Breaking into Marketing and UX Design - Farha's Journey

As BioMedware's new site lauch gets closer, I've had to shift gears from website UX to email design. This week, I've been working on designing the outgoing order and purchase emails for our ecommerce site. Since these emails may be our first contact with the customer, it's important that they are designed to be simple and efficient. Now with email design, I've learned that there are a few key differences from web design: let me walk you through the basics. Focus - Mobile or Desktop? This is a big one: since BioMedware sells desktop software, our main focus was optimizing the desktop version of our website. However, statistics show that most users open email correspondence on mobile devices, making the mobile design and accessibility larger priority. Email Sizing The first thing to note is email size: unlike a full desktop width, the average email width is 550px-600px. Anything wider than that may not be displayed to customers as intended. Make sure to check that you

This week at BioMedware, I've gotten more into the marketing side of my position: I've started working on creating a custom logo animation for the company. The process has definitely had its ups and downs, so I thought I'd walk you through some questions I had and helpful tips I've learned: So why animate a company logo? Think of it this way: your company logo represents the essence of your brand to potential customers. Animating the logo creates a greater connection with these customers: it attracts attention and customers are more likely to retain a memory of the logo, and by connection, your company and brand. Your ultimate goal is to have them associate your logo with your field of business. Where should I use the animation? An animated logo is used to promote your company or brand. Depending on your company's needs, it can be used in many different places. Here are a few places our marketing team hopes to implement it: Social Media and Marketing Adding the anim

Let's get into wireframing! The past few weeks at BioMedware, I've spent much of my time creating wireframes for our new ecommerce website. With a background in software and web development, my experience definitely resides on the technical side, so I was excited to explore the other side of website creation: design. Apparently, a whiteboard wouldn't cut it - my team member introduced me to a design software called Figma: it has a bunch of pre-sized frames, from phone screens to desktop and tablet layouts that you can start off with, plus templates, examples, images, and more. As you can imagine, the wireframing process has a few steps. These steps can vary between companies and designers, but I'll break down our general process at BioMedware:  1. Create a low-fidelity draft The first step is to create a low-fidelity draft which basically just positions the web content - where the header, nav bar, footer, and paragraphs are located relative to each other. For our barebo

Is website design the most important element in tailoring user experience? Not quite, as I’ve learned. The UX design process starts off with getting familiar with your clients and their needs. Our first week at BioMedware, my internship partner and I met with the company president and employees to discuss requirements and the feel of their brand. With a small but high-powered staff of five, it didn’t take long to learn their highest priority: simplicity. They wanted a design similar to their original website, meaning that we had a precedent to base our fonts and colors off of. So what comes next? Initial market research. Knowing what other companies are doing and their reasons for this is a great way to be aware of design opportunities and pitfalls. My team was lucky in this regard – BioMedware had sample pages of competitor ecommerce sites, so we had our research ready, as well as our company’s take on what they liked and disliked. Having simplicity as the highest priority meant never