketch and design your own chatbot interactions using the BotPreview online editor and share them or export as static HTML or MP4/GIF video, without writing a single line of code.Botsociety
Design voice and chat interfaces using the online web editor by quickly building a high-fidelity preview of your next chatbot or voice assistant. Botsociety takes care of the appearance, the platform limitations, the preview, the export and the user testing for you.Botmock
Botmock uses a drag-and-drop editor with templates to build prototypes of conversational design. Map out the customer's journey, and create a live preview that can be exported to GIF and video.Bots UI Kit for Sketch
A simple and fully customisable Sketch UI kit to help you design and showcase your Facebook Messenger Bots. All elements are turned into new branded Sketch symbols, so prototyping has never been easier.Walkie
This tool is especially for Slack users to help design slack bot dialogues. It provides an easy way to write and test bot dialogues, which include buttons and also attachments.

This article was originally published in issue 274 of creative web design magazine Web Designer. Buy issue 274 here or subscribe to Web Designer here.

Related articles:

New skills in UX designWhat are the main barriers to good UX today?Why graphic designers need to master UX

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/5-great-html5-video-players/

There has been an increasing demand for creators to develop their own custom video platform which they can use to advance their own advertising, marketing or branding goals. Although YouTube and other similar platforms are generally more promising, hosting videos on your own and using a video player of your choice offers more control over how your videos are used.

Irrespective of whether you are a YouTube video creator or social media influencer, we've compiled a list of 5 of the greatest HTML5 video players. This list has been compiled after taking into consideration a few important needs, such as:

Fast and responsive
Easy to install and use
Compatibility quotient across browsers
Robust and all round playlist options
Ability to include an advertisement at various stages of the video – before, during or after
Ability to integrate self-hosted videos with those from channels like YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, etc.

Now that we have an idea what to look for, here is a list of the top 5 HTML5 Video Players.

VideoJS

VideoJS, an open source HTML5 video player is built using JavaScript and CSS. It's an HTML5 video player with optional support for Flash. Having Flash as a fallback option is especially helpful when you're using it on browsers that do not support HTML5. It can extend its support to Vimeo and YouTube.

Launched in the year 2010, VideoJS currently serves more than 400,000 websites across the internet. VideoJS is equally compatible on mobile devices as well as desktops.

Some of the top features of VideoJS include:

Plugin Support: VideoJS supports multiple plugins like analytics, advertising, playlists as well as support for advanced formats such as HLS and DASH. A full list of supported plugins can be found VideoJS plugin page.
Skinning: Everything about VideoJS is customizable. You can easily customize the way it looks by editing the CSS style. Steve Heffernan has a codepen demo for customizing VideoJS skin that should help you get started.
Ready adaptability to various plugins makes this player much more useful. Some sample plugins include:

Analytics: Ability to track Google Analytics events from the VideoJS player
Brand: You can add the logo of your brand to the player
Playlist: Support for playlists
Chromecast: Ability to cast a video to a device using a Chromecast device

JW Player

JW Player has been around for ages and was one of the most popular Flash video players for the web. Later on, it extended its support for HTML5 video playback. JW Player is completely customizable, has a responsive HTML5 video and has a large variety of features right from analytics support to accessibility and full HTML5 video controls.

It has perhaps the best website video player with its wide array of video supported solutions. JW player also works very well as an HTML5 video player for WordPress websites. It can also be used as an alternate option for YouTube's video player. Interestingly, before Google purchased YouTube, the original YouTube video player was based on JW Player.

One of the key reasons that the JW Player is above its peers in this category because of the sheer amount of features it provides via a number of different add-ons. These can range from advertising partnerships to closed captions as well as popular social networking tools.

As mentioned earlier, the player is completely customizable and supports a number of custom user-defined themes. It also comes with an integrated API. It has a number of different plugins to support the more popular CMSs, which makes integration fairly simple.

Kaltura HTML5 Video Player

Kaltura Player is a free-to-use, open source HTML5 video player that can be used to create multiple and custom inter-browser and inter-device skins that can match or complement the design of your website. The Kaltura player comes with numerous player templates to choose from.

Some of the key features include:

Robust, all-round Performance
Multi-platform support
Advertising & Analytics: It supports most ad formats including VAST v. 3.0 as well as integrated plugins that can be used across a wide range of video ad networks. These include Google's Doubleclick Ad Platform, FreeWheel, Eye Wonder, Ad Tech, Tremor Video, AdapTV and many more.

Flowplayer

Flowplayer is an extremely simple video player for creators who wish to include video playback on their websites. Integrating and the markup process for Flowplayer is decidedly straightforward, which is one of its major benefits.

At the outset, it is important to note that Flowplayer is primarily aimed at those creators who host video files independently. In case creators are using a streaming service such as Vimeo or YouTube, both streaming services provide code that can be used to embed the player itself onto the website or landing page.

Flowplayer is 100% customizable as well as skinnable and comes with support for including subtitles, modifying the playback speed, including video analytics and monetization opportunities.

The post 5 Great HTML5 Video Players appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/07/popular-design-news-of-the-week-july-23-2018-july-29-2018/

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

The Future of Mobile Web? It’s all About Progressive Web Apps

Finally… Capture your Screen Without all that Mess on your Desktop

Google Video Shows All-white Redesigns for Gmail, Google Photos, and More

Forget About your Logo. Nobody Cares.

Fresh Fonts Freshen up your Font News

Your Coworker with the Annoying Sit-stand Desk May Be Onto Something

20 White Texture Background Graphics

What if People were Paid for their Data?

We’re Underestimating the Mind-warping Potential of Fake Video

5 Ways to Take Better Control of your WordPress Website

Keyframes: A Community for Animators

Designers Talk: What We Didn’t Expect

Hacking User Perception to Make your Websites and Apps Feel Faster

Site Design: Emergence

Queer UX Experience

How to Give Project Estimates—and When not to Estimate at all

Timeqube – Beautiful Timer that Helps Waste Less Time in Meetings

8 Logo Design Cliches You Should Avoid

One Year After Massive Takedowns, Dark Web Marketplaces are Thriving

User Research: Is More the Merrier?

Netflix is Launching a New TV Interface Starting Today

How We Improved Our Landing Page Conversion Rate by 500%

Why Logo Placement is Essential to your Company Website

7 Design Lessons from Silicon Valley’s Most Important Failure

Adobe Shares Pantone’s Summer Trending Colours

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

Add Realistic Chalk and Sketch Lettering Effects with Sketch’it – only $5!

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