Linkswitch #67, Boost Business, Boost Your Happiness, Simplify Sign-Ups

Everyone’s focused on the digital world these days, and rightfully so. There’s always a new technology rolling out and its exciting to be amazed at what our favorite gadgets can do.

But when it comes to customer service and getting clients, you’ve got to integrate the old with the new. Why? Not all clients are using things like social media. And even those that do may appreciate–and respond better to–”old school” techniques. Here are four big ones you may not be leveraging.

Work burnout is a physical, mental and psychological state of exhaustion. The name says a lot about what it feels like. When you’re burnt out, you feel like a lamp running out of fuel and, thus, burn out. When you’re burnt out, you don’t have the energy to keep going.

Social media is transforming the way journalists break news. Consider Robert Hernandez. He was searching for video on YouTube of the Bahrain protests.

He used filters to find videos from Bahrain and then sorted to find the most recent uploads. The top result had just been uploaded and had yet to be viewed. He watched it.

Diversity is one of the things that make the web great, and every audience has its own needs and requirements. But what happens if that audience is comprised of a specific age group? Are you providing something fun and interactive for kids, or are you strictly an adult-only website (such as one that sells alcohol)?

As web designers and developers, we love to see how our sites and web apps look and function using a really good browser.

It’s true that with the release of IE9, Microsoft has made great progress in the so-called browser wars. And although IE9 is a fast and reliable browser that has pretty good support for CSS3 and HTML5, there are still quite a few missing technologies that we all would like to see in Internet Explorer soon.

In the design world, one type of sought after resource centers around that misty natural special effect called fog or smoke. Look around and you will see numerous textures, brushes, and tutorials all focusing on capturing that vaporesque element in our work. So today we thought we might take this fascination one step further, and take it into the realm of inspiration.

I’m a huge fan of Twitter, and I’ve tried to persuade several people to give it a try. (My greatest triumph: convincing my sister to use it. Seeing my sister in my Twitter feed — that makes me very happy.)

We’ve all seen how Twitter can play an unprecedented role in world events and in news communication. But on a very personal, routine level, there are several (other) ways in which Twitter can boost your happiness. After all, is it just a coincidence that a blue bird is both the symbol for happiness and the symbol for Twitter? Probably yes, I know, but still, it’s a happy coincidence.

There are many ways to design sign-up and log-in forms. Most designers are familiar with the conventional ways. But understanding and applying a few innovative techniques could make your forms simpler and more efficient to fill out. In this article, we’d like to present a couple of new ideas that might be useful for your next designs. Please notice that before using these techniques, you should make sure that they make sense in the context in which you are going to use them. We’d love to hear about your case-studies and usability tests that affirm or dismiss the suggestions proposed below.