It’s no surprise users depend on copy to interact and navigate through the digital world. Whether it’s writing product descriptions or choosing the correct label for a menu item, copy that’s written for user-facing touchpoints and that embodies the voice of the organization are crucial parts of the way we design for experiences. It’s no longer enough to just provide the information users are looking for, but you must also write with users’ motivations, actions, and reactions in mind. Providing this human element behind copy without sacrificing a great user experience is what we refer to as UX writing.

In… Read More

Walled Gardens

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about a role in the field of marketing is that I continually get exposed to a diverse range of industry verticals, customer segmentation and journeys, and the use of new technologies. Another benefit is the learnings that come from the people interaction, the diverse range of industries, and all the fun acronyms that firms use in their day-to-day operations. This led me to a term you may have heard recently, a “Walled Garden.” Though this isn’t a new term—according to Techopedia, John Malone (of Liberty Media fame) coined the term back in the… Read More

Public Relations (PR) is defined as a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics. While this definition still rings true, the way in which PR practitioners build those relationships has changed. As marketing and technology evolve, PR also continues to evolve.

Today, PR professionals are responsible for designing and implementing integrated strategies across a variety of platforms to create awareness and build brand credibility. There are far more vehicles for relaying information to consumers than ever before. While this sounds like a good… Read More

Marketing automation (MA) refers to the idea of automating repetitive marketing tasks and processes using software. In many cases, marketing automation works along-side a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, where live data can be passed back and forth between systems to share a cohesive understanding of an organization’s customer and prospective contact records.

Just like the relationship between a MA and CRM system, marketing and sales departments need to have a consistent, cohesive alignment to achieve success in today’s business world. This is done by gaining an understanding of not only when a customer or prospect should be communicated… Read More

Recently, members from the Zion & Zion team traveled to the windy city to attend seven straight days of user experience training by Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), one of the world’s top UX research and training firms. The conference consisted of seven full-day, immersive classes which covered topics in user experience design.

The Courses

Between the five Zion & Zion employees that attended this seven-day conference, we were able to cover a lot of ground and further our knowledge in the principles of user experience. Together, we completed the following courses: … Read More

Design thinking is a new, hot topic in the marketing industry that is an excellent tool for stirring creativity and innovation. In a nutshell, design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem solving and innovation. To learn more about the entire design thinking process, you can read our article d.Signing My Way Through San Francisco.

For a human-centered approach, one of the key components requires you to understand the people for whom you are trying to solve a problem. In order to do so,… Read More

Conducting a user test may seem simple at first—you ask a few questions and observe the participant, right? Not quite. As user experience strategists and designers, understanding our users is one of, if not the, most important pieces in the user experience (UX) puzzle. It can also be one of the most challenging. Everyone is different. People think differently. People act differently. And most importantly in UX, people use websites (apps, software, etc.) differently. That’s why user testing is so crucial. It allows us to observe users as they interact with our (or our client’s) website. The benefits of user testing are incomparable to the benefits of other forms of research, and when paired together with those other forms of research, can result in truly powerful insights. Read More

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is an awesome tool that many websites use. CSS describes how elements should be rendered, and thanks to it, we can produce awesome, colorful, intuitive, and easy to understand websites.

In this article, I am going to talk about some CSS properties that can be helpful when developing a website that requires specific styling, or styling otherwise known as custom handmade styling. There are a lot of premade libraries out there that you can use to add certain classes to div tags or other types of containers, however they don’t always let you create exactly what… Read More