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Microcopy can make a macro impression

Taylor Dewey on September 3, 2015 • 3 Comments

A newly hired UX Designer once quipped, “I could spend all day obsessing about word choices.” It’s true, we could! Those small fragments of text—a phrase, a sentence fragment, or even a word—can make an interface really work. We call it microcopy.

Microcopy sits unobtrusively alongside user interface, ready to provide contextual information for a user that needs that extra bit of help or information. It makes visitors feel confident and can help reinforce a client’s brand through tone and style. Typically you see microcopy near interactive elements. Here are some prototypical examples of microcopy found online:

: Status Messages: Google drive keeps you informed that your hard work is okay.

: Form Help: WordPress admin

: Forms: Hotels.com lets you know what you can search for.

: Expectations: BBC lets potential signups know that it won’t post to your feeds.

“Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word… Don’t be deceived by the size of microcopy. It can make or break an interface.”

— Joshua Porter, 2009

Marrying Brightcove and WordPress

Jaimee Ratliff on August 18, 2015 • 1 Comment

When it comes to providing enterprise-class cloud solutions for video delivery and monetization, Brightcove is the biggest game in town.

10up recently teamed up with Brightcove to create Brightcove Video Connect: a beautiful WordPress plugin that leverages the new Video Cloud API to power an intuitive experience for content creators designed to look and feel like an organic extension of WordPress. The plugin features the functionality that media publishers value most, such as easy video uploads and playlist management. We even designed the plugin with extensibility in mind, so that major media companies with unique workflows and presentation requirements can customize and extend their experience.

Sponsoring Sanitize.css

Taylor Lovett on August 13, 2015

In keeping with our commitments and contributions to important open source projects, we’re proud to take on stewardship of sanitize.css. An incredibly popular project by 10up’er Jonathan Neal, sanitize.css makes it easier to engineer website front ends that render consistently across popular browsers.

Elegant in its simplicity and superbly documented, the project already more than meets our engineering standards. More importantly, tools like sanitize.css serve 10up’s mission to create outstanding, dependable content-centric website experiences from front to back, for our clients, and for a bigger open web.

You Got Your Content in My Web Design

John Eckman on August 5, 2015

I’m very excited this week for the Design and Content Conference in Vancouver BC. The conference theme is “Designers and Content Strategists: We’re Better Together,” and the speakers list is a who’s-who of the web design and content strategy worlds, including Ethan Marcotte and Karen McGrane, whose Content Strategy for Mobile was the first detailed, extended discussion of how design and content come together in a multi-device world.

For me, the most important shifts in the web design and development industry in the last decade have been:

The recognition of content strategy as a discipline, and the inclusion of content strategy-driven thinking in web teams. (See Kristina Halvorson’s The Discipline of Content Strategy and Content Strategy for the Web)
The acknowledgement of the impact responsive web design has on the design process, activities, and outputs (See Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design and Responsive Web Design).

As these authors pointed out, neither concept was entirely new. Ethan’s article referenced “A Dao of Web Design” which prescribed “pages which are accessible, regardless of the browser, platform or screen that your reader chooses or must use.”

Catch four 10up speakers at WordCamp Europe

Drew Jaynes on June 26, 2015

WordCamp Europe is this weekend, and four 10uppers have made the trek to Seville, Spain to mingle and share insights.

I will be presenting on Friday on the experience of setting up WordPress for new users, raising questions about how WordPress can continue to drive adoption by catering to that audience. I’ll also be teaching attendees how to write documentation for the handbooks, inline docs, and examples for the code reference.

Director of Platform Helen Hou-Sandi is presenting Developing for Capabilities, covering approaches for mobile, responsive, and accessible development. Lead Engineer Eric Mann will be giving a short talk on Saturday on how to sandbox a development environment with Vagrant. Finally, Senior Engineer Adam Silverstein will talk about Backbone.js and WordPress, in Putting a little Backbone in your WordPress.

With a packed schedule and huge attendance, WordCamp Europe looks to live up to its name once again as the premier WordCamp abroad.

Taylor Lovett on June 12, 2015

10up spans the globe, including Brazil! I will be speaking this weekend at WordCamp Belo Horizonte. I will be presenting on modernizing WordPress search using the 10up plugin ElasticPress. 10upper Thiago Ponte will also be in attendance.

Wanted: Project and Account Managers, Reward for Capture

Christine Garrison on June 12, 2015

10up is widely known for the complex and unique web experiences we produce. We consistently create unparalleled experiences for our clients and while engineering and design is a large part of that, senior project and account management talent are critical to the success of 10up and its clients.

In an effort to thank you for helping us find our next 10upper, we’ll offer you a finders fee of $500 if we decide to hire who you referred. We’ll even go a step further and throw in an additional $500 when they complete a successful 6 month review just to show our appreciation.

We have a talented team of strategists consulting with enterprise clients, leading our engineers and designers, coordinating site launches, and resourcing/planning/managing some pretty exciting projects – and better yet, we are looking to expand the team!

10up at WordCamp Philly

Helen Hou-Sandi on June 11, 2015

Once again, 10up is back for WordCamp Philly! This year, co-organizer and 10upper extraordinaire Doug Stewart will be joined by John Eckman, Allen Moore, and myself as speakers.

On Saturday morning, I’ll be presenting “User-First Approaches to APIs“, which will touch on what we mean by users, what it means to be a maintainer, and the excitement of a potential fields API in WordPress.

Right after that, Allen will be presenting “A Need For Speed: Performance Driven Front End Development,” focused on how front end performance affects User Engagement and Experience; best practices for performance driven front end development; and tools to measure front end performance.

Then John will take us into lunch with “Getting outside the WordPress bubble“, a topic perfect for somebody with deep experiences with other CMS’s and their communities (including commits to Drupal 8!), as well as other communities at large.

WordCamp Philly holds a special place in 10up history, as the place where I first met Jake in 2011 and began my time as an agency-backed core contributor to WordPress. Doug even found this photo from that 2011 contributor day in the archives! We’re really excited about all of the great talks scheduled for Saturday, and what’s sure to be another fantastic contributor day on Sunday.

WordCamp Philly 2011

Sliders, Rotators, and Carousels — Oh no!

Taylor Dewey on June 1, 2015 • 4 Comments

There is evidence to indicate that sliders (or rotators or carousels) are generally ineffective. Engagement with the second slide is precipitously low and engagement with the third slide is near negligible. Assuming visitors see it at all.

As an adaptation to information overload, web users have trained themselves to divert their attention away from areas that seem unimportant or look like advertising.
—Hoa Loranger, NNGroup

Although Loranger was summarizing a study about right-rail blindness, NNGroup has done previous examinations of sliders and found a similar effect. Notre Dame university also studied sliders on their home page and found only 1% of visitors interacted with it at all.

Finally, these interfaces often have usability concerns: microscopic control buttons, odd mobile/touch behavior, and the removal of visitors’ control.

Thorsten Ott on May 30, 2015

There will be several 10uppers presenting this weekend at WordCamp Miami — Taylor Lovett will be presenting on the ins and outs of using Elasticsearch and ElasticPress to make WordPress’ search great, Chris Wiegman will be talking about securing your WordPress installs, and I will be chatting about making Vagrant a greater part of your development workflow.