I read a lot of RFPs and I attend a lot of website redesign kickoff meetings. The most important questions I ask are, “Why redesign? Why now?” I usually get answers like: Our website needs to mobile-friendly The website needs a faceted search Our site search sucks The website isn’t user-friendly While these are all […]
A few years ago, Matrix Group Creative Director Alex Pineda suggested that we ditch PowerPoint and move to Google Slides. The reason? Collaborating on a PPT file is really hard. We used to pass around huge files via email or rely on the network share. Alex came up with a beautiful template and the rest […]
Last month, some of the largest AMS (association management software) companies (YourMembership, Abila, Aptify and NimbleAMS) joined forces to create Community Brands, which they describe as “a powerful and unified family of brands and a connected eco-system of software and services to better serve associations, nonprofits and government entities.” One can quibble over whether or not […]
I was trying to get my 6-year old out of bed the other morning. He wouldn’t budge. Finally, he challenged me by asking, “What’s special about today?” That stopped me my in tracks. “What IS special about today?,” I thought. I named a few things: “I’m picking you up early. You have TaeKwonDo. I’m making […]
One of the best parts of my job is conducting user interviews. Nearly every Matrix Group project starts with a User Persona exercise where we interview staff to glean their most important target audiences. Then a team of Matrix Group staff interview people in each group. Whenever I can, I help conduct these interviews because […]
I attend a lot of redesign kickoff meetings. Clients almost always list as one of their top goals,“Increase traffic to the website.” Sounds reasonable, right? Organizations are competing for eyeballs, so traffic means organizations are getting attention and their content is being read and hopefully appreciated. Indeed, nearly every client I work with has a […]
I was in a meeting with a client last week and he complained that their Google Analytics (GA) reports just aren’t that useful. I asked why, and he said, “GA tells me the top pages visited on my site and that Google is referring a lot of traffic, and that’s about it.” Hmm… I decided […]
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a meeting with a client who was interested in redesigning their website. “Why?” I asked. The site looks pretty good, the site is mobile-friendly, and the analytics are pretty good. So what’s driving the desire for a redesign? The answer: They wanted to make a few changes to the home […]
Starting early this year, I have been urging clients to consider a mobile app. Not just a responsive website, which should be a given these days, but native iOS and Android apps. Why? The reasons have been building up over the past couple of years, but I became convinced because of several things. Earlier this […]
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of moderating a discussion with Tim Martin and Jessica Katz of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Tim is Digital Director and Jessica is Web Manager & Developer at Carnegie. Carnegie has a well-developed analytics program, the organization respects data, and Tim and Jessica are committed […]