Digital Transformation

UX design – or user experience design – is aimed at aligning business goals and user goals as closely as possible in mobile apps, websites and pretty much any product. Good UX design can yield incredible improvements in buyer behavior, lead generation, and visitor engagement. UX design works best when it’s an iterative process. With each iteration, a UX designer can identify new opportunities, respond to changes in business goals and user needs, and adapt to current market trends and advances in technology. Fortunately, developing a repeatable UX design process is not rocket science.

Competition in the app marketplace is fierce, to say the least. Everyone and their mothers are jumping aboard the mobile app gravy train in hopes of an express ride to the fabled Money Mountain (which was coincidentally built on Minecraft – Pocket Edition). That excitement may be warranted. Mobile app usage has overtaken desktop web browsing and is starting to challenge TV. Consumers now spend over 2 hours in mobile apps each day. That’s up 35% from last year and rapidly approaching the 168 minutes of television the average U.S. consumer watches per day. It’s not so easy, though, to figure out a mobile app monetization strategy.

Large companies have always relied – well, for the past few decades, anyway – on software applications to provide critical business services. Everything from customer relationships to business intelligence to supply chains is managed with complex software. Big CRM, SCM and other acronym-monikered software programs bring terrific benefits. They streamline most business processes, enable more robust data collection and analysis, and help people communicate better with colleagues, customers and suppliers.

Custom systems integration can deliver major benefits for an organization. At the same time, it’s more often than not a very involved undertaking. A few years ago, it was understood that as many as 70 percent of enterprise application integration projects fail, as reported at an EAI Industry Consortium workshop in 2003. Huge advances have been made in cross-application compatibility since that time. The evolution of application programming interfaces (APIs), for example, has doubtless improved the success of custom systems integration projects.

Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the default point of entry for Internet users. For online businesses, the old “adapt or die” adage rings more true every day. The need for mobile-optimized experiences is clear, but there are multiple approaches to consider. The mobile app vs. mobile site debate has recently expanded to include responsive design. Responsive web design adapts the site layout to the viewing environment. Page elements get resized, repositioned, or hidden as browser resolution changes.

When we were approached by Kaiser Permanente to create a site that could seamlessly sell and deliver healthcare education, we immediately turned to Drupal and Moodle. Drupal provides a versatile front end that supports eCommerce functionality. Moodle offers peerless management capabilities for creating and delivering course content on the back end. Both are open source, highly flexible, and supported by active communities that regularly contribute to their development.

The Learning Management System (LMS) marketplace has evolved rapidly over the past decade. Open source alternatives to Blackboard – Moodle in particular – have not only proved viable, but are now outperforming the leading paid LMS. Independent research has demonstrated that cost of ownership, platform flexibility, ease of use, and student and faculty satisfaction are all areas where Moodle has clearly surpassed Blackboard.

In the fast-paced lives of consumers today, everyone is looking for the advantage that a viable presence on mobile devices offers. With projections of mobile web use matching or even exceeding desktop web use in the next few years, mobile applications already exceeding both, and the ever-expanding mobile device market, it’s past time to jump on this bandwagon. The question is no longer whether on not to invest in a mobile presence, the only question now is what that presence should look like, and how can you invest in it wisely.

On most of our projects, at one point or another, someone says “I think there’s a module for that”, and then they rush off and start searching online. Most of the time, the module DOES exist, and most of the time, it’s really easy to find. It’s all in the wrist… Since Drupal.org’s new theme was released, the search and filtering capability has improved tenfold. If you’re like us, however, you use Google for just about everything. This is just a quick little guide on some of the tricks we learned early on that made searching for Drupal themes and modules much faster.

If you’re familiar with Varnish, you’re well aware of its awesomeness. It can turn your site from a slowpoke into a speed demon. We recently observed a site (which we didn’t build) that was, under load, taking about 800ms to respond per request. In went Varnish, and the response time for 99% of the requests dropped to just over 2ms. Kind of a “Holy crap!” moment. Sometimes though, you might run into some issues when trying to configure Varnish. One of these instances is when you need it to provide different caches in different circumstances. For this tutorial, we’ll be focusing on configuring Varnish to provide a cache per group of devices, defined by user agent. Why is this important? Well, what if you want a different theme for each of these scenarios? Without adding some mechanism to handle this, Varnish will just cache the first thing it sees and serve it out to all of the devices.