by Walter Steward

Update Your Website with These 7 Easy Design Trends

Websites can easily become stale and dated. I know. I just updated our agency’s site to better reflect current trends. (When you’re busy working on client projects, it’s challenging to look after your own.)

trends

For small and mid-sized organizations that don’t always have the budget for fancy and customized bells and whistles, my motto is KISS (Keep it simple, stupid.) The marketing objective is to attract and engage visitors and guide them to calls to action. No design awards required.

Related:- AWS Glue: Simple and Serverless Data Integration

Before I tackled the project, I laid out my goals:

  • Make it cleaner and less cluttered with lots of white space.
  • Make the menu navigation simpler with fewer drop-downs.
  • Ensure there’s a good mix of copy, images, videos, and embedded Slide Shares.
  • Revise the lead call to action to make it more relevant.
  • Simplify the footer.
  • Ensure the user experience is easy and smooth.

I also researched award-winning websites and read what some designers say are the current trends. Naturally, it’s a subjective matter, but some commonalities do exist. Here’s what I discovered:

1. Vector Illustrations

According to the Next Web, “While illustrations have been prevalent on websites for many years, there’s a growing trend of having custom, detailed, and well-executed illustrations grace websites recently, and I’m sure this is a trend that is just getting started.”

Eshley Jackson, in a DesignHill article adds:

“Use of illustration and graphics is another web design trend that the website designers are preferring for its use as an effective visual tool to communicate a brand message. Unlike stock photography, illustrations can be tailored to suit to the tone of a company. This helps a brand stand out in a marketplace. If you imagine how future website designs will look like, include custom illustration as a trend.”

Related:- Role of automation in securing cloud data

2. Whitespace

According to Sylvia Foerster in a recent Business2Community article,

“Having a lot of whitespace throughout your site is not necessarily a new trend, but it will be used more and more, especially in tandem with minimalistic designs. Whitespace or negative space refers to the empty areas around design elements like text or images. Just because it’s called ‘whitespace’ doesn’t mean it’s only white—it can be made up of any background color. The empty space between columns, margins, and lines of text is also considered whitespace.”

Moses Kim at UX Planet agrees.

“When elements fight for attention, none of them is getting enough. When there is a spotlight on one element, it gets all the attention. Depending on the message the UI is delivering, it’s important to give it some space, to let that message sink.”

by Walter Steward

AWS Glue: Simple and Serverless Data Integration

Data integration is a necessary process that combines data for machine learning, analytics, and cloud application development. AWS Glue is a way to make every step of the data integration process serverless and in the AWS Cloud. It possesses all the relevant capabilities so that analysis can be put to use immediately as opposed to later. These capabilities include data extraction from multiple sources, cleaning, normalization, and overall organization in databases and data lakes. Which method you use depends on the type of user you are and what products you are using.

Data Integration

AWS Glue is at its core an ETL (extract, transform, load) service with workflows that can be easily initiated. The monitoring and management of said workflows are done simply by navigating the AWS Glue Studio interface. Like all AWS services, you only pay for what you use, which means resources running at any given moment.

AWS Glue comes with a robust featureset that, if utilized to the fullest, will go through all the integration heavy lifting. You can focus on the data analysis that comes right after.

Related:- Role of automation in securing cloud data

AWS Glue Features

AWS Glue Data Catalog

This is the prime destination of all your data assets, no matter where they may actually be located. To help control the AWS Glue environment it contains job and table definitions, schemas, and other control information. It uses AWS machine learning and artificial intelligence to recognize patterns to make data queries cost-effective and efficient.

Alongside this, a schema version history is saved so data changes can be seen over the course of time.

AWS Glue Schema Registry

The registry enables the use of Apache Avro schemas to validate and control streaming data without charging extra for it. When data streaming applications are integrated with the registry, you can improve data quality and safeguard against unexpected changes. You can also update or create new AWS Glue tables and partitions using schemas stored in the registry.

Drag and Drop Visual Data

You don’t have to be an Apache Spark expert to create scalable ETL jobs for further distributed processing. AWS Glue lets you use a drag and drop interface to define ETL processes. The code is automatically generated to extract, transform and load your data, in either Python, Scala, or Apache Spark.

Data Replication

Data stored in multiple storage types can have views created on top of them with AWS Glue Elastic Views. You can create the views using an open-source SQL compatible language (PartiQL) to manipulate and query the data. This does not depend on the structure of the data, it can be tabular or like a document.

Related:- Ok Google, What Happened to the Cloud Platform?

Data Preparation

AWS Glue has a built-in feature called FindMatches that links data together that are imperfect matches of each other. It uses machine learning to fix duplicates in your records, you are asked beforehand whether it is indeed a duplicate. The system will start learning from your criteria of match or no match and can build you an ETL job that can help you find duplicates between records.

You are given development endpoints to test out the code that Glue generated for you. This is useful when choosing to interactively develop your ETL code. Custom readers, writers, or transformations can be written by you and then be imported into your Glue ETL jobs.

AWS Glue DataBrew

DataBrew lets you normalize data without code using a visual interface. The UI is point to click and simple for users like data scientists to normalize it without sifting through code. You can clean data from various other locations like data lakes and databases like Amazon S3 and Redshift.

by Walter Steward

Role of automation in securing cloud data

CIOs say that data automation can be effectively used to handle security. In the current scenario where enterprises have to deal with dynamic threat actors, they should be capable of responding to security issues and lapses within minutes or seconds.

The threat actors and their strategies keep changing; however, the criticality of protecting and reducing attacks on cloud platforms will always remain constant. If the risk is decreased, the attack surface is reduced considerably, which results in a smaller blast radius. It helps reduce costly repercussions in a breach event.

automation

Organizations that are highly regulated should deploy automation to mitigate, identify, and resolve cloud issues. This must be done especially to avoid expensive outcomes. It is very critical in the current scenario, where most enterprises are accelerating their digital transformation journey. They are fast reaping advantages like agility and speed and to ensure business continuity as employees work from remote locations.

Read More: Ok Google, What Happened to the Cloud Platform?

CIOs point out that organizations that implement advanced automation tools for protecting data in the cloud have a competitive edge as they receive immediate alerts and notifications regarding policy violations or misconfigurations.

They can also more easily design workflows that can produce resolutions for human-based processes and implement prescriptive actions that can solve the issues. The biggest advantage of automation is that it identifies if data is being exposed or misused and sets forward a rapid response for the issue.

Automated Remediation

Enterprise leaders say that automated remediation measures are capable of performing actions like updating cloud data architecture, re-configuring cloud services, boosting human-based workflows that are integrated with current platforms, and planning out the workflow activities in other systems.

Such remediation enabled organizations to focus on the highly critical problems while ensuring that normal routine problems are solved and reconfigured accurately, so that data is continuously and effectively secured and minor misconfigurations don’t transform into data leaks.

Leaders believe that when organizations secure their cloud data via automation, they, in turn, become enablers of the cloud. When they invest in automation security services, executive-level leadership becomes more confident and comfortable about sensitive information being transported via the cloud.

It accelerates the widespread adoption of cloud through the industry. Accurately automated cloud security policies are vital to ensure proper deployment and continued enforcement of compliance and security.

In the end, the cloud service provides the required agility for organizations that are operating in the digital landscape and is proven to be effective in deploying workloads compared to conventional cloud data centers.

Read More: The Future of Data Science in the Age of COVID-19

Enterprise leaders believe that the biggest obstacle to the implementation of automation is establishing trust with clients. They need to be assured that the automation tools will deploy corrective measures on non-compliant elements and not waste resources on false positives.

It is important to present conclusive and clear evidence of the outcomes to win the trust of the clients. This is best done via custom scorecards and reports that can be showcased to stakeholders and auditors to prove that all detected misconfigurations were open to the public, and none were misidentified.

by Walter Steward

Ok Google, What Happened to the Cloud Platform?

One of the biggest cloud platform has experienced an outage that affected the world. Reports from the UK, France, Austria, Spain, Brazil, and North America are among the countries experiencing the crash of Google Cloud. This disruption is affecting numerous services throughout the Google suite, including major platforms like Snapchat, Discord, Gmail, and Nest. The hit to Google’s Cloud Platform affected social networks and even people’s ability to control temperatures in their own homes and apartments. In a public announcement regarding the issue, Google stated on its Google Cloud Platform that the company was dealing with a multi-region issue with the Google Compute Engine.

Cloud Platform

“We are experiencing high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube. Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors. We believe we have identified the root cause of the congestion and expect to return to a normal service shortly,” stated by the company.

Rarely lasting as long as this did, the outage is not the only one to occur to Google in recent months. While YouTube experienced downtime this past October, Google’s overall services also went offline in November from a routing problem. In late 2018 and beginning of 2019, Nest suffered from multiple of outages. Although there is no common route of the downtime and outages, reliability seems to be a challenge for the enterprise. After resolving this most recent issue, Google promises its consumers and clients that they will be conducting a “post mortem” and make the appropriate adjustments to prevent something similar happening in the future.

Related:- Developing a more resilient IT work culture

How Bad Was The Damage?

Despite the damage to Google’s brand, the consequences of the outage spreads to numerous other parties. During the 4 hours of downtime, YouTube calculated a 2.5% decrease in views in an hour. Google Cloud Storage found a 30% reduction in overall traffic. Some Nest consumers were unable to access their air conditioner control settings and some could not even unlock their own homes. 1% of Gmail users had issues with their accounts. Although that percentage may seem small, it renders to be millions of people who could not access their emails, proving extremely disruptive.

After the cloud outage, Google suffered another hit when their phone service went down less than 24 hours later. The phone service, Fi, prevented its customers from receiving or making phone calls. This is the worst kind of outage for a phone provider. Even though Google was able to provide a resolution to the interruption of service, people are furious that their ability to make phone calls during work, travel, and even in case of emergencies was hindered.

The networking issue now resolved, Google’s cloud services’ weaknesses are more apparent to the public making them more weary than ever. With the upcoming advancements to computing architectures, this outage emphasizes how little cloud coverage can stretch. As modern cloud infrastructures have cut the costs of being a technologically advanced business, the dependency on one service to perform increases.

Being the giant they are, this issue is not strictly affecting Google’s own applications. Other businesses that rely on the Google Cloud platform are consequently experiencing outages as well. Most companies the consumers use today have entrusted Google with their backends, and although the benefits outweigh the possible risks, it is important to brainstorm contingency plans.

As internet-enabled technology becomes more ubiquitous in homes, the world grows increasingly networked. Companies are finding it more and more important to curate back up plans in the case that the services they rely on crash. Dependency on the cloud is fine, so long that the companies have a means to consider the risks.

Related:- The Future of Data Science in the Age of COVID-19

What Does This Mean?

Google carries the expectation that they would always be reliable. After the outage, it has become a wakeup call to businesses to have a backup plan in a worse case scenario instance. This unfortunate event for Google further emphasizes the necessity to create an effective disaster recovery plan. Companies can continue to entrust the cloud architecture, as it has proven itself to carry immense benefits. Considering DRaaS to become IT resilient should be at the forefront of companies’ IT agenda to ensure they are protected in an outage.

by Walter Steward

The Future of Data Science in the Age of COVID-19

The measurable turnaround of public confidence in data science applied for social good since the outbreak of COVID-19 represents an opportunity for data-driven analytics to embed far more deeply in society than was envisaged in the preceding years, with the triumphs and challenges of the COVID-facing public sector data science setting a new benchmark and level of expectation across the commercial sector as well.

However, although there’s reason for optimism that AI-focused data science can thrive in both sectors in the coming years, data science consultants need to carefully evaluate the evidence for this in light of the current global upheaval.Data Science

Nearly all the contributing variables for the coming economic and market environment are in flux; not only have the massively skewed spikes and troughs of the COVID era literally forced a re-write of many analytics and AI-driven prediction systems, but they have also cast doubt upon the last few years of trends and predictions related to the industry3.

Let’s take a look at the few broad indicators we currently have and examine how the wider data science sector might need to reconcile the volatile conditions of 2020 and beyond.

Making Sense of the Blown Gradients after COVID

According to McKinsey, the rout of ‘face-to-face’ society has broken historical analytics models so badly that pre-COVID data may itself have to be considered in a separate historical context, and compensated for in any attempt to maintain a continuum of measurement for year-on-year progression in business cycles.

At the time of writing, post-outbreak data has had less than a year of existence. With no way to know when the post-COVID era will begin (or whether the threat will diminish with the speed of the Millennium Bug or the languorous, decades-long struggle against HIV), it’s difficult to understand at what point a long-term analytical context will emerge that isn’t specifically related to efforts against the virus.

Even if we were inclined to consider the period since the outbreak as a ‘hard reset’ in analytics and forecasting, not only is post-outbreak data insufficient yet to form a base for prediction, but it’s also defined by a number of pivotal factors that are in no way constant or reliable enough for forecasting further years of combatting the epidemic. These factors include:

  • State-led fiscal interventions that give a statistically skewed representation of national and global consumption, productivity and stability.
  • Supply chain interruptions, which have had a significant effect on downstream economic logistics management.
  • Changes in customer behavior that relate directly to the increased short-term and long-term economic insecurity, and which are not in themselves constant or predictable.
  • The ambient effect of the diminution, destruction and/or bankruptcy of multi-billion dollar industries that underpinned the pre-COVID model, such as airlines and hospitality.

There is general agreement, however, on one upcoming scenario in which the data science sector will not only play an important role, but need to negotiate in itself.

The Implications of Recession for Data Science

The World Bank estimates a 5.2% reduction in the global economy in 2020, characterizing the growing downturn as a portent of the deepest recession since WWII, affecting the largest number of countries since 1870. Others, including the IMF and Time, assess the coming decline in terms of a depression that’s likely to last longer than any comparable economic crises of the last 100 years.

Though the effect of furloughs, lay-offs and terminations has not left the data science sector untouched, with a reported 40% of surveyed companies freezing new data science hires, the downward trend is slower relative to the average in comparable fields.

It should also be considered that sector demand was declining directly prior to the outbreak, and that it’s now impossible to tell how that short downward trend might have developed.

In any case, outside of public-sector data science projects either directly or indirectly related to COVID, data science seems destined for a period of reductionism and a focus on essential, proven analytics implementations.

Related:- 5 Top Design Elements to Incorporate into Your Next App

5 Areas of Expected Data Science Uptake

There is a strong possibility that the customary recovery environment of a late-stage recession will be different from those of the past; and that the inability to quickly reboot into a pre-COVID economic template will elevate data analytics to a more central and enduring position in civic and commercial culture, no matter what the outcome of the crisis might be.

If we do not currently need the new roads, train lines, and other travel-based infrastructure boosts that kick-started the failing economies of the more mobile societies of the past, and if we are unable to re-capitalize (as after 2008) by continuing to inflate the cost of real estate in major cities in the face of an urban exodus and an emerging long-term telecommuting culture, it seems inevitable that money will follow consumers into virtual space — which signifies a massive acceleration of digital conversion and the analytics culture that accompanies it.

For business, this external pressure to migrate from analogue transactions to digital paradigms and platforms is merely an acceleration of what was already occurring in the years leading to 2020.

The following are the key areas where data science is poised to aid in sector recovery and endurance.

Global and National Supply Chain Logistics

The use of AI to model historical and ‘live’ logistics data allows distribution companies to simulate thousands of scenarios, incorporating ad-hoc factors such as state and national restrictions that may come into force or be cancelled according to infection levels and local and national policies.

As with many sectors that depend on predictive machine learning systems, the Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) industry has had to recover from unexpected variations in demand since the late winter of 2020, and is in some cases merging prediction models for the lifetime of the COVID-19 crisis into traditional logistics forecasting systems.

Remote Productivity Management

In the United States alone, the coronavirus crisis is set to force a 733% increase in the number of Americans working full-time from home, with many influential companies now committed to partial or permanent long-term telecommuting, irrespective of societal progress against COVID-19.

Though there are diverse AI-powered solutions to aid remote workers in scheduling, search, and even to improve the quality of teleconferencing, it seems likely that innovations in AI-based remote monitoring will also bring new data streams that can be utilized for performance monitoring at an individual and team level.

The use of data science and machine learning to evaluate employee performance pre-dates the pandemic. Such systems are centralized and can be applied to the remote working sphere via authorized VPNs, with only minor latency considerations compared to on-premises workstations.

One company has experimented with AI-enabled fitness monitors to assess the level of employee stress during remote working under COVID-19. However, depending on the geographic region and its applicable laws, the proliferation of such systems may eventually bring privacy and diverse legal implications into the public arena, notwithstanding an employee’s contractual consent.

Machine learning has been used in a number of evaluative systems for students forced to follow academic courses in ad-hoc online environments — a necessary innovation that may eventually feed into more stable and generalized online management systems.

Related:- Developing a more resilient IT work culture

Chatbots

Besides providing curated information on the COVID-19 crisis for overburdened health services, chatbots are proving an essential stopgap for companies whose former investment in intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) has become urgent under coronavirus-related restrictions, and for whom negative public perception of AI-based assistants has been relegated by the scale of the current public health crisis.

Thus it appears that increased public tolerance for chatbot-based interaction in core services such as health may be improving the general reputation and uptake of chatbot development on the whole.

The pre-COVID estimate that chatbot sales would grow to US$112 billion by 2023 is now thought by some to have multiplied significantly. However, the current trend towards economic decline also indicates that lower general economic demand could cancel out this trend, leaving the market with similar prospects to those forecast in the pre-COVID era.

The necessity for increased engagement with chatbots represents an unforeseen opportunity to improve both their performance and reputation: as the volume of IVA transactions increases, analysis of the interactions allows their underlying systems to improve in a manner that could not have been foreseen prior to the pandemic — a further boon to chatbot research and deployment.

After-Market Service Through AI-Driven Analytics and Logistics Systems

According to Deloitte, the possibility of ongoing disruption to supply chains, together with diminished spending patterns, constitutes a threat to the hardware technology release cycle, including computing components, smartphones, consumer electronics devices, and a range of business technologies.

This situation could trigger a short- or long-term emphasis on after-market support, where the role of machine learning analytics could transform from a minor industry advantage to a critical edge in a market often beset by low margins.

The much-criticized tendency of manufacturers to abandon software support for older models in order to perpetuate the buying cycle could even transform from time-limited after-market care to the subscription-based SaaS models that have come to dominate the software market since 2015.

by Walter Steward

Developing a more resilient IT work culture

“Resilient practices” has become the go-to phrase for IT leaders across the world. CIOs are responsible for ensuring the continued operations of enterprises in uncertain times. They are working to enable entire-organizations’ workforce to be remote work compatible at a quick pace. Simultaneously they are pushing for digital transformation initiatives to be the central focus even during the pandemic.

IT

Organizations that rapidly changed gears and navigated the hardship with restructured practices were a testament to the IT industry’s capability to be flexible enough to bounce back from difficulties. For the enterprises which didn’t deploy an agile approach, the situation has been a crash course on how to practice resilience. Each example has contributed to the best practices- for them and other enterprises to learn from.

The pandemic has turned out to be a live, global-scale social experiment for organizations across industries. Leaders acknowledge that conventional methods are not successful in the current scenario, and new behaviors must be developed.

Related:- 5 Top Design Elements to Incorporate into Your Next App

Ensuring that people are prioritized

CIOs point out that open communication is a critical factor in guaranteeing resiliency in the present scenario. Employees are relieved when truthful interaction is encouraged by the enterprise; satisfied and peaceful employees work more productively. An open exchange will ensure that they are ready for potential changes down the line. It’s encouraged that employees receive positive and negative news from the leadership rather than some other source.

Empathetic leadership is needed; a resilient IT culture encourages putting people first. Emotional well-being was prioritized in the past couple of years, and the notion has gained new traction during the pandemic. A sense of camaraderie is required to ensure better productivity and reduced attrition in organizations.

Keeping connected

Most organizations have increased the number of meetings to compensate for the lack of in-person interaction and seamless connectivity between colleagues. IT leaders are figuring out ways to prevent Zoom fatigue and burnout. Reduced travel hours for employees who were located off-premise, has resulted in longer work-hours in most organizations. Employees located outside of the headquarter locations are forced to either get up earlier or work later to accommodate other colleagues.

CIOs are working to stop the practice, reducing Friday meetings unless an emergency and encourage the time to be utilized for “strategic analysis”. Better communication is necessary, but alternatives must be identified for communicating with internal teams. Leaders propose more meetings, but of shorter durations and end encourage more personal meetings for daily check-ins. Virtual lunch meet-ups have proved to be a suitable medium of catching up, without encroaching on productive work hours.

Related:- Optimization Suggestions For New Users On The App

Identifying common goals

Leaders say that when the work environment proves to be demanding and challenging, enterprises will be encouraged when goals are set. For the IT industry, the mission sense is best taught via developing business value. When professionals feel invested in the organization and connected, resilience is enhanced.

The agile methodology of building products encourages resiliency and productivity compared to the silo methodology of building projects. It also ensures that IT and business develop common objectives, which helps the organization grow.

by Walter Steward

5 Top Design Elements to Incorporate into Your Next App

With thousands upon thousands of apps on the market, getting users’ attention often comes down to UI/UX. Stunning designs make apps stand out above competitors and attract users. Giving users an intuitive experience is what keeps them coming back for more.design

Here are the top design elements to consider when developing your next app.

Clean and Uncluttered

App developers should make sure that they incorporate a logic of clear, concise, and uncluttered design. Apps with cluttered or ambiguous interfaces and content are offensive to users. Cognitive load refers to the amount of brain power required to use an application and a cluttered app can require too much stress and thinking for the user. Having a high cognitive load may lead users to abandon the app and look for easier and simpler tools.

Clean design is especially imperative on mobile apps, where the screen is much smaller, and the precision of thumb tapping is often lacking. Show users just what they need to know in that screen and keep extras on other pagers or off the app entirely.

Related:- Optimization Suggestions For New Users On The App

User Interface Design

User interface, or UI design, is one of the most important aspects of app design. When designing an app, the user and their interests should be used to mold the app around in terms of design. A great designer will go so far as to provide customer inputs into each part of the design. By watching how customers interact with the app, you can evolve and improve the UI making the app increasingly easy and intuitive to use.

Font Adds to Design

Another important design element in app development is typeface. Typeface has qualities that have been embraced and used in marketing psychology and can also be used to increase engagement and interest in an app.

Making a smooth reading experience means effective use of typeface. Designers should make sure that the app’s typeface should be compatible with their respective OS and tablet size. Again, due to the small screen on mobile devices, designers need to be especially careful with font types and styles. While bold, underlines and italics may work on desktop, they may not be seen clearly on a mobile device.

Related:- 2020 Advertising Trends – Push Notification Ads

Personalization Without Too Much Work

Design elements today are expected to contain personalization. Knowing the right time zone or populating the weather or time can make the user feel like the app is personalize to their needs.

Often businesses do this by asking a bunch of questions during the onboarding process. This, however, requires too much work by the user. Rather, only ask for the data you need and find innovative ways to offer personalization to make the experience stand out.

App Design Elements

App development is an ongoing evolution with new technology and ideas happening every day. To provide your customers the best experience, you need the best mobile app talent. Where you are looking for a UX, UI, web or brand designer, the right designer can bring an amazing experience to the user.

App design is incredibly important to users who are looking for apps that appeal to their individual tastes. This is the biggest message of all. Individual tastes are taking control of the market and driving sales that are geared and tailored towards individuals that have unique individual tastes. The appeal of individual tastes cannot be ignored because the individual is shaping the market.

by Walter Steward

Optimization Suggestions For New Users On The App

Users install a lot of apps on their smartphones, but most apps may only be opened a few times after installation. According to the survey, 80% to 90% of the installed apps will be deleted immediately after the first use.
App developers put a lot of effort into the development of an app, and the marketing department also spends a lot of money to promote it. It is difficult to attract users to download it, and sometimes, the result is for it to be uninstalled after the first use. This result is obviously horrible.
Users
Getting users to download the app is only the first step, and the more important thing that comes with it is how to keep the user. After the user completes the installation, what happens when they open the app becomes critical. It is at this moment that the user will establish a first impression, which is the key to user conversion and retention.
There is no silver bullet or a secret recipe for the establishment of the first impression. Optimizing the App through A/B testing is the primary tool. Let’s share some optimization suggestions in this regard.
1. Focus on the important things
New users may need something like a help guide, but be careful not to give too much information. The first interface should start with an introduction to the core value of the product, and a short and connotative description lets the user understand the essence of the product. The user can then be directed to the basic registration process or initialization process. It is important to note that you must provide the user with an option to skip. The entire process must not include too much content. Conciseness and orderliness are the best.
2. Show process and not just text description
When guiding new users to start using an app, too much text will only make the user bored and thus increase the possibility of closing the app. You can’t just give a piece of text for the user to understand, but should design an action-oriented help that the user can follow step by step. For example, the highlight button is accompanied by a short description on the side of the button. This interactive help allows the user to learn the necessary operations without hindrance and to seamlessly enter the world of the product, making it easier to become a returning user.
3. Remove the obstacles to the registration process
The registration process is a very tricky part. In the process, we can lose a large number of users and lose an average of 56% of new users. But for an app, registration is an indispensable part. Therefore, how to optimize the user registration process is particularly important. Different registration processes can make huge differences; some have good results, while others have poor results. In general, your goal is to collect user information as quickly as possible so that they can move on before they get bored.
There are many elements in the registration process that can be used to design experiments such as social network login or email login. We can also consider the timing of registration: either register directly from the beginning or while browsing some content.
4. More humane
Don’t come up with some inexplicable marketing arguments. We need to communicate with users with a more humane tone. Let them feel that we are friends, people who they can trust, and not some robots that only sell things. Trying to use the first person’s tone will be more intimate.
5. Put advanced stages later
Don’t try to put everything in the first place. The correct way to do this is to start with the basics. You should show the basic features of the app to the users first before moving to the more advanced features and always help them along the way. It is the right thing to continually reinforce the user’s perception and encourage them to study the App step by step.
6. Learn about the user’s thoughts
In addition to the above, we must learn to listen to and understand users. There are many ways we can understand user behavior; statistics, testing, feedback, and more. App development companies can use these statistics to find a solution to some of the perceived difficulties that the users are experiencing while using the app.
Having a mobile app for your business is a desire that is difficult to resist for many business owners. However, there are many factors to put into consideration because owing an app isn’t just enough. You need an app to educate users and strengthen your value. As a result, you have to provide a good user experience and get a better retention rate. The solution to finding the best solution is the A/B test, which uses objective scientific data to help you make the best decisions. You will be surprised by the results, and a little insignificant change can have a huge impact.
by Walter Steward

2020 Advertising Trends – Push Notification Ads

Marketing is full of challenges and opportunities. Smart people can always seize new opportunities. This article is recommended for everyone. The current profitable advertising trend is: push notification ads.
notification
As early as two years, many Apps are running, but 2020 still has a lot of arbitrage space. Unless you don’t use your phone and browser, that is when you wouldn’t have received a bunch of unread push notifications, it has become part of our screen life.
What is Push Notification Ads?
It is a relatively innovative and user-friendly way to push ads, and it is a good way to connect with the target audience. As long as the user agrees to subscribe to the notification, the push notification is sent in text or graphic form from the mobile device or browser third party application. This traffic has a large potential conversion probability in addition to the high delivery rate.
Push notification was first introduced in 2009 when Jobs was working on the iPhone and then extended to Safari, Chrome, and various services to send push notifications.
How does a push notification ad work?
Users who visit the website choose to receive push notifications. Users can receive push notifications via PC, tablet, mobile devices, etc. (whether or not the user has browsed the website or use the app). When the user clicks on the push notification, they are directed to a landing page. Such push notification advertisements can generally be purchased through CPC or CPM.
The following push notifications apply to the following devices and browsers:
– Desktop: PC / OS X: Chrome, Firefox, Opera
Mobile devices: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge, Samsung Internet
Safari (OS X, iOS) does not allow web push notifications
Push notifications are not available for HTTP sites, only for HTTPS sites.
Push Notification example
On a mobile phone using the iPhone as an example, after the app by app developers obtains the user’s consent to accept the push notification, the app will send a notification based on the user’s subscription status. For example, you can choose to receive the podcast notification and then receive a similar message on the mobile phone.
If there is a small red circle on the app icon, it means you have an unread message; this is the push notification. The desktop browser can also notify the presence of a push notification. Here, we highly recommend everyone to use the Chrome browser.
Why do we recommend trying to push notification ads in 2020?
The traffic is large. There are over 200 million hits per day, and the traffic is increasing. There have been a lot of alliances to launch this kind of push notification advertisement. In addition, it is an emerging traffic source. It is not saturated yet, and the price is relatively low. At least, compared to Pop, which is saturated for many years, the traffic of push notification is a kind of traffic in progress. The most important thing is that it is a native ad that is pushed at the user’s will, and it has a higher delivery and conversion rate.
Another point is that users don’t need to go to the website or open the app to receive push notifications!
Which platforms can currently push traffic (Push traffic)?
– PropellerAds: Push traffic is mainly mobile Android and desktop.
– Richpush: claims to have 300 million real users, the lowest CPC is $0.003
– PlugRush, Exoclick, PlugRush: These are also performing greatly. The lowest CPC is $0.005.
Megapush: The first new alliance to support push notifications, fast approval, low traffic price, convenient deposit, and withdrawal. The disadvantage is that Targeting’s US traffic is always mixed with some other GEO’s garbage traffic. The key is that they don’t recognize it. So CPC is lower than other leagues for a reason.
There are other platforms that support push notification traffic: Clickadu, Adsterra, Airpush, Admaven. You can test them out yourself.
What areas are recommended for push traffic?
Push notification can be used to promote many services and products such as video games, app installation, finance, Blockchain, Dating, e-commerce. It should be noted that push traffic data statistics are delayed. The user receives the push notification advertisement and has a great relationship with the subscription time and the number of pushes on the day.
by Walter Steward

Encourage User Retention Through Gamification

Gamification is a technique aimed at transposing the mechanics and codes of video games to areas for which they were not necessarily intended. This technique has always been used to encourage the participation of students in class (good points, images, etc.), but also that of soldiers on the battlefield (medals, badges, ranks, etc.). Widely developed with loyalty programs, the trend gained popularity during the 2010s with the explosion of social media and the rise of the smartphone.
Gamification
One of the first to jump at the chance was Foursquare, which allowed users of its mobile application to identify themselves at a specific location and become “mayor” of the location in question. At the height of its glory, the application represented more than 50 million users worldwide and 8 billion “check-ins”.
Engament at the heart of gamification
The objective of gamification is to maximize user retention by facilitating and providing a playful dimension to the application. We then speak of “gamification”. The developers of the most popular mobile applications have understood the great potential of this method and include the game codes. For example, the famous Snapchat which uses a points system to rank friends and a panel of trophies awarded as and when usage measurement.
The reward of the user in the form of points, levels or statuses is today the most widespread form but many other means are possible:
* Ranking and position in relation to other users
* Virtual badges and trophies
* Gifts and virtual currency
* Progress bars
* Dashboards and scoring
Another more recent example: Welcome To The Jungle, (which we don’t even show you anymore) which released for 2019 a new game allowing it to present all the companies that the site contains.
We let you try it here
NikePlus Running is the perfect example of a mobile application bringing together almost all of these gamification techniques. It takes the form of a dashboard listing the different scores of the runner: number of runs, record times, average times, number of kilometers traveled, track of the route, accumulated points (NikeFuel), etc. A gauge shows him his progress and how far he has to go before reaching the next level. The user is then encouraged to go above and beyond to beat his own records but also those of his friends with whom he can share his results.
Strategic implementation
All these elements are intended to stimulate the motivation of the user and to awaken his competitive spirit. But gamification also has other marketing-oriented interests such as increasing the user persuasion rate. Indeed, he will be abler to authorize access to his personal information or to accept to perform certain actions if these are included in a well-tested gamification system (registration, survey, etc.). Thus this technique acts as a lever of loyalty by promoting the creation of a feeling of proximity with the brand. For app development companies(https://www.hyperlinkinfosystem.com/mobile-app-development.htm), it is also about being able to stand out in an extremely saturated competitive universe where each product seems at first glance to look alike.
Finally, gamification brings interest and originality to tools that are not used to being interactive or fun, like GPS. The monotony of this feature can be overcome by the integration of a mini-game.
Waze has achieved the feat of creating a community of users who want to help other drivers “thwart traffic and get the best route to and from work”.The mobile application transforms the daily journey into an interactive social trip. It commits the user to participate by offering him the possibility of climbing levels or earning points according to the number of kilometers traveled and reports made.
User behavior
Gamification techniques work so well that they have the power to create in individuals a feeling of excitement, happiness or in some cases, “anxiety about missing something”.These extreme feelings are mainly present in users of mobile applications.
This is why, NirEyal, author and Israeli-American entrepreneur, sought to explain how the development of a product from his hook-shaped model (The Hook Model) allowed to obtain a strong emotional connection with the and a long-term commitment.
The goal of his model is to create a kind of routine dependence on a product. Habit is an ordinary way of acting and thinking. The individual who acts out of habit acts without really thinking about what he is doing. Action therefore becomes an ordinary reflex. Completely adapted to the world of mobile applications, it looks like this:
1. Trigger
The first stage of the process is linked to the triggering factors which can be of two types: external triggers (interaction elements, action buttons, popup) and internal triggers (personal emotions, situation, environment, social interactions, etc.). Individual feelings, especially negative emotions (tiredness, boredom, hesitation, dissatisfaction, etc.), are excellent triggers often at the origin of the relationship with the application.
Providing the individual with a set of triggers therefore encourages them to associate their existential needs with the mobile application. For Instagram, for example, it involves creating the user’s automation to open the application when they want to take a photo.
2. Action
The individual therefore begins to use the application and develops a relationship with the brand. We are talking about all the actions to perform here, such as scrolling, searching, launching the playback, video viewing, etc. functionalities.
3. Reward
Then, to hook the user, it is necessary to provide rewards in anticipation of his future engagement. Mobile applications that want to build addiction with their users, use one or the other of these variables:
4. Investment
The investment is the result of the previous three stages. The user enters into a relationship with the mobile application and you benefit from it: personal data, comments, notes on the stores, purchase, share capital, etc. Each engagement loads a new trigger and the cycle begins again.
Mobile applications such as Instagram, WhatsApp or Facebook have used this model to develop their offer and create a feeling of dependence among their users.
It is important to plan for gamification and not to skip the stages. You have to make sure that adding this playful dimension will improve the user experience, make it more attractive and “addictive” without making the navigation more complex or heavier.