Karen McGrane is a content strategist and website accessibility advocate, who wrote a book called Content Strategy for Mobile. [1]
McGrane teaches Design Management at School of Visual Arts in New York. [2] Her design philosophy is "every company is a technology company" and "every business is in the user experience business." [3] McGrane was an early proponent of designing web content for mobile devices and is a frequent speaker at technology conferences. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] She was also the co-executive producer, with Jared Spool, of the UX Advantage Conference and cohost of the UX Advantage podcast. [9] She co-hosted the Responsive Web Design podcast from 2014-2018 with Ethan Marcotte. [10]
McGrane has done user experience design work for many major media companies including Condé Nast, Disney, and Citibank; in her position at Razorfish she was the design lead on the New York Times' 2006 redesign. [11] [12] Prior to that she was Vice President and National Lead for User Experience at Razorfish where she was their first information architect hire in 1998. [13] In August 2020 she co-founded the consultancy Autogram with Ethan Marcotte and Jeff Eaton. [14]
Content Strategy for Mobile was published in 2012 by A Book Apart. [15] It has been called an essential guide for people publishing serial content online, one that has a clear "plan of action." [16] [17] McGrane advocates for "adaptive content," small chunks of content that can appear on different platforms and in different contexts. [18] For this to happen, content needs to have good metadata and exist within a content management system which is itself easy to use. [18] Companies also need to do research into both their audience needs and the approaches of their competition in order to do this effectively. [17] If done correctly, web content will "work everywhere, all the time." [19]
She published her second book, Going Responsive, with A Book Apart in 2015. [20]
McGrane has a BA in American Studies and Philosophy from the University of Minnesota and a Master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Human Computer interaction. [21]
Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design ; authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design ; and search engine optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term "web design" is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end design of a website including writing markup. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.
Drupal is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide and 1.2% of the top 10 million websites—ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites. Systems also use Drupal for knowledge management and for business collaboration.
A technical writer is a professional information communicator whose task is to transfer information between two or more parties, through any medium that best facilitates the transfer and comprehension of the information. Technical writers research and create information through a variety of delivery media. Example types of information include online help, manuals, white papers, design specifications, project plans, and software test plans. With the rise of e-learning, technical writers are increasingly becoming involved with creating online training material.
Jeffrey Zeldman is an American entrepreneur, web designer, author, podcaster and speaker on web design. He is the co-founder of A List Apart Magazine and the Web Standards Project. He also founded the design studios Happy Cog and studio.zeldman, and co-founded the A Book Apart imprint and the design conference An Event Apart.
Technical communication is used to convey scientific, engineering, or other technical information. Individuals in a variety of contexts and with varied professional credentials engage in technical communication. Some individuals are designated as technical communicators or technical writers. These individuals use a set of methods to research, document, and present technical processes or products. Technical communicators may put the information they capture into paper documents, web pages, computer-based training, digitally stored text, audio, video, and other media. The Society for Technical Communication defines the field as any form of communication that focuses on technical or specialized topics, communicates specifically by using technology, or provides instructions on how to do something. More succinctly, the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators defines technical communication as factual communication, usually about products and services. The European Association for Technical Communication briefly defines technical communication as "the process of defining, creating and delivering information products for the safe, efficient and effective use of products ".
Audible is an American online audiobook and podcast service that allows users to purchase and stream audiobooks and other forms of spoken word content. This content can be purchased individually or under a subscription model where the user receives "credits" that can be redeemed for content monthly and receive access to a curated on-demand library of content. Audible is the United States' largest audiobook producer and retailer. The service is owned by Audible, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., headquartered in Newark, New Jersey.
Progressive enhancement is a strategy in web design that puts emphasis on web content first, allowing everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, whilst users with additional browser features or faster Internet access receive the enhanced version instead. Additionally, it speeds up loading and facilitates crawling by web search engines, as pages' text is loaded immediately through the HTML source code rather than having to wait for JavaScript to initiate and load the content subsequently, meaning content ready for consumption "out of the box" is served imminently, not behind additional layers.
User experience design is the process of defining the experience a user would go through when interacting with a company, its services, and its products. Design decisions in UX design are often driven by research, data analysis, and test results rather than aesthetic preferences and opinions. Unlike user interface design, which focuses solely on the design of a computer interface, UX design encompasses all aspects of a user's perceived experience with a product or website, such as its usability, usefulness, desirability, brand perception, and overall performance. UX design is also an element of the customer experience (CX), which encompasses all aspects and stages of a customer's experience and interaction with a company.
Designing with Web Standards, first published in 2003 with revised editions in 2007 and 2009, is a web development book by Jeffrey Zeldman. The book’s audience is primarily web development professionals who aim to produce design work that complies with web standards. The work is used as a textbook in over 85 colleges.
Jaime Levy is an American author, lecturer, interface designer, and user experience strategist. She first became known for her new media projects in the 1990s. Her best-known projects include the floppy disk distributed with Billy Idol’s album Cyberpunk, WORD, an online magazine, and an online cartoon series, CyberSlacker. She is the author of the business book UX Strategy, which was first published by O’Reilly Media in 2015. It is widely regarded as the definitive work on the practice of user experience strategy and has been translated into nine languages.
Jared Spool is an American writer, researcher, speaker, educator, and an expert on the subjects of usability, software, design, and research. He is the founding principal of User Interface Engineering (UIE), a research, training, and consulting firm that specializes in website and product usability. He is also an amateur magician. Spool attended Niskayuna High School in Niskayuna, NY.
Responsive web design (RWD) or responsive design is an approach to web design that aims to make web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes from minimum to maximum display size to ensure usability and satisfaction.
Adaptive web design (AWD) promotes the creation of multiple versions of a web page to better fit the user's device, as opposed to a single static page which loads the same on all devices or a single page which reorders and resizes content responsively based on the device/screen size/browser of the user.
User research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through interviews, surveys, usability evaluations and other forms of feedback methodologies. It is used to understand how people interact with products and evaluate whether design solutions meet their needs. This field of research aims at improving the user experience (UX) of products, services, or processes by incorporating experimental and observational research methods to guide the design, development, and refinement of a product. User research is used to improve a multitude of products like websites, mobile phones, medical devices, banking, government services and many more. It is an iterative process that can be used at anytime during product development and is a core part of user-centered design.
The Audience Engine is announced open-source, customizable suite of fundraising tools for public radio being developed by the Congera Corporation, a subsidiary of WFMU Radio. It was conceived by and is being developed under the supervision of WFMU management, but as of November 2020 no product has been announced, demoed or released thus rendering the project as effectively vaporware.
A progressive web application (PWA), or progressive web app, is a type of application software delivered through the web, built using common web technologies including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WebAssembly. It is intended to work on any platform with a standards-compliant browser, including desktop and mobile devices.
Adobe XD is a vector design tool for web and mobile applications, developed and published by Adobe Inc. It is available for macOS and Windows, and there are versions for iOS and Android to help preview the result of work directly on mobile devices. Adobe XD enables website wireframing and creating click-through prototypes.
Kristina Halvorson is an American writer, entrepreneur, speaker, podcaster, and expert on the subject of content strategy. She is the founder and CEO of Brain Traffic.
Jen Simmons is a graphic designer, web developer, educator and speaker known for her expertise in web standards, particularly HTML and CSS. She is a member of the CSS Working Group and has been prominent in the deployment of CSS grid layout. She worked as a developer advocate at Mozilla and later at Apple.
Kelly Goto is an American entrepreneur specializing in user experience design and contextual research. She was one of the first design researchers using design ethnography. She is the founder and principal at gotomedia and gotoresearch.