Monthly Archives: April 2017

Basic Buccaneer Branding

Open avenues

It is all too tempting to add this one to the long list of potential initial expenses, chalk it up to something the investors can pay for and move on to the important stuff. Of course this approach is wrong on every possible level, branding is important, equity is the most expensive form of financing – less is better– , and paying upfront without collecting any pertinent data goes against the grain of the can do spirit at the heart of internet marketing. For The Buccaneer Network at the very least then, simply outsourcing branding to an agency would be a bad route to take. Instead, we propose to use a standard approach from the internet marketing community namely,  A/B split testing.

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Good design tips to improve user exprience

Page design

  • Use white space
  • Mostly content not navigation
  • Simplicity better than complexity
  • Separate meaning and presentation
  • Use stylesheets for presentation
  • Resolution independent design (percentages not fixed pixel width)
  • Relative not absolute font size
  • Don’t include text in graphics
  • Don’t exclude older browsers
  • Pages should load fast ( <10 seconds , warn if not)
  • Keep graphics to minimum
  • Useful initial information (e.g. ALT text & meaningful info at top)
  • Use Standards
  • Short meaningful link text (not ‘click here’)
  • Helpful Link title
  • Colour & underline indicate links
  • Visited links differentiated by colour
  • Don’t automatically open new windows
  • No more than 2 fonts
  • No frames

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International social network communication issues.

As I was going back to China, the team mentioned about social networking used to maintain connection during the Easter Vacation. The first thing comes to our mind was using Facebook. However, when I told that Facebook was blocked in China, they were shocked. ‘Then what social networking platform you have?’ this question came next. Actually, not only Facebook, all the products related to Google are not accessible in China, instead, we get chatting software QQ, Wechat to contact with family members, friends and anyone we already know of or familiar with. We get Weibo to link to people we never meet but we interest in or interest in us. What’s more, BaiduTeiba is a good place for us to post our own opinion to the public and get response from every corner. As China has a large population cardinality, the social networking we use ‘internally’ work for enough users’ supporting. Continue reading

The cost of free feedback

Considering the alternatives:

Easy access to near limitless data is one of the key features of the information age. Unfortunately, this superficial truth belies the complexities of freely obtained data. These may include the quality of the data, the direct applicability thereof, how recent it is, who is providing it or how it was obtained. There are numerous other considerations all of which may impact on a specific data use and whether or not any one consideration is of concern will be highly dependent on the situation being addressed. So for instance, a fashion blogger might make good use of data on the shopping habits of a hand full of celebrities. If however the same dataset was presented to the chief procurement officer of an budget clothing retailer, that information would be far from sufficient for planning the next season’s line-up. Continue reading

Maintaining User Identity With Third Party Social Media APIs…

One of the methods we propose for building our trustworthiness metric is to establish a single identity for our users by linking their Trust Machine identity to their other online identities on sites such as Ebay, Facebook and Twitter. The aim is to link an account to one on another service and only allow one link per Trust Machine user, so that once a profile has been used to create a Trust Machine account it can never linked to another one. Continue reading

There’s a lot at stake(holder)

Further to my recent post on deriving who our target users are, in this blog post I have formulated this into a more ‘formal’ stakeholder analysis.

Later in the blog we will look at some Personas of the stakeholders we have identified. Personas are useful to give realistic, yet totally fictitious, representations to help get inside the mind of the person the system is being designed for. Continue reading