For the May NoVA UX meetup, Microsoft Dev Evangelist Andrew Duthie gave the group a presentation on the design thinking behind Windows 8. He described three influences–Bauhaus design, Swiss typography, and motion cinematography–and five design principles that guided the team: Continue →
Everywhere you look, people are talking about “mobile.”
Mobile-first design, mobile responsive design, mobile apps, mobile sites, etc.
“Mobile” is clearly a handy buzzword for all of the new devices, but…
What does “mobile” actually mean?
On the go?
A small screen?
A touch screen?
Handheld?
Unfortunately, the term “mobile” is used to describe many different things. Continue →
For Wednesday night’s NoVA UX meetup I moderated a panel discussion about how two local retailers — CustomInk and ThinkGeek — approach user experience design in an e-commerce setting.
Both companies use comprehensive testing strategies, and multiple analytics tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, and Adobe’s Test and Target, to optimize conversions and revenue. Continue →
With spring in the air and the cherry blossoms around DC blooming, it feels like the perfect time to roll out a new blog design, wouldn’t you agree? We rolled it out yesterday afternoon, and since then have received some good feedback – which we appreciate greatly – hopefully you like it as much as we do.
The following is a guest post by AddThis VP of Engineering, Charlie Reverte, posted today at APIUX.com. To read the rest of the blog post, click here to go over to their site.
URL design discussions for RESTful web services often degrade into debates over pluralization and parameter names. There are a couple of principles I like to use to keep things simple. Continue →
Does redesigning a game room count as a hackathon project? I don’t know, but I couldn’t have chosen a better time to join the team! 4 days in a new UX designer, I found myself knee-deep in IKEA furniture and orange paint with fellow A-teamers Jeff, Jim, Foo and Elizabeth. While our super talented developers coded, we began a 24 hour quest to create a fun, comfortable space for meeting, gaming and interviewing. Continue →
For our February NoVA UX meetup, John Whalen (PhD Cognitive Science Johns Hopkins and Founder, Brilliant Experience consultancy) shared his insights and experience about cognitive science with the group. Using videos and interactive examples, he shared learnings about how we perceive, remember, and make decisions, and how those concepts can be applied to user experience design. Continue →
Another successful AddThis Hackathon is in the books! We measure the success of a Hackathon in a few different ways:
For those not familiar with hackathons, they are our 24-hour sprints of innovation. A-Teamers group up, or work alone, on a new project outside of what they are currently working on in their day-to-day. The energy surrounding a hackathon is always fun and familial. They are a very important part of the AddThis culture.
WINNER: Telepresence Roomba Robot
The winning project of this installment of all-night coding was quite impressive. The team went out to solve a common challenge we face at AddThis. Since we have multiple offices across the country, sometimes communicating and collaborating requires extra effort. So, the team created a telepresence robot using a Roomba, a MacBook Air, foamcore and a rocket launcher. And the entire thing was controlled from a Google Hangout! See it in action:
Congratulations to the winning team! It was well deserved.
Honorable Mention: AddThis Garden
The unofficial “runners-up” also deserve Earth Day Award 2012. “AddThis Plant” went on a mission to “green” our new HQ office in Virginia. It is an extensive project of plant growing, caring and loving with the end goal to have a nice array of beautiful oxygen-producing decorations for our work space. Check them out:
And those are just the official winners! There were many other brilliant and noteworthy projects that did not go unnoticed or under-appreciated. Some of which will be used to make everyday AddThis processes more efficient — a win all by itself!
Like this? Check out more posts about AddThis Engineering.
We’re happy to announce major updates to the AddThis sharing tool suite: the new design we’ve been testing in AddThis Labs graduates today, with a slew of new features. Go grab the new code!
We’ve written before about the mind-boggling amount of data every day, and how we use it to provide insights both to our publishers and into trends across our network. But we also use data to drive and refine our own processes and designs. Today, we’ve used what we’ve learned to make sharing even easier, and more personal. That means more engagement from your visitors, more sharing, and more traffic for your site.
First, we have a new look. We’ve streamlined and simplified the compact menu. We’ve made our email form a lot easier to use, like the email clients you’re already familiar with. Our expanded menu’s been optimized for faster sharing to the most popular services in your region, and easier searching for your personal favorites. (As always, we’ll highlight the services you use for even easier sharing next time.) We’ll take advantage of jQuery on pages that already include it for simple but lovely transitions. And while our new platform takes advantage of HTML5 and loads of modern browser features, we won’t leave you out in the cold if you’re stuck on IE6–though, seriously guys, it’s time.
In Labs, the updated design increased sharing by 11%. In production, it’s going to do even better–due to our second major update.
Instant sharing.
Sharing to Facebook or Twitter used to mean popping a new window. That’s fast, but we figured if we made it even faster, more people would be sharing your content. To that end, we’re introducing “instant” inline sharing to the most popular social networks. If your users link their social accounts with AddThis, they’ll be able to share directly to Facebook or Twitter without even leaving your page. The new inline interface means there’s no extra page load–that means more unimpeded sharing. Even better, once a user authenticates, they’ll remain logged in on every single site with AddThis, until they log out. Everybody wins.
Adding social sign in to our sharing tools doesn’t just mean it’s easier to share. It also means it’s a lot easier to personalize your AddThis experience–easily choose the services you want to see once, and you’ll see them across all the sites that use AddThis.
Pain-free pinning.Our recent updates for Pinterest are fully integrated with the new design. We’ve created the simplest and easiest way to integrate with Pinterest: almost no work necessary! Put AddThis on any page you want to make pinnable, and we’ll show a simple, elegant lightbox to showcase all the images on your page for your users to pick from. You can always specify your own image, too, if you want! We’ve found this feature can boost sharing to Pinterest by 20% or more.
You can add all these capabilities to your site with one simple code snippet. Take a look and try it out!
Our plugins for WordPress, Magento, and Shopify will be updated this week to support the new surfaces.
Questions? Comments? As always, we’d love your feedback.
