West Virginia’s Sugar Grove naval base was closing, and the state had two major options of what to turn the land into next—another state prison or a career college for youth who age out of foster care. KVC Health Systems approached us to help them quickly rally support and fight for the latter.
We recently had the pleasure of planning and implementing a whole year’s worth of marketing for Stuppy Greenhouse, a Kansas City-based greenhouse and aquaponics system designer and manufacturer who develops solutions for commercial growers and educators across the country.
Customer turnover is a real worry in the banking world, and, after 90 days, it’s common for many customers to just leave. We didn’t want Academy Bank’s customers to do that, so we thought up some ways to improve their experience and help them get more out of banking. Our first idea was to give out free money, but evidently that wasn’t in budget, so plan B it was.
A few years back, we helped non-profit KVC Health Systems completely overhaul their branding and websites, an effort which involved a lot of asset creation up front for a vast range of collateral across their different organizations. That same year and every year since they have come to us for help with designing their annual report.
Everyone in Kansas City knows Christopher Elbow’s Chocolates as the créme de le créme of confections, but the brand wanted to improve traffic to their site through search, so they approached us to see what kind of solutions we could whip up.
Armed Forces Bank is a full-service bank that serves military members across the world, the majority of which are new recruits who never walk into a branch and have little experience with handling finances. This and the fact they are gone for 8 to 12 weeks for basic training makes onboarding these customers especially tricky, which is why Armed Forces Bank approached us to help develop an onboarding and financial literacy campaign to turn these recruits into lasting customers who can start their financial lives on the right foot.
David Cecil, Johnny Lightning Strikes Again co-owner and director of strategy, was interviewed by Fox 4 News in Kansas City last week and asked to share his thoughts on retail stores using new technology to ‘spy’ on their customers by tracking their movements in their stores.
What is user interface design?
In the past 30 years, the ways in which we interact with content have changed significantly. No longer do we simply pick up a piece of paper and read from left to right — we click, we surf, we roll over, and we search. As these systems have become more complicated it has become increasingly important to make them seem easy. This is the purpose of user interface design.
User interface design, or user experience design, is the process of designing how a user interacts with a given system, whether that system be a website, an application, or a piece of software. It has a hand in all aspects of interaction — how a user perceives a system, how they learn it, and how they use it. While user interface design is primarily associated with digital products, the philosophy behind the field is much older than websites and software. As soon as humans started building machines that required people to operate, someone had to think about how this operation could be carried out as smoothly as possible.
Jamie Kosoy wrote a great article that puts the HTML5 vs Flash “conflict” into perspective wonderfully:
Pretend you were that student of mine, and pretend you started school 4 years ago. It’s your senior year now. In your freshman year, Twitter had just started. Facebook was approaching its first birthday – everyone was on MySpace. There was no whiff of a rumor of an iPhone. The mobile revolution was a pipe dream. Multi touch and gestural navigation wasn’t even a remote possibility.
He explains how it isn’t simply a matter of how viable either of the technologies are, it is a matter of the attitude with which you approach the entire digital ecosystem.
It’s gotten easier and it’s gotten harder simultaneously. There is only one way to maintain in that landscape, and that is to keep an open mind.
And the best part is these attitudes are important to everyone – client, designer, and developer alike.
Branding and design aren’t topics normally discussed by media outlets like CNN and BBC. But when Gap rolled out a new logo, found out that everyone hated it, and took it back, that’s exactly what happened. READ MORE →
