UM-Flint University Relations

Well this week has been rather interesting with the release of Google’s Instant Search and with next week Microsoft releasing their beta of the 9th version of Internet Explorer. We are in an age where performance matters more than ever.  We have seen this progression over time of things getting faster online, from minutes to seconds, […]

Any business, public or private, has an input/output paradigm. You give a clerk $2, you get a soda. You enter a number in a phone, you get some sort of response on the other end. You go to Google and enter a search term, you get search results. Even such vital things as hospitals work […]

I’ll be the first to say that I’m not an illustrator, nor am I a classically trained designer, however that does not mean that I can’t draw.  Humans by nature are visual thinkers, which historically can be shown by the cave paintings in Lascaux in France.  Drawing allows us to present the ideas in our head to […]

As a new homemaker in the early 1990s, I just had to have one of the hot appliances of the times:  the automatic breadmaker.  Panasonic produced the most popular version of this insta-bread making wonder.  All you

This month, UR spent a good deal of time and made a great deal of headway on our largest and most important ongoing project: the redesign of the UM-Flint website. For those faculty and staff members charged with maintaining their department’s website, the most eagerly anticipated aspect of the redesign process may well be the […]

In the upcoming months, work will be done to convert our current content management system over to a system called LiveSite. LiveSite will allow for much easier creation and maintenance of web pages, and with its implementation will come a new look for the entire university website. You’ve probably seen the screen shot of what […]

Finding the pain points in a site for a user is easier than you may think.  There are couple things that you can do to fairly quickly uncover the usability problems of your site or web app.

Normally I talk about things like user experience, web design, and best practices for the web. In this  post I hope to shed some light on font issues and to offer some tips in choosing fonts for things like emails, “quick” signage, and reports. FIRST, MY RANT Everyone in our office knows that there are some […]

A logo designer can choose the perfect typeface and construct the perfect logo.  A marketer can evangelize and promote a product or service.  Yet all of these things are irrelevant until the consumer or end-user experiences the product or service.  It is the job of a marketing professional to sell, it’s a user experience professional’s job to make sure that the […]

eduStyle.net is an excellent example of the spirit of collaboration and push for collective advancement that are hallmarks of today’s open source ethos on the web. According to eduStyle, its mission “is for higher ed web professionals to learn from and be inspired by the work of their peers.” Given their size, complexity, and array […]