We will discuss real-life scenarios where Application Development aided organizations in achieving their overall business strategy and positively impacted their ability to achieve business goals during a time where innovation and timing were crucial.
Modern Workplace Summit
October 11, 2020
Speaker: Karina Myers, Director of App Development and Collaboration
Recording posted below.
It’s always a great experience when you get to hear a customer proudly showcase the work you have done for them. True partnership comes when everyone brings their ideas and expertise to the table and decides to build excellence together. Today, I’m happy to share with you a demo video recorded with Detroit Institute of Arts and my team showcasing some of the key features of 3 of the apps we’ve recently built for them: Touchless Digital Response Stations, Queue Management App, and Microsoft 365 Adoption roadmap.
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The pandemic pushed museums and nonprofits alike to digitally modernize at a moment’s notice
The Detroit Institute of Arts has implemented digital changes to help with internal struggles and bring patrons back into the museum. Hear how Richard Scott, the Director of IT at the Detroit Institute of Arts, developed game-changing apps and internal resources to keep things moving forward. Richard will share how they implemented touchless digital response stations and an exhibition queueing management app to safely welcome visitors without losing exhibition interactivity.
Museum Collaboration with Microsoft 365 Webinar
March 10, 2021
(Recording posted below)
I’m very excited and proud to share the latest addition to our product line at Red Level, exclusively for the museum community. Created by my team in partnership with Detroit Institute of Arts.
We’ve all been fascinated by the worlds of possibility presented in sci-fi stories. Our heroes searching through data for answers to save the day with a wave of their hand.
The dreams of science fiction are becoming reality today. With the futuristic gesture control interface of Red Level’s Motia, the future is now at a museum near you.
Motia was created by a partnership between Red Level’s expert team of technologists and museum professionals. The cutting-edge spatial computing revolutionizes museum visitor’s experiences. Allowing visitors to look deeper than ever before and interact with a museum’s collection like never before.
Red Level’s Motia system is effortless to implement. A simple video camera captures natural hand movements and Motia’s sophisticated computer vision models translate the gestures and motion to unlock your exhibitions and artifacts – allowing vistors to browse the collection, and access additional educational and historical content from your curators.
Motia is the latest innovation from Red Level designed for the museum community – including the Clearpass queuing app to help museums to safely open during the pandemic and Curia collaborative exhibition planning app helping curators design engaging exhibits.
Transport your visitors into the future or the past today with Motia, the innovative gesture control interface designed exclusively for the museum community. Learn more at RedLevelGroup.com
From governance and hybrid collaboration to implementing mixed-reality solutions, we will share real-life scenarios where a holistic approach to creating cloud-first roadmaps has positively revolutionized organizations like the Detroit Institute of Arts and The Trustees’ business.
Modern Workplace Summit
September 30, 12-3pm EST
Speaker: Karina Myers, Director of App Dev and Collaboration
As organizations prepared to rollout their Q1 strategy in 2020, the year had other plans.
Digital transformation in pandemic times was one for the books. The countless hours spent by organizations in rolling out a COVID response strategy that ensures their workforce to be able to safely continue working in pandemic and post-pandemic times were paramount and worth of recognition.
Even with the difficulties social distancing and stay at home orders presented, creativity and ingenuity and the adoption of technology solutions took precedence above anything else as organizations quickly pivot and re-prioritized their technology strategies for the year.
Discussing technology initiatives with IT professionals is a normal expectation I have as a technology strategist, but what happens when an organization does not count with the resources to rollout an entire IT response plan in less than a week? Many of the conversations I had in 2020 were not only with IT professionals but also with HR professionals, accountants, lawyers, marketing – business stakeholders working together and as fast as possible to roll out technology they didn’t anticipate prioritizing this soon.
In a world where remote connectivity, and contactless and cashless solutions became paramount, it was of the most importance for organizations to ensure they had the appropriate technology support and established partnership to drive these initiatives into reality across their organization.
If anything last year have showed us when it comes to technology, is that taking a holistic approach is paramount to ensure business longevity.
COVID-19 pandemic expedited and solidified the need of providing reliable and secure cloud solutions for people to perform their work, collaboration, study, entertainment, shopping, financial transactions, and business operations.
Microsoft’s Cloud remarkable success in comparison to other tech giants in 2020 is no coincidence. In the last decade, Microsoft has been releasing a coveted array of solutions that when working together empower organizations to build a solid foundation that can scale with their business.
But, where do we begin?
This is a common conversation I encounter when talking to organization stakeholders and business owners. We know what is needed, but how do we start? How do I bring my workforce on board? How can I choose the tools I need? How can I prioritize?
I’ll be covering this and more in future articles. In the meantime, I’m curious to learn about your digital transformation in 2020. What were the most common struggles and how was your plan for the year impacted by the pandemic and stay at home orders?
What comes to mind when I say: digital personalization?
Personalization is the method used to bring an enhanced digital experience to users when visiting a website or working on an application. This is accomplished by studying various data point references and applying content targeting behind the scenes to increase content relevancy. This approach has been rapidly growing in the recent years and developing some controversy along the way. It’s also one of the most popular features I get questions about as a technology consultant.
Personalization and Customization are two terms that are often mistakenly used interchangeably in the industry. Both of these features bring value to the digital experience and can complement each other during an implementation, but they are not the same. Customization can be any feature that has been especially configured to serve a functionality in a website that otherwise would be not available. This can also include any configuration setting on which the user can customize their preferences on how they choose to interact with an application. For example, selection of language, theme, notification preferences, etc. Personalization, however, is that additional layer in a digital experience, that enables an application to make smart decisions and facilitates the provisioning of relevant content to the end user.
Personalization performance tracking presents a challenge to IA specialists when all that is being gathered in the system are data points and metrics that lack the necessary depth of dimension to explain user behavior. For example, we can capture the number of visitors to an website and also the time spent interacting with the site but this data is incomplete if we forget to introduce the UX aspect of measuring the ‘why’ users would behave that way when visiting the site. A simple assumption could be the fact that users really enjoyed using the application and that’s why they spent a long time interacting with it. A more in-depth study might provide a clearer perspective declaring the users took a long time finding information and that’s the reason why they spent more time in the site. These are both valid scenarios that can only be proven when User Experience is introduced in the analysis as a new test factor.
As User Experience specialists, our job is not only to analyze data and provide results based on these metrics, but we also help test this data in a multi-dimensional manner on which Intention, Failure and Success can be measured and traced back to a successful connected experience.
When studying user behavior and coming up with content targeting solutions, User Experience specialists take a thoughtful approach on which sensitivity, and empathy are applied in a holistic manner. This is where UX brings that test-and-learn attitude to the table on which the main purpose of personalizing a product is to find solutions that better serve the user. Measuring this information provides that sharp understanding of the product’s audience and calls the user to focus by thoughtfully serving relevant information that can potential enhance their experience and save them time when performing a tasks.
In the past few years, users are becoming more aware of digital content targeting and in some cases it has developed a sense of fear and lack of trust, especially in the ad industry. As a technology consultant, I’ve been part of projects on which personalization was successful implemented in applications and products and has had a positive impact in their processes. This could only have been accomplished due to a combined effort of technology specialists taking a holistic approach during the application implementation. There are many practices that as User Experience experts we tend to apply when measuring data. Sometimes, it can be necessary to spend time measuring the level of distrust and disengagement in an organization before introducing a new feature. In every step of the way, think empathy and sensitivity.
Transparency is important when implementing content targeting. Providing additional information as to ‘why’ a certain type of content is being presented to the user can be helpful to build trust and even loyalty. Netflix, for example, lets the users know that a certain list of Movies or TV Shows genre is being presented to them due to previous selections they’ve made in the past. In a corporate website, it can be extremely helpful to display content that is to be consumed by a particularly user group based on the tasks or role they perform in the organization. A manager that is part of the leadership team in a company, can benefit from seeing a targeted Leadership News Feed, Documents Awaiting My Approval, or My Team’s News Feed right in the homepage.
Some other helpful content targeting can be due to localization. Presenting content that is specific to me as a user based on my current geo-location or my office location. For example, weather or time information, regional news, division news, etc.
Due to rapid technology advancement especially when it comes to digital data collection, data usage, and content targeting, there are many new privacy policies that are being established to help provide user privacy protection and regulate better quality procedures around connected experiences. The implementation of GRDP (General Data Protection Regulation) in 2018 is a great example of regularization that made a great impact especially on international organizations that have a presence in Europe. Many other companies like Facebook are being forced to re-examine their processes and abide to privacy regulations that protect the user and the information they choose share.
An empathetic approach and the application of privacy policy regulations when establishing digital strategies can ensure the success of connected experiences in a world that is constantly evolving and relies on technology on a day-to-day basis.
There is an important aspect of user experience that is usually taken for granted and sometimes it doesn’t get the spotlight it deserves: user research.
User research is the first step in a user experience analysis. This is the part where we gain better understanding through observation of users behaviors, needs, and motivations. The information gathered at this stage of the project, will inform the decisions made throughout the entire planning and implementation of the solution.
User research is often divided into quantitative and qualitative methods.
Surveys and A/B testing are commonly used quantitative method during user research. Quantitative user methods seek to measure user behavior in a way that it can be quantified and used for statistical analysis.
Qualitative methods such as user interviews and usability tests seek to get an in-depth understanding of the experiences and everyday lives of individual users or user groups.
User research can be very helpful when trying to keep track of the return of investment (ROI) of a solution. It’s often a lot easier when we’re able to show the positive impact a change in the design made in sales or in the increase of visitors or customers in the site. This helps make a much stronger case for investing in user experience.
Join me as I take a deeper dive in the User Experience trends I see happening in 2019. Check out the video!
I got to sit down with a few of my co-workers and share some of the trends we see happening in 2019. Check out the video!
It’s going be an exciting year for tech.
I was recently interviewed to share my experience working on the development of one of the many mobile apps we’ve built for one of the largest furniture manufacturing companies in the world. It was an amazing experience working along side a very talented group of professionals. You can read the full article here http://www.cdh.com/resources-events/case-studies/furniture-manufacturer-implements-custom-app
