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Knowing What Is Augmented Reality and Its Implementations

Posted on by Mario

Knowing-What-Is-Augmented-Reality-and-Its-Implementation

Augmented reality is a new digital phenomenon that changes the environment around you into a digital interface. It places virtual objects in the real world and in real-time. Therefore, it provides the power of learning and technology together.

Nowadays, you can experience augmented reality through a wide variety of activities. This is because AR aims to simplify human’s lives by combining virtual information to surroundings view of real environment. The usage of AR is limited for Mobile. Although, it also works on some desktop browsers but it doesn’t produce the same experience as a smartphone did. That is why this area is mostly developed by mobile apps developers.

In general, there are 3 main categories of augmented reality (AR) that you can distinguish:

Augmented Reality 3D viewers
This type of AR allows users to locate life-size 3D models in your environment with or without the use of trackers. Trackers are better known as simple images that 3D models can be applied to in Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality Browsers
This AR’s type will enhance your camera display with contextual information. Hence, you can display any history or estimated value of one building only by pointing your smartphone at it.

Augmented Reality for Gaming
The last and maybe the most popular way to experience Augmented Reality is through gaming. Have you ever heard or played Pokémon? This game utilizes your actual surroundings and has become very popular because of it.

All of these 3 categories have been applied to many fields of lives. Hence, in this article, we would like to broaden your knowledge about the implementation of AR. Below are some of the good examples of AR that you can learn for:

Augmented Car Finder
If you often forget where you park your car, augmented car finder can be a good idea for you. Augmented Car Finder will help you identify location of your vehicle in a maze of parking lots. The apps will show a marker where your car is parked; it also shows the distance between you and your car’s location. Moreover, it will guide you to reach your car area.

Layar
With Layar, you can connect digital content with the real world. There are many more advantages that you can get through Layar. For instance, magazines come alive with videos right on the page, easily buy items with direct mobile shopping links, connect with links to web content and share items on social  media, and browse and view thousands of Geo Layers to find stuff nearby, like ATMs, restaurants, historical locations.

EyeDecide AR app
AR implementations are also developed in healthcare industry. One of them is EyeDecide AR app. EyeDecide AR app is created to provide patient-engagement tools for healthcare providers. Developers can use the camera to simulate the vision of a patient. Here are some basic features of this app:

  1. Leverage interactive anatomical models to enhance patient understanding.
  2. Effectively educate patients by comparing normal and abnormal images and using 3D animation videos of most common conditions.
  3. Improve patient and surgical retention by helping patients make more informed decision about the care.

 

5 Ways to Build Better Online Reputation through SEO

Posted on by Mario

 

How-SEO-can-help-shape-your-online-reputation

The main purpose of SEO service is to optimize any strategy to boost your website rank in the search results. One of the strategies that you can rely on is to show your “human” side of your business. This strategy will make your business seems more relatable and real. But, how can you show your human side through SEO? The answer is simply by collecting and displaying reviews. In fact, positive and negative reviews are used as a ranking factor. Negative reviews cause bad rank to your site while positive reviews will elevate your rank.

How Do I Take Advantage of Online Reviews and Improve my SEO?
Nowadays, customers wish to get better “transparency” from sellers. Transparency as a business means to open up to criticism and feedback. In detail, the action includes as:

  • Allowing employees to talk about your products and services publicly such as through an employee advocacy program.
  • Establishing 1-to-1 communication channel
  • Asking for feedback
  • Not hiding from criticism
  • Addressing criticism publicly

There will be some reviews that may destroy your reputation. Although, you can remove all the bad reviews but it is not a wise move. The best way is to turn the negative reviews to positive reviews through better customer service experience. Here are 7 tips that you can use to uplift your online reputation management:

  1. Monitor Your Reviews
    Apply social keywords when responding to social media messages directed at your brand. Set a Google Alert to notify you of any news posted about your brand. Therefore, by monitoring people’s reviews, you know what people really want and you can improve your product better.
  1. Friendly and Quick Respond
    Read your reviews daily. If you have more time, you can login to view and respond to social media messages multiple times a day. Make these daily routines as your habit, just like checking your email. In short, try to respond any reviews in less than 24 hours.
  1. Have Personality
    You can learn from many famous online businesses. Amazon is a good example. It always comes with a positive attitude and a willingness to help. Besides, it opens up a conversation in a witty style no matter what you have to say.
  1. Think of SEO as your Digital Business Card
    As it is stated above, good SEO strategies will help you boost your business. It works better than any business cards or flyers. In fact, business directory and profile sites help you accurately list your company online and monitor your reviews. Here are lists of business profile sites, that you can get started:
  • Amazon
  • Angie’s List
  • Better Business Bureau (BBB)
  • Bing Places
  • Citysearch
  • Consumer Reports
  • Demand Force (newer review site)
  • Dex Knows
  • com
  • com
  • Google+ Local/Google Places
  • Home Advisor
  • Insider Pages
  • Judy’s Book
  • MerchantCircle
  • Trip Advisor
  • Yahoo! Local
  • Yellow Pages
  • Yelp!

To gain and monitor your reviews, you can list your business on these sites.

  1. Pay Attention to Reviews on Social Media
    Remember that social media profiles are also part of digital reputation management. Therefore, sites like LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook are best for business as it has important information and people can post their reviews in these social media.

How to Avoid Design Fails through a Usability Test

Posted on by Mario

how-to-avoid-a-design-fails-through-a-usability-test

As web designers, one of the lessons that will come in handy is learning objectives. With these objectives, a designer will figure out whether a design has passed or failed a usability test. Here are few things that you should know.

Verbs are Magical

One of the books that can teach you about learning objectives is George Piskurich’s Rapid Instructional Design. These books will provide you with list of behaviors to start your success criteria.

For example, you need to describe or demonstrate your objectives for comprehension rather than just understand it.

After obtain a higher level, a participant might develop their work stage into “explain” or “organize”, and even “create” or “evaluate”.

Think through the End of the Session

When you start planning your next usability test and you’re working on tasks, you can ask yourself a simple question like, “What should a user be able to do with this design?”

This question will take you to these answers:

  • Track three hours of time for a particular project;
  • Generate an invoice to a client based on that tracked time;
  • Describe the difference between tracking time and logging time.

Those three statements will guide you to give three success criteria to the participants. Success is different with tasks, even though it may sound similar. Success criteria are for your team, while the task is for the participant in the context of the usability session. In fact, in the explanation above, you’ll see that success criteria are about describing something. For instance, following-up question to a task rather than completing a task.

Stakeholders Love Success Criteria

Since stakeholders’ orientation is on your results rather than on your process. They will be terribly irritated, if your presentation of the results is vague.

So, using success criteria can help you clarify whether your design is really successful. They make it easier to share those results.

To help you track your success criteria, you can create a simple table with a color coding, such as below:

web designer

On the table, you can find where the problems are and grounds the results in the experiences of actual participants.