Never Stop Learning—Design for Impact!
07 September 2015

Never Stop Learning—Design for Impact!

I am very happy to say that I have learned much more in the last 18 months than in the 18 months preceding. What do I attribute this to? Primarily keeping up with the paradigm-shifting world that we live in, but even more so, to going virtual.

When we had a big office and a group of colleagues, and one of us had a technical question or a design conundrum, we just reached out and helped each other. Not so today.

Working virtually added at least an hour of work time to my workday. There are fewer interruptions. I have more control of my time. And I have no one to ask a question of unless I stop my workflow and make a call and interrupt someone else.

There is Lynda.com and YouTube, the web and LinkedIn groups and the unquenchable desire to stay relevant in the info/tech/inbound/UX/content marketing/analytics/responsive design marketplace that we live in.

I’ve learned more than I knew before about Photoshop, SEO, Google Analytics,WordPress, boosting Facebook ads and UX design. I am learning some coding, about multiscreen marketing, content marketing and inbound marketing.

The big question for most marketers in the age of information overload is always “how do I get my prospect to read this page/banner/site/ad“?

Methods for designing and marketing today change almost daily. Everyone is trying to figure out how to succeed at publishing in an age of visual noise.

Good design principles are more important today than ever— but to practice good design, you must first understand what good design is and what good design can achieve for a marketer.

For me, the key lessons are keeping up with UX and analytics.

Your target audience is absorbing content all day— How do you get them to hear what you have to say?

Design your site so that it’s easy to navigate. Don’t make your visitors work too hard. Remember the usability principle “if it looks like too much work, people won’t do it.”

Design your banner ads so they are not annoying. Let them speak, but in the background. Good advertising takes expertise.

I think I have been doing UX since grad school at Pratt. Everything I have ever done has been about visual navigation.

But the world is changing at an exponential pace!

Never stop learning! And enjoy the process!

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