John is a storyteller with design and development skills. By day he designs and builds websites and mobile apps, by night he spins sci-fi stories at StoryLab and counts his words carefully at https://8wordstories.com. He’s also a pineapple in disguise and writes zombie themed web development books. He’s been lucky enough to collect a wife and five kids along with six cats, four dogs, and a small army of fish. If he remembers to wear pants, it’s been a good day.
When someone reads a story, they have certain expectations about how that story will unfold whether they know how to articulate them or not. The same is true about users coming to our websites. We can pull principles from storytelling to help us meet and, hopefully, exceed those user expectations. Today, John Rhea will pull out and discuss just a few examples of how thinking about your users’ stories can increase user engagement and satisfaction. He’ll look at audience expectations and how your site is meeting those expectations or not.
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Story structure can be the lens through which we view websites. It helps us step into the user’s shoes and understand where and how users interact with our websites. The user finds themselves on a journey through your website on the way to their goal. If you can see this journey from their perspective, you can better understand what they need at each step, and align your goals with theirs. We, web professionals and site owners, are characters in their story and it’s about time we acted like it.
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Attribute selectors are magical. They can get you out of sticky problems, help you avoid adding classes and point out some problems in your code. But don’t worry, while attribute selectors are complex and powerful, they’re easy to learn and easy to utilize. In this article, John Rhea will discuss how they operate and give you some ideas about how to use them. By the end of this article, you’ll use them to run diagnostics on your site, fix otherwise unsolvable problems, and generate technologic experiences so advanced they feel like magic.
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From campfires to books to advertisements to film, stories have a power over us that no other human invention can wield. They calm us, thrill us, enthrall us and send us running back to the box office for another hit. If we consider story structure as we look at user interactions, there are lots of ways we can put ourselves in the user’s shoes and optimize their experience, providing support exactly when they need it. In this article, John Rhea brings you some techniques.
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