In April’s 20 Best New Websites roundup we’ve got some awesome examples of current design trends, and one or two sites that have struck out in their own direction. There’s an experimental typeface, a museum making perfect use of video, and lots of large type. But the two dominant themes are lots of color, and lots of transitions. Enjoy!

Calexo

This incredible site for THC-infused beverages from Calexo, is bursting with color, and positivity. We absolutely love the animated hamburger menu that seems to embody the spirit of the product.

Moderne

Illustration has been a huge trend for the last couple of years, what we love about Moderne’s approach is that it’s embraced the trend, but adopted a completely unique style of illustration that’s certain to spark a trend of its own.

Play

Play is a new app for designing experiences on your phone instead of your desktop. Its site features some awesome, atmospheric product demos, with beautifully shot hand overlays.

bored.solutions

If you’re stuck in lockdown thanks to the coronavirus, or just at a loose end, you’ll appreciate the bored.solutions site which styles a simple collection of links with amazing color blobbing.

Comrad

It’s pretty hard to enthuse about socks, especially as compression socks aren’t the sexiest option, but Comrad’s site does the job perfectly. And check out the social proof, a 3-times Olympic champion no less.

Digital Horizon

Digital Horizon is a venture capitalist investment fund. Its site has some nice slick text transitions, but what really stands out is the incredible use of the animated liquid effect to bring its huge hero image to life.

Érika Moreira

This is a fabulous, simple site for Sao Paulo-based copywriter Érika Moreira. We love the big type, and the creative use of case studies. It’s tough to produce a great portfolio for a writer but this is definitely an awesome example.

Odunpazar? Modern Museum

Set mid-way between Ankara and Istanbul, in Turkey, is Odunpazar? Modern Museum, a modern art gallery that expertly uses video to convey the experience of visiting the current series of exhibits.

MoreSleep

MoreSleep is a Berlin-based agency, with a presence in LA; Its branding makes fascinating use of some exaggerated ink traps, and we love the animated scribble hover states of the links.

Käthe Kollwitz Memorial

The Käthe Kollwitz memorial site is a tribute to the life and work of the Expressionist printmaker. The site features stunning examples of her work, presented alongside large type and splash style color transitions.

The Ruby Company

Blending video, photography, and some woodcut-style illustrations, The Ruby Company’s site conveys a sense of rising to the challenge, with positivity and some excellent UX writing.

Neuro

Neuro sells gum and mints with a hint of caffeine to help you stay calm and focussed. Its modern brand, with bold warm colors, and simple typography, is perfectly pitched for the millennial market.

Ride Out

The intriguingly masked video that introduces us to Ride Out, Amsterdam’s ultimate bike store, does so much to tease the in-store content. And we love the wheel inspired spinning links.

Andrew Benson

Andrew Benson’s site is a crazy single-page site with color, motion, energy, and creative coding. He’s come up with the kind of personal site we loved 20 years ago.

Ballsystem

Ballsystem is an Italian company that smooths out dents in vehicle bodywork. What we love about this site is that every transition, state change, and animation is super smooth, mimicking the company’s product.

Basic

Basic is a West-coast experience design and branding agency with an exceptional site. There’s awesome attention to detail, from the barely-noticeable glitch effect in the background, to the graceful state transitions.

Mosaic Foods

Any food site needs to have great photography, which Mosaic achieves, but we’re also fans of the organic, natural-feeling shapes and colors, and the carefully considered user experience.

Capo La Gala

The site for Capo La Gala perfectly captures the glamor and light of the Gulf of Naples. With views to both Capri and Vesuvius, the site makes great use of photography combined with video.

Yuta Onoda

The real strength of Yuta Onoda’s site is having the confidence to present such great work, in such a simple format. It’s a fantastic example of invisible design, and less is more.

Max

Max is an experimental typeface that would be perfect for somebody’s branding project. It’s a variable font, and the promotional site is a fun digital playground. This is one time when a dark mode option really does help.

Source

While we’ve always known that injecting humor into situations makes the mood lighter, we have hard data showing that comedy sells products.

A worldwide survey conducted by Nielsen revealed that humor consistently ranks high as an advertising theme compared to others such as family, pets, or even sex, no matter where the market is located.

A great example of a business that put this theory into practice is the mattress company Purple. The Youtube ad, The Goldilocks Bed Experiment, has 186,189,435 views at the time of posting.

It’s incredibly funny. More importantly, the ad helped drive $75 million in sales in 2016.

Now that you know how much humor can change your business’s bottom line, the question becomes, how do you go about adding humor and comedy into your brand? We’ve come up with five steps for turning your dull brand into something that gives people just the right amount of laughs while maintaining credibility.

Find your brand voice

Establishing your brand voice is the first step in making sure that people recall your company and the products you sell. Your brand voice should be situated at the crossroads between what you want your brand to tell your customers and what you believe your customers should feel about the company. Ideally, you should be able to sum up your brand voice in a couple of words.

Below are some questions you could ask to help define your brand voice:

• If your brand was a person, how would you describe them?
• How would you describe your competition?
• Do you see your brand as an underdog and your rivals as some Goliath?
• What differentiates you from the other brands operating in your space?

If your business provides a time clock app, as we do, you might summarize your brand voice as “reliable, accurate, easy.” Alternatively, you might choose to go for “fun, accessible, stable” instead. Whatever happens, your brand voice should be well-defined and stand for what your business wants to become, even if your brand tone changes according to the situation.

Focus on a pain point

All successful brands fill a need. It is your job as a marketer to understand the customer’s needs and address them. These problems are known as “pain points,” and your products should be able to solve some or all of them. If you can address pain points consistently, you will win new customers and retain existing ones.

Marketing experts often categorize pain points into four broad categories:

• Financial: Customers feel that they are spending a lot but are not getting their money’s worth from their current product or service provider. They want to get more bang for their buck.
• Productivity: People want to save time or increase productivity using a solution similar to the one you provide.
• Support: They want support to help them achieve their goal. It might even be, they want to purchase from a company they can rely on because it has first-rate customer support.
• Process: Customers want to streamline their processes to ensure that all bases are covered. This might involve searching for a tool with increased functionality. There is an overlap here with productivity.

You need to identify the specific pain points your product solves, and present your products accordingly. Listing your audience’s pain points is important because it will help you define your content marketing strategy.

Keep in mind; the pain points don’t need to be specific to the problem you are solving. For example, you’ll find companies that feel that “entertaining their audience” is an important element of their content marketing strategy. The burger chain Wendy’s is a great example. More on this later.

Choose your kind of humor

“Humor” is a broad term. What you find funny can be considered corny or even offensive by some people. How do you establish a sense of humor that customers will find engaging?

The humor that you choose should be true to your brand. It should also speak to your audience and make them spill their coffee, not roll their eyes. To start with, you need to decide how frequently and where you should inject humor into your marketing content.

Spotify is an excellent example. As each year draws to a close, Spotify puts together campaigns that utilize user data as inspiration.

If a company executed these ads in another industry like banking or insurance, they might be seen as intrusive or even a violation of data privacy rules. However, Spotify pulls it off with a sprinkling of humor that pokes fun at people’s musical tastes. They even call out misspelled playlist titles with rib-tickling results.

Humor in branding isn’t just confined to advertising. Some brands use their HTTP 404 error pages to showcase their unique sense of humor.

Hub09, an Italian advertising agency, uses a series of animated GIFs of people doing the facepalm to express their disappointment that you were not able to find the page you were looking for. If you look through the rest of Hub09’s website, you will quickly realize that the 404 page is consistent with the rest of their brand voice.

Choosing your humor consists of two things: knowing your audience and understanding what makes them laugh. If you’ve got these two right, you’re on the right track.

Create Your Tribe

We all identify ourselves with labels, and we group people in the same way. For example, think of these terms:

• Hipster
• Punk
• Hippy

There are probably people in your social group who you’d label with one of these terms. Even if you don’t know people who identify with these social labels, you could probably describe some shared characteristics of people in each group.

This phenomenon is relevant to business. When people choose to purchase from a company, they often identify with your brand over another. You can play on this by exploiting a “them versus us” mentality using humor.

Some brands are a lot better than others at this. Others just rule over the pretenders.

Let’s take fast-food chain Wendy’s as an example. On the surface, Wendy’s just looks like your average burger joint with a freckled, family-friendly logo that conspiracy theorists claim says “MOM”.

Wendy’s is known for hitting the competition where it hurts on social media. For example, when McDonald’s announced that they were switching over to fresh beef Quarter Pounder burger patties in most of their restaurants the social media team at Wendy’s were quick to react.

It’s a humorous exchange. Wendy’s are indirectly stating that they use fresh meat in all of their restaurants all of the time. It’s humor that seeks to emphasize the difference in product quality between these two competing companies.

As a result of this brash but calculated approach to social media, Wendy’s has cemented its reputation as the King of Fast Food Twitter. While this approach may not work for your brand and industry, it’s an excellent example of the magic that can happen when you identify your brand voice and put together a competent team. Speaking of a team…

Find a team that can work with your sense of humor

A joke’s success depends heavily on delivery. You may have some really funny material, but if your branding team or ad agency does not know how to execute it, your campaign will end up falling flat on its face.

You don’t have to hire any of the big names like McCann or Ogilvy just to put together a funny marketing campaign. Some of the funniest people around don’t even work in ad agencies.

It’s always good to find and reach out to people who can look at your brand and products with a fresh set of eyes and see something funny in them. Where do you find these people?

Humor is pretty much hit-and-miss, and we have no guarantee that the same things people find funny now will still be funny today. Nevertheless, if you are clear on what you are looking for, you can try and discover creatives capable of producing such content.

Once you’ve assembled your comedy crew, put them all together in a room for a day or two and leave them the heck alone. This is when ideas start coming out. Of course, you shouldn’t discount the little gems of humor they drop outside isolation, but whatever they come up with during the brainstorming session should form the germ of your humor-infused branding.

Conclusion

Some brands have been amazingly successful as a result of injecting humor into their marketing, while others do better when they keep it serious. If your business does decide to inject humor into your brand, it has to be the result of a long and intensive thought process.

Your humor should be aligned with your brand voice and goals. More difficult to achieve is to find a branding team that can spot opportunities for humor. This might take a while to achieve. However, if your business can learn how to take advantage of humor, you can rapidly increase your reach, engage your core audience, and turn more prospects into customers.

You make sure the text is more than twice the width of the screen, then use negative translate animations to do the marquee movement.

You’ll probably want to aria-hidden all but one of them if you need to duplicate the text. Or, you could use a very clever CSS trick to “duplicate” the text using text-shadow.

Nice to see prefers-reduced-motion in there stopping the effect when it should be.

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Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

55+ Best Free Fonts

Colors.lol – Overly Descriptive Color Palettes

Reactive Resume: Free and Open-Source Resume Builder

Cross-Cultural Design: 4 Ways to Get Started

Productivity: The Ultimate Guide

Spicypass – Free and Open-Source Minimalist Password Manager

12+ Low-Code and No-Code Development Platforms

UX Myths to Forget in 2020

United Nations Issues an Open Brief to Designers to Help Fight Coronavirus

Best Infographic Makers in 2020

27 Best Movies & Documentaries for Creatives

6 Underestimated Soft Skills that will Make You a Better Designer

Design Trend: Mono Gradients

Not Safe for Design, a Creative Challenge Generator

Top 4 Tips on How to Build an Effective Design System

Social Distancing Logos are the Design Equivalent of ‘Thoughts and Prayers’

The Best Alternatives to Zoom for Videoconferencing

A Complete Guide to Wireframe Design

Top 5 Mockup Tools for Web Designers in 2020

A New Color Contrast Analyser that Suggests Better Colors

How to Build a Bad Design System

What Should You do When a Web Design Trend Becomes Too Popular?

How Organize your Text Styles in Sketch

Basecamp’s Jason Fried on the Learning Curve of Remote Work

How to Write UX Copy that Makes your Product a Joy to Use

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

Source

I just can’t stop bookmarking great links related to typography. I’m afraid I’m going to have to subject you, yet again, to a bunch of them all grouped up. So those of you that care about web type stuff, enjoy.

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I know there are lots of good reasons to be excited about variable fonts. The design possibilities of endless variations in one file is chief among them. But I remain the most excited about the performance benefits. Having a single file that elegantly handles the thicker weights (for bolding) and italics is so cool. I can’t wait to wave my fist saying back in my day we had to load multiple files for our font variations!

Mandy Michael digs into the performance implications in a deeper way than just reducing the number of requests.

Even if you consider the slightly larger file sizes, when combined with improved font compression formats like WOFF2, font subsetting and font loading techniques like font-display: swap; we end up in a situation where we can still get smaller overall font file sizes as well as a significant increase in stylistic opportunity.

---

Anna Monus did some variable font performance testing as well, evaluating the extreme case of loading 12 variations of a font against a variable font. Even though the copy of the variable font she had for Roboto was massive (over 1MB), there was a perf gain compared against loading 12 variations.

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Roboto is on Google Fonts, of course, and it’s got the #1 position by far. But Google Fonts has Inter now, and I’d expect that leap up in the charts as it’s got a style that everyone seems to like and can work with just about anything.

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Seeing a variable font control a smiley face is never not gonna make me happy. Don’t miss that first face-ness slider, lollllz.

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Klint Finley on the proliferation of high-quality open-source fonts for WIRED. Sometimes they are backed by companies with thick wallets, which makes sense. But the motivation for doing it varies. Sometimes quality is the goal. Like open-source anything, lots of contributions, can, if handled well, lead to a better product. But open-source doesn’t always mean there isn’t a business possibility, and if not, not everyone cares about turning a profit on everything.

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Speaking of open-source fonts, Collletttivo is an open-source font foundry with a good dozen typefaces, including a variable font one. It’s a super fun site to explore with the little fake windows you open up and move around.

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There’s a new mac app called FontGoggles for poking into a font file and taking a look at what it offers. Seems like that would be easy but it really isn’t. I like that it supports WOFF/2 as that’s pretty much all we deal with on the web.

Also, remember there is a website that looks around in font files with the best name ever.

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Font Match allows you to put fonts on top of each other for comparisons. Seems like it’s more for large type and comparing their features, while Font style matcher is more about comparing paragraph text.

In fact, using Font style matcher to make a perfect font fallback is one of my all-time favorite CSS-Tricks. Sssshh… don’t tell anybody but I’m compiling those all-time favorites into a book, like this chapter. You’d have to subscribe to read it, because that’s kind of the point: I’d like to sell the book. So if you happen to subscribe now, there is stuff to read there, but you’d be a very early supporter for the rest of it.

The post Some Typography Links appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

JavaScript and CSS have lived beside one another for upwards of 20 years. And yet it’s been remarkably tough to share data between them. There have been large attempts, sure. But, I have something simple and intuitive in mind — something not involving a structural change, but rather putting CSS custom properties and even Sass variables to use.

CSS custom properties and JavaScript

Custom properties shouldn’t be all that surprising here. One thing they’ve always been able to do since browsers started supporting them is work alongside JavaScript to set and manipulate the values.

Specifically, though, we can use JavaScript with custom properties in a few ways. We can set the value of a custom property using setProperty:

document.documentElement.style.setProperty("--padding", 124 + "px"); // 124px

We can also retrieve CSS variables using getComputedStyle in JavaScript. The logic behind this is fairly simple: custom properties are part of the style, therefore, they are part of computed style.

getComputedStyle(document.documentElement).getPropertyValue('--padding') // 124px

Same sort of deal with getPropertyValue. That let us get the custom property value from an inlined style from HTML markup.

document.documentElement.style.getPropertyValue("--padding'"); // 124px

Note that custom properties are scoped. This means we need to get computed styles from a particular element. As we previously defined our variable in :root we get them on the HTML element.

Sass variables and JavaScript

Sass is a pre-processing language, meaning it’s turned into CSS before it ever is a part of a website. For that reason, accessing them from JavaScript in the same way as CSS custom properties — which are accessible in the DOM as computed styles — is not possible.

We need to modify our build process to change this. I doubt there isn’t a huge need for this in most cases since loaders are often already part of a build process. But if that’s not the case in your project, we need three modules that are capable of importing and translating Sass modules.

Here’s how that looks in a webpack configuration:

module.exports = {
 // ...
 module: {
  rules: [
   {
    test: /.scss$/,
    use: ["style-loader", "css-loader", "sass-loader"]
   },
   // ...
  ]
 }
};

To make Sass (or, specifically, SCSS in this case) variables available to JavaScript, we need to “export” them.

// variables.scss
$primary-color: #fe4e5e;
$background-color: #fefefe;
$padding: 124px;

:export {
  primaryColor: $primary-color;
  backgroundColor: $background-color;
  padding: $padding;
}

The :export block is the magic sauce webpack uses to import the variables. What is nice about this approach is that we can rename the variables using camelCase syntax and choose what we expose.

Then we import the Sass file (variables.scss) file into JavaScript, giving us access to the variables defined in the file.

import variables from './variables.scss';

/*
 {
  primaryColor: "#fe4e5e"
  backgroundColor: "#fefefe"
  padding: "124px"
 }
*/

document.getElementById("app").style.padding = variables.padding;

There are some restrictions on the :export syntax that are worth calling out:

• It must be at the top level but can be anywhere in the file.
• If there is more than one in a file, the keys and values are combined and exported together.
• If a particular exportedKey is duplicated, the last one (in the source order) takes precedence.
• An exportedValue may contain any character that’s valid in CSS declaration values (including spaces).
• An exportedValue does not need to be quoted because it is already treated as a literal string.

There are lots of ways having access to Sass variables in JavaScript can come in handy. I tend to reach for this approach for sharing breakpoints. Here is my breakpoints.scs file, which I later import in JavaScript so I can use the matchMedia() method to have consistent breakpoints.

// Sass variables that define breakpoint values
$breakpoints: (
  mobile: 375px,
  tablet: 768px,
  // etc.
);

// Sass variables for writing out media queries
$media: (
  mobile: '(max-width: #{map-get($breakpoints, mobile)})',
  tablet: '(max-width: #{map-get($breakpoints, tablet)})',
  // etc.
);

// The export module that makes Sass variables accessible in JavaScript
:export {
  breakpointMobile: unquote(map-get($media, mobile));
  breakpointTablet: unquote(map-get($media, tablet));
  // etc.
}

Animations are another use case. The duration of an animation is usually stored in CSS, but more complex animations need to be done with JavaScript’s help.

// animation.scss
$global-animation-duration: 300ms;
$global-animation-easing: ease-in-out;

:export {
  animationDuration: strip-unit($global-animation-duration);
  animationEasing: $global-animation-easing;
}

Notice that I use a custom strip-unit function when exporting the variable. This allows me to easily parse things on the JavaScript side.

// main.js
document.getElementById('image').animate([
  { transform: 'scale(1)', opacity: 1, offset: 0 },
  { transform: 'scale(.6)', opacity: .6, offset: 1 }
], {
  duration: Number(variables.animationDuration),
  easing: variables.animationEasing,
});

---

It makes me happy that I can exchange data between CSS, Sass and JavaScript so easily. Sharing variables like this makes code simple and DRY.

There are multiple ways to achieve the same sort of thing, of course. Les James shared an interesting approach in 2017 that allows Sass and JavaScript to interact via JSON. I may be biased, but I find the approach we covered here to be the simplest and most intuitive. It doesn’t require crazy changes to the way you already use and write CSS and JavaScript.

Are there other approaches that you might be using somewhere? Share them here in the comments — I’d love to see how you’re solving it.

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It’s good!

I’ve written up my advice (sprinkled with great advice from others), but this is way more straightforward nuts-and-bolts training on technical writing. It’s structured like an actual course, with exercises along the way.

I’m far from an expert here. But between Geoff and I, we end up doing a lot of technical article editing for the sake of clarity.

Comedy writers seek the funniest results, horror writers strive for the scariest, and technical writers aim for the clearest. In technical writing, clarity takes precedence over all other rules.

It can be tricky to get right. Read the section on Active voice. That’s easy for anyone to get wrong.

Essentially every single rule is just an extension of “make it more clear.”

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The healthcare industry is focused on saving people’s lives and maintaining our well-being so it’s critical to empower it with the latest technologies. From electronic health records to AI-powered virtual nurses, healthcare is now undergoing a massive technological transformation.

It can be rather tempting to rush into digitization, especially considering all the benefits that it brings. However, there are certain issues that need to be considered in order to implement a really valuable and suitable solution.

Security of the data

The healthcare industry processes incredibly massive amounts of sensitive patients’ data on a daily basis. At the same time, statistics reveal that this industry is the most affected by the data breaches and in 2019, over 60% of the personal data breaches were caused by a human error, including response to phishing emails and loss of paper records.

Thus, if you think about digitizing your processes and patients’ records management, the first thing to pay attention to is data security. Once you transfer the data from paper records into digital format, you will expose it to both external and internal threats. Here are a few recommendations on safeguarding the data.

Implement automation

One of the primary causes of the data leak is incorrect data management like sending a patient’s record to a wrong receiver. To prevent such mistakes and mitigate the possible risks, it is highly recommended to automate all possible data-related processes such as data input in the system and data exchange processes. As well, automation of data retrieval and input will contribute to better data quality, which, in turn, will impact the incorrect decisions that are based on this data.

Secure the data exchange process

When the data is being exchanged online, there is always a possibility of a hacker’s attack. To minimize the chances of data theft and to keep your channels secure, consider implementing the following practices:

• Use VPN,
• Use SSL/TLS protocols,
• Use two-factor authentication,
• Encrypt the data and store all the passwords in an encrypted format,
• Use REST API for API protection,
• Use authentication for the APIs.

These are the most common ways to protect the process of data transmission. As well, pay extreme attention to the database security and user roles and their level of access.

Big Data management

Big Data means an incredibly large volume of data that a business proceeds on a daily basis. Big Data includes data from all possible sources such as medical records, social media, wearables, and contains information in different sizes and formats.

One cannot underestimate the role of Big Data in modern healthcare. Some of the most significant applications of Big Data are:

• Predictive analytics and prevention of diseases (i.e. cancer prevention),
• Faster and more accurate research of new treatments,
• More accurate diagnosis,
• Computer vision for disease detection.

And don’t forget that Big Data serves as a cornerstone for Machine Learning, which, in turn, is used to design highly personalized virtual assistants for the patients and the doctors and is deployed in multiple ways.

So what are the biggest challenges in Big Data implementation and management?

First, you need to decide how you are going to collect the data and which sources you will be using. It is preferable to automate the process of data collection in order to save time and resources. Second, all the collected data needs to be “cleaned”: meaning, it has to be in one format, has no missing values, etc. As well, you will have to choose the suitable tools for data collection, cleaning, parsing, and analysis.

In order to overcome these challenges, you need to carefully evaluate the available resources (such as finances and IT infrastructure) and craft a thorough plan on implementing Big Data management.

Choice of the needed platform

Digitization means turning your healthcare processes into digital format and that means, you will need a suitable platform to manage them. It can be a CRM platform, an EHR platform, online consultation platforms, and much more – the choice is really big. So once you decide to adopt such a platform, here are the questions that you will need to answer:

• What is the primary goal of using this platform?
• What exact functions does it have to have?
• What are the requirements for the platform?
• Who will be using the platform?

As well, you will need to choose between a ready product or a custom solution. The biggest advantage of a readymade product is its affordable cost and immediate availability but the product might lack some features that are critical for you. A custom solution, on the other hand, will be tailored precisely to your needs but will cost much more and will also take a significant amount of time to be developed.

Employee training

Healthcare is a rather conservative industry and many healthcare institutions and companies are still not ready for a change. One of the reasons for that lies in the mindset of the people who work in these facilities so one of the primary issues to address during digitization is training and education.

You will need to determine who will be involved in the digital transformation and what roles and responsibilities each user will have. As well, you will need to organize sufficient training to ensure that everyone understands how new technology functions. This is an absolute must in order to prevent human errors and technology malfunction.

Last but not least is informing everyone across the organization about the upcoming change and emphasizing the value and importance of this new adoption. When people do not fully understand a certain concept, they tend to neglect it and that means, the adoption of new technology will bring zero change to your processes.

Focus on the value

The biggest temptation for any company or organization is to rush into adopting an innovative technology without fully comprehending the value behind it. So the big question here: do you really need to digitize your processes?

In most cases, it would be a definite yes since digitization helps healthcare become more accurate, efficient, and value-centric. At the same time, many companies do not really need to adopt Machine Learning, Big Data processing tools, or AI-powered devices. What they need most of the time is facilitating and speeding up their processes by simply transforming the paper records into electronic ones or adopting a system that would keep all the data and facilitate communication between the medical specialists.

So before planning the next big step, outline the value that your patients and your employees will receive from this implementation. Only after that, you will be able to come up with a solid strategy for the next steps and will remain within the budget and set deadlines.

I know this might seem like an odd question to ask. After all, it’s not like we’re living in a villain-filled Gotham City in need of saving.

When it comes to asking the question, “Can web designers save the world?”, I look at it like this:

Superheroes don’t exist in real life, so there’s no way that one single person on this planet is going to “save” the world — web designer or otherwise. But heroes that fight small battles that add up to larger wins for humanity? They certainly do exist and web designers collectively have the ability to help shape and save the world this way.

How Can Web Designers Save the World?

We see it all the time from those around us: People who donate blood regularly; Volunteers who rebuild homes and cities after natural disasters; Households that practice sustainability through recycling and composting.

These might seem like small acts of kindness on an individual level, but when you put everyone’s efforts together, there’s a lot of good being done for the world.

Web designers can make contributions of their own, too.

1. Work for Clients Doing Good

I know it can be hard to be picky about who you work with. But when you reach a point in your design career where your revenue stream is stable and you feel confident saying “no” to clients that aren’t a good fit, you may want to factor this in.

In other words, rather than say “yes” because a client can afford your rates, build websites for businesses that:

• Have sustainable initiatives;
• Lend support to their local communities;
• Take really good care of their employees;
• Build products that make the world a better place;
• And so on…

By building websites for companies like these, you’ll empower them to spread their positive messages and missions far and wide.

2. Design Accessible Websites

It’s not just the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes a “web for all”. Accessibility is an innate human right that governments are now taking action to protect as well.

As a web designer, you have a crucial role to play in this. If you aren’t yet in the habit of making your websites accessible, today is as good a time as any to start.

Keep in mind that it’s not just about making a website easy for impaired visitors to navigate or see. Accessibility means making it so that everyone can access a website equally. For instance, building a progressive web app would allow a business to get its website into the hands of people in developing parts of the world that might not always have fast or reliable Internet access.

So, don’t forget to think outside the box for accessible solutions.

3. Practice Ethical Web Design

The Internet has done a lot of good for this world, but as we grow more permanently connected to it and our devices, users have begun to experience a slew of negative side effects.

While you don’t want to keep people from the web or the companies and services they need, you can make better choices about how you design online experiences for them. Namely, you can use ethical design features and techniques to encourage healthier online habits.

Many apps, for example, now come with daily time reminders.

Although this solution wouldn’t work for a website, you could try to accomplish something similar by reducing the number of push notifications or emails sent from your site. You use these elements to promote re-engagement with your website, so by reducing how many or how frequently they go out, you can keep users from aggravating their addiction to the web or their smartphones.

4. Use Eco-Friendly Design Tactics

If you want to help save the physical planet we’re on, utilizing eco-friendly or sustainable design practices would be a good idea. You may be using many of them already without actually knowing it.

For instance, many leading web hosting providers are investing in renewable energy to power their infrastructure and, consequently, their customers’ websites. It’s a simple thing — switching to a “green” web hosting plan — but it can have a significant impact on the planet as more and more companies head in that direction.

Certain choices you make for the websites you build can help the planet as well. For example, by creating more efficient user pathways, people won’t spend as much time on your website and, hopefully, online. Even things like minimal design, image optimization, and caching can help as your server doesn’t have to waste so much energy trying to serve it to visitors.

5. Lend Your Skills During Global Crises

As I was looking over recent research and reports for web designers, I discovered an article from Dr. Stephanie Evergreen on Fast Company. It suggested that web designers had an important part to play during global crises, like the Coronavirus pandemic.

As a data visualization specialist, she knows how much easier it is for consumers to understand data and directives when it’s designed visually. And we’re not just talking about laying out statistics in a table. She cites various examples of creative graphics that spell out difficult-to-understand concepts.

This graphic on the Australian Government Department of Health homepage, for instance, is a good example of that in action:

The graphic on the left could’ve just been a boring text banner (like the one on the right) or, worse, a cheesy stock image of people coughing. Instead, the designer made a great choice by creatively depicting and labeling the most common symptoms of the virus.

Whether you’re tasked with designing something like this to help in a crisis, or you normally work with medical or scientific organizations, your ability to translate quantifiable data into beautiful graphics can make a world of difference.

Wrap-Up

Will you, as one web designer, be able to save the world? Eh, probably not. But your contribution made alongside other web designers definitely will.

Just remember that saving the world isn’t always about cleaning up the planet or locking away criminals. The people that you choose to work with, the design techniques you use, and the kinds of websites you put out into the world can have an impact, too.

Featured image via Unsplash.

Source

Timing is everything. Not just in movies but everywhere.

An employee survey is a powerful tool for employers and management. Transforming the company culture and enhancing employee experience is now taking the centre stage in the business world. The only way to nurture a good organizational culture is adapting with the rapid changes and constantly improving it. And like they say, the first step to improvement is measurement.

If you conduct employee surveys effectively it can do wonders for your organization. It can give you deep insights about the culture, track improvement and reveal problem areas of an organization. Focusing on the right area makes the surveys much more efficient, so it’s vital for you to know how to create a survey.

But it is equally crucial to tap the insights from your employees in the right time and right manner.

To get the timing right, here are 5 important factors that you should consider before circulating an Employee Survey:

1. Purpose of the Survey

Every employee survey should have a well defined and specific purpose. When you establish the purpose, it will help you in narrowing down the best time when the particular survey will be able to gauge most honest and meaningful responses. For example, you may wish to run the survey to track employee engagement, learn about the work environment, ask about the onboarding process and so on. If you want to make changes to the work environment, running a survey 2-3 weeks ahead of planning to understand your employees’ needs and preferences would be a great idea.

2. The types of Survey

Traditionally employee surveys are run once in two years or annually. These are long-form surveys that consist of over 50 Questions from all areas of the organization. Annual or Bi-annual surveys are circulated towards the end of the year. Although this particular form of survey offers some useful insights there is often a huge gap in the timeline between employee needs and action by the management.

Presently most employee surveys are pulse surveys. These are short-form, frequent and fast surveys that typically ask targeted questions to uncover specific company concerns. As the name suggests, pulse surveys try to grab the pulse of the workplace.

There is no right time for running pulse surveys, they should be run frequently typically once a week, to keep a continuous check on your employees attitude.

A combination of an annual long-form survey and frequent pulse survey can give the best results.

3. The Key junctures in Employee Lifecycle

Apart from running regular and annual surveys, there are certain stages in the employee lifecycle where a survey can give you insightful and extremely important information about the company and its culture.

Four most important junctures are:

1. Employee Onboarding: New employees in the workplace are like new kids in school. They are nervous, excited and full of positive energy. They naturally have high expectations from the employer and the company. When you run a survey among them they bring a fresh perspective to the table. Their outlook reflects how the company is perceived on the outside of the organization. Their answers can also act like baseline data to track their engagement and commitment to the company in the long run.
2. Work Anniversaries: Another important point in the employee journey that you can’t miss out on is the work anniversaries. Work anniversaries are significant milestones for your employees, they are the equivalent of birthdays in our personal lives. When employees cross the threshold of a year in the organization they get a well-rounded idea about the strengths and weak points. They gain a deeper understanding of the company goals and values, the work environment and the overall culture of the company. Also, work anniversaries are a great opportunity to understand what makes employees stay in the company. So next time you have a work anniversary coming up, make sure to conduct a survey.
3. Employee Review Processes: Next thing that I like to mention is posting an employee review. Every organization has its own employee review processes and most often than not these are hard to get right. Feedback is crucial in performance management, both from the employer and employees. Once the review process is over, employees should be asked to answer a set of questions regarding the process. Employees can either be happy about a promotion or appraisal or they may feel that their promotion was long overdue. Either way, the responses will give a good idea about the effectiveness of your performance management structure. It will throw the light of possible shortcomings and help in further improving the evaluation process.
4. Exit Interviews: Letting good employees go is hard for any organization. Often an employee’s decision to leave a company is due to multiple reasons. While some reasons are inevitable, most of the time the reasons are avoidable. Instead of turning your back on your outgoing employees, you should try to understand the factors that led to this. Although it might sound unnecessary, these surveys often are good sources to uncover lesser-known problems in the company. It can add value immensely to your employee retention strategies.

4. Understanding employee psychology

At different times of the year your employees’ psychology will differ and they might have different responses to the questions asked in the survey. As much as possible avoid running a survey during these touch-points. If they are too stressed at a certain point maybe before big project launch, it’s probably not the best time to collect responses. Similarly, if they are too relaxed and overjoyed maybe after an office team party, it is again not a great time to seek answers. The reason is simple, the purpose of running a survey is to gather honest and actionable responses that can be helpful in the betterment of the organization. You don’t want to collect too harsh or too satisfied responses just for the sake of it.

5. Outcomes and Action Plan

The final and most important when it comes to circulating a survey is having an action plan in hand. The management should only run a survey when they are willing and absolutely committed to acting on the results. Simply running a survey or collecting responses is not enough. Keep note that the time period between running a survey and taking a necessary action should be minimum. This is crucial to make the most of the survey process.

Final Words

Running well-designed employee surveys is a scientific way to gauge employee engagement and employee satisfaction. Being mindful about what you are asking, how you are asking and when you’re asking can be detrimental to the success of the survey. Additionally, try to keep the survey questions simple, short and anonymous. The survey shouldn’t cause fatigue among employees. The above are a few suggestions from my personal experiences, feel free to share your thoughts on the comment section below.