The advantages of outsourcing

But what are the advantages of outsourcing and how can these be generated? The system is easy. If you as a company – (whether a small or big one) – would like to give previously performed in-house tasks to an external provider, you can simply give the contract to a third-party who you will pay to carry out the task on your behalf. The main advantages include cost savings, being able to focus on your core business, overall being able to improve the quality while increasing flexibility at the same time. Collaborating with external experts allows customers to calculate their business costs more precisely because the costs only occur for a certain period of time.
But how can you find such an external provider, and how do you know if the price you are paying is not too high and if the proposal is really the best you could get? One possibility is: Using global internet platforms which arrange services for you in order to meet your individual needs. One of the biggest in Germany is twago.

Team Work Across Global Offices – twago

twago is a Berlin based company which focuses on outsourcing and offshoring of online services. The overall goal is to achieve the best performance for the best price for the customer. The more precisely you know what specific task you would like to have done, e.g. programming, web design, user interface design, etc., the better it is. You simply post your project with a detailed description on the platform and receive proposals from all over the world from up to 20,000 providers. These service providers can be companies or freelancers. You can find a service provider who best fits to the individual project. Whether you are looking for a service provider from around the corner to meet up face to face or you prefer a freelancer from a specific country, twago offers the possibility to find the right service provider with suitable skills. You choose the one that best fits your needs and preferences. And the best of all: Using twago is easy. You just have to register, post your project and award it to your provider of choice. Should you need any help or special service the kind twago employees are ready to support you. You can try it out at: http://www.twago.com.

Of course, improvements do not a perfect version make, and complaints bubbling to the surface surrounding the MacBook Air include small and difficult keyboard keys and heating issues – user interface problems affecting the usability of the device. However, the most prominent complaint concerns the GUI design.  Many users are reporting that the interface display is prone to flickering, freezing, and kernel errors as the computer attempts to resurrect itself from sleep mode.  The causes behind these GUI difficulties are not quite clear, but what is clear is that each new generation of technology comes with its own set of new and unique issues that have to be remedied over the course of the first few months of release.  Thus, the new MacBook Air is definitely a worthwhile investment, but it might be prudent to wait to buy it until the newborn glitches are sorted out.

Users who install the Plane Finder app on their smartphone interface will be able to see:

•    How fast the plane is going
•    The plane’s point of origin
•    The plane’s destination
•    The plane’s elevation
•    The flight number
•    The distance between the phone and the plane

User interface design review

According to Barrett, the Xbox application user interface design will be “familiar” in terms of what users are used to seeing on their regular Xbox consoles. This is a smart move by Microsoft in terms of usability as users like applications that are familiar and thus easier to employ with fluency.  By tapping on the Xbox tile users will be met with their avatar and their last game achievement (the game achievement can be updated from both the phone and the Xbox console).  Users will also be able to view invites from friends and previously downloaded games.

There are some new features that have been added especially for the Xbox Live app but Barrett maintains that these “are some clever ways Microsoft has optimized the experience for mobile” (msnbc.com).  For example, the user’s 3D avatar will “get dizzy” and fall down when the phone shakes and any unlocked avatar item can be accessed from the phone no matter the source of the action. These new features are slight and help to facilitate the relationship between the Xbox console and the Xbox Windows 7 app, thus reinforcing the concept of user familiarity.
If Barrett’s report is accurate, then users can look forward to an Xbox application that is familiar and intelligent without too many frills and nonsense.  Micrsoft didn’t try to get too creative on this one, just smart enough to be subtle and for their sake successful.

Although Samsung and LG are the second and third largest handset manufacturers in the world behind Nokia (Tech Crunchies), both companies have struggled to find success (or maybe a better way to put it is their place) in the smartphone market.  The Samsung Galaxy S has been relatively fruitful but in comparison to the iPhone and Blackberry consumer feeding frenzy, both companies haven’t exactly been able to bait the waters with their products.   The hiring of UI/UX design experts shows that Samsung and LG not only acknowledge their smartphone weakness, but also concede that user interface design strategies need to be the crux of mobile product marketing and sales.  The fact that the UX/UI experts come from universities indicates that both companies want to be at the cutting edge of new developments in the UI/UX design worlds.   LG already plans to release a line of Optimus smartphones and both companies plan to have Android tablets by the end of 2010.  Time will tell if the UID academic infusion translates to smartphone success.

When George Orwell predicted that future technology would one day police all of our activities, he wasn’t too far off from the truth.  Needless to say that many services like Facebook offer significant benefits to user, and although many users around the world happily and voluntarily join such services, people today would be hard pressed to escape technological monitoring from passport control to personal banking.  Although it is a far stretch to compare Facebook to Big Brother, it is worth pondering what Orwell himself would think about the social networking site’s ability to pervade nearly every aspect of our lives.  He might actually be quite impressed.

My mother groaned, my father wept:

Into their shopping cart unwanted things leapt,

Helpless, overcharged but arrestingly proud,

Feeling like a fiend was hid in ‘the cloud’.

Who to blame when the mouse was in my father’s hands,

Well poor usability & interface design will hurt a brand,

Placing the ‘Cancel’ button a nanometer from ‘Buy’ is not best,

Especially with a return policy worse than the rest.

The first poem is based on The Garden of Love by William Blake; the second was inspired by Infant Sorrow by William Blake. The idea behind this series of blog posts is to look at famous poems and use them to shed light on issues that affect usability, wireframes and interface design. If any of you have some suggestions of poems that you would like for us to interpolate please feel free to do so by leaving a comment with your request.

Search Engine Optimization can help improve the findability of your website

How you organize the structure of your website’s content as well as how you implement web standards and conventions is important for search engine optimization (SEO) because search engines can only react to standard representations. In addition, the organization of your interface design affects its SEO ranking. Considering that search engines are arguably the most commonly used online tool, a website’s search ranking can potentially make or break a website. Simply put, search engine optimization is the art of science of increasing traffic to a given website. This is done by optimizing structure, text content, photos and videos to increase a website’s visibility on search engines and other web 2.0 portals such as Facebook. Another way of doing this is through interface design whereby a website appears the same in different web browsers, and without errors. After all what good is it to create a wonderful interface design if it may appear broken to a significant number of users. Using a number of different portals to generate more inbound traffic from different sources also results in higher search engine rankings which begets more traffic. Other considerations of SEO, even though they don’t necessarily have much to do with interface design proper, include incorporating particular keywords and key phrases even and recoding a website to make it more crawl-able by search engines.

Usability tests can help determine the findability of your site content

As mentioned in part 1 of this blog, the best way to determine the findability of your interface design’s content is to conduct iterative usability testing. One usability method that is particularly helpful when evaluating and optimizing findability is tree testing. The information architecture of interface designs is in most cases organized in hierarchies. These are referred to as trees (with subsections “branching” out). Tree testing, also known as card-based classification or reverse card sorting, seeks to find out how well users are able to find information within a website’s hierarchy. Remember, tree testing differs from traditional usability testing in that it is not done on a wireframe prototype or the website itself but on using cards (or software) of a simplified text version of the site structure. A typical tree test is as follows:

1.    Users are given a “find it” task (e.g. look for the breakfast menu).
2.    Users are then shown a list of the top topics on the website (as they might appear in the main navigation)
3.    They choose one and then are shown a list of subtopics (such as in a sub-menu of a navigation)
4.    They continue choosing, backtracking if necessary, until they have found a topic that completes their task.
5.    The test conductor has the user repeat this process several times with several different tasks
6.    After several users have completed the tree test, the results are analyzed by the design and development team.

For the reasons mentioned above, findability should be an important consideration of every interface designer.