Cubeworks blog – digital opinion & insight

We’ve got a number of user experience projects on at the moment and I came across this great cartoon below from StuffThatHappens.com that should serve as an inspiration to us and our clients.

Apple and Google define what the user experience is right now. Apple is all about simplicity and intuitiveness; Google is all about search and the serendipity that comes from their magical algorithms. Apple’s vision is driven by the singular ego of Steve Jobs and the genius of Jonathan Ive; Google’s by the raw power of the masses of data gathered from all our web searches.

What neither of them do is rely on a design by committee, lowest common denominator, let’s copy what our rival is doing approach. Neither should we.

Steve Mason, Senior Developer and hat wearer

Imagine Olympic 100m champion Usain Bolt winning an egg and spoon race: an expected result but an achievement nonetheless. That’s probably a bit how Senior Developer Steve Mason felt as he got himself certified as an EPiServer CMS developer.

Around the Cubeworks office Steve is known as ‘The Legend’ because of his vast knowledge and lightning speed in all things coding. Steve has already played a big part in developing EPiServer sites for Chichester College and Sanyo, so we felt confident he’d ace the test. And he did! Good to get the certificate up on the wall, especially as Cubeworks does more EPiServer sites for clients.

Steve is now in intensive training for the three-legged race.

Six by Tc7

For the uninitiated, Aggers is the nickname of Jonathan Agnew, a stalwart of Test Match Special on the Beeb. As a lover of test cricket and a long-suffering England fan, I have been enjoying following Aggers on Twitter (@aggerscricket) during the current winter series in South Africa. Not only does he keep me updated on the score, but he knows how to banter – a fine twitterer if ever there was one.

But what I particularly like is the instantaneousness that Twitter gives you of something you can’t get elsewhere. Take an Aggers tweet from this morning:

Strauss press conference. “Test won’t last 5 days” http://twitpic.com/xwfkg

Here we have it, the thoughts of the England captain and a photo from the press conference, published ahead of its appearance in other media, even in the age of 24 hour news.

Continue reading “Aggers offers real-time appeal”

As many of you have no doubt already heard by now, in the early hours of this morning Google posted to their blog stating that they are taking “A new approach to China”. It would appear that Google, amongst a significant number of large western companies, have been the victim of a co-ordinated and distributed attack with the aim of gaining access to private communication between Chinese dissidents.

Continue reading “Google vs. China: What’s your view?”

Are you planning a website re-design in 2010? If so you’ll want to show what a forward-looking type you are by leaving the Noughties look behind and embracing the 2010s. Here’s a quick roundup of styles that are proving to be more popular than ever as we emerge blinking into the light of the new decade. These are visual styles that are likely to see a growth during 2010.

Psychedelia Reloaded

Continue reading “Four web design styles for 2010″

How can you display a large amount of information on a web page and still have a good user experience? As web designers this is becoming a common scenario to deal with as users need to handle more and more data: search results, emails, tweets, blog posts. There are some emergent trends that are solving this problem in interesting ways, each with their own advantages. Let’s have a quick look at them.

Continue reading “How to design for infinite data”

The Twitter fail whale by Viying Lu

What has an unsuccessful whale got to do with your business? I’ll explain by the end of this post – all you need to know for now is that you definitely don’t want to be one. Easier said than done though because Twitter, like most social media sites, contains many pitfalls for an unsuspecting organisations to fall into. So to help you out here are our top five things NOT to do on Twitter.

Continue reading “HOW TO: Avoid being a Twitter fail whale”

Photo by Espen Klum

Google Caffeine, the worst kept “top secret” project of 2009 is ready for roll out early next year.  After a flurry of speculation caused by the beta version disappearing, Google blogger Matt Cutts confirmed the news that one of your New Year’s resolutions is going to be “check my position in the Google rankings”. For now though, we wait.

But what are we waiting for, exactly?

Continue reading “Should Google Caffeine give you the jitters?”

Do your users mind scrolling? Does all your content have to appear on one screen? It’s a long-running debate in web design, recently revived by blog chatter on the significance of the “page fold”. But is it relevant to your website in 2009?

Continue reading “What everyone needs to know about the page fold”

Zendesk's happy Buddah logo

The Cubeworks helpdesk service has always had very high client satisfaction levels. I used to work on a helpdesk for a software company about 10 years ago so I know how crucial it is to provide great support. Clients only tend to get in touch when they really need support – it’s not often they phone up the support team for a chat (though they’re most welcome to). I take great satisfaction that we’re good at providing support and it’s important to me that we can maintain this level of service as the company grows.

Increasing demands

In the past two years, the number of support tickets we handle has increased by over 200% due to the number of new projects we’ve taken on. Our development team – who deliver our helpdesk service – has  also increased from four people to eight. Unfortunately, under the increased load, our systems and processes have occasionally creaked at the seams. So it was time to think at how we could improve things.

Continue reading “Supporting clients better with Zendesk”