Month: March 2019

Digital Trends to Look Out for in 2019

Now we are almost 3 months passed in 2019, it’s time to look at the digital trends for businesses to pay attention to for the year ahead. 2018 saw some big developments in the technology world and it will be a hard one to top, however technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things hold big potential for business this year, but business leaders will need their finger on the pulse to stay on top of digital trends explored within this article by CRM software provider, PragmatiQ Solutions…

Trend 1. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)
VR started to really take off in 2018 and was even labelled as a huge part of the future. We’re not saying it won’t be huge, however with limited accessibility, it hasn’t seen the rapid growth rate expected. On the other hand, Augmented Reality (AR) has been developing in the background ready to outpace VR in 2019.

The ability to be used on mobile phones and tablets makes Augmented Reality much more easily accessible and affordable than VR, which requires a headset for use.

Trend 2. Voice Search Marketing
By 2020, 50% of searches will be voice-based, according to ComScore. 2018 saw a huge increase in voice-search and devices like the Amazon Alexa, however most consumers are using this technology to listen to music and add items to their shopping list. Big brands, like Ocado who launched their hands-free shopping, are quickly picking up on this this shift in consumerism and pioneering the way in this new search environment.

These devices present an opportunity for consumers to simply buy a product by using their voice, and the sooner brands understand this, the sooner they can market their products via this emerging technology and reap the rewards.

According to Forbes, the voice search revolution has been fueled by the rise in smart speakers, which has more than tripled in the last year, with more consumers having these devices in their homes than ever. Although it’s not clear how this trend will develop, PragmatiQ Solutions believe that it’s here to stay and you can find more information on this here.

Trend 3. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
At the Microsoft Ignite conference in July 2018, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted “AI to be one of the trends that is going to be the next big shift in technology”, and we agree.

These platforms can analyse data to form a set of insights which mirror human decision-making processes or automate tasks to increase the productivity and efficiency of teams within your business. From manufacturing to healthcare and many more, AI & Machine Learning is assisting many industries, despite the past assumptions it would just benefit sales teams.

Requiring integration with current systems and a strategic approach to cover planning and deployment, it is essential that organisations understand AI is not a plug-and-play approach.

Trend 4. Adoption of Internet of Things (IoT)
IoT has been threatening growth for a number of years, however mainly due to security concerns, companies have been more hesitant to adopt this technology. However, if you’re anything like us here at PragmatiQ Solutions, you will have more connected devices and gadgets in your home than this time last year, demonstrating the growth IoT has seen in 2018.

Escape From Chatbot Hell: Using AI to Improve Service While Cutting Costs

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IoT is paving the way for businesses when creating new business lines, according to Forbes. For example, companies who manufacture products now have opportunities to expand their offering to ongoing services in order to monitor the performance of these products, thanks to algorithms that provide predictive maintenance alerts as required.

Top Ways to Improve the Web Design for Enhanced Customer Experience

The design for the web store is an essential facet of the customer experience today. A device-wide ease-of-use and accessibility is the desire of every customer today, whether they are looking for a product or a service. However, to achieve this, the organizations require an in-depth assessment of numerous aspects while designing their website as it not only about improving just the website functioning to attract more visitors but also considerations on what will drive sales from the web platform.

Let’s look at some of the focus elements to help you improve the design of your website that ensure highlighting of the best bits you want to offer:

Appearance – As soon as someone clicks on a webpage, they create an impression of it in their mind. Moreover, if they don’t find what they see and read alluring, they will bounce from your webpage and would not like to revisit the website. The design of any site doesn’t need to be complicated, but it should be up-to-date and more accessible for visitors to browse through. The site must have:

New advances in Conversational AI technology has made it possible to create smart virtual assistants that understand real human dialog. Learn how to leverage this new technology to drive impact for your business.

• Responsive Design: For a seamless look across devices, from smartphones to the desktop computer screen. the most value from your website without straining their eyes.
• Bold Fonts: Easy-to-read fonts to offer readers the required value without straining their eyes.
• Eye-Catching Images: Visuals summarise the text and help visitors to absorb the information quickly and easily.
• Multimedia: Interactive elements like videos, images, and infographics help convert visitors into customers!

Professionalism – The design of your website is a reflection of your business outlook. Your visitors must feel confident about dealing with a reputable enterprise. The trustworthiness of your company gets reflected based on the below elements:

• Culture Page: This page must elaborate on the company’s approach along with its values and traditions.
• Employee Pictures: Let the visitors know the people behind the organization and with whom they will have to connect depending on their focus areas.
• Customer Feedback & Testimonials: Showcase the received inputs from your valuable customers to help target and convert the visitors into prospects.

Clarity – The significance of clarity is straightforward; it enables users to find what they are looking for, and in the fastest possible time. It gets improved through the navigation tools. Though it is simple to adjust there are two most excellent ways to enhance the clarity on the website are:

• Breadcrumb: They help users find their way back home. While visitors click on a new link, breadcrumb ensure that there is a link back to the previous page.
• Drop-down Menu: It must reflect all the content is segregated into categories and makes the product or service search easier.

Conversions – The main aim of your web design is improving its conversion rate. Below are the three things to keep in mind while designing the web pages:

Color Scheme: Use a color scheme to highlight the call to action (CTA). An explicit view will allow clicking by the visitors for a future discussion

• KISS: ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid.’ Avoid busy backgrounds and cluttered designs. Make use of simple, modern, and attractive designs.
• Human Faces: They help visitors to relate to the business and make visitors contact you on-the-go.

How to Build Your Brand through Web Design

A successful brand can get you customers, and enable you to keep them at the same time. Also, by keeping your buyers satisfied with your products or services, they will remain loyal. The first thing you should do, however, is to tell them what your brand is all about. You can also build your brand through web design.

Here are several tips on how web design can help build a brand suitable for your audience.

1. Choose the right color
   Colors are important because they can evoke people’s emotions and their subconscious. For example, what comes to mind when you see the color green? You are probably thinking of the environment or your health. Seeing it may also keep you calm. For this reason, many hospital walls are now painted with pale green.
   
   Meanwhile, black is a serious color since it can represent luxury. Think of brands like Louis Vuitton or Rolex watches. Orange, however, is less suitable for serious brands. When people see this color, they see it bursting with youthful energy.
   
   If you want to build excitement or interest when people see your brand, find out which colors can do that. You should also consider that various cultures have different interpretations of the same colors. If you’re catering to an international market, use only colors that are universally favored if possible.
2. Inject some personality
   People like brands that have human-like attributions because it helps them identify with it. Psychologists call it anthropomorphism.
   
   A fine example of this is Twitter with its little blue bird. Once people see this winged mascot, they think of Twitter. It’s easy to recall a brand that has some human-like familiarity.
3. Stir your audience’s feelings
   If they see your brand, what emotions do you want them to experience? Using the latest designs isn’t going to cut it anymore. To make your brand popular, associate it with pleasant emotions and vibes that you can include in the web design.
   
   With our site, we used the color orange and short video clips to showcase our brand as a creative web design agency. Upon landing on the page, the images aim to bring positive feelings to the audience.
4. Keep the design consistent
   Brands are successful because people care and remember them. So how do you make your brand memorable? The answer is consistency.
   
   This means you need to be consistent in your web design. In every page, use the same colors, formatting, graphics, personality, and emotions. People should see a uniform image throughout your website.
   
   This will also make your website perform better. Since you’re reusing content such as graphics, your site will load faster. If someone has visited the site before, your images are easily displayed from the browser’s cache. For example, if you’re using the same navigation bar in all web pages, the browser only needs to download the code once.
5. Display your logo properly
   You can get creative with your logo design but there’s only one place where it should be located. Always put your logo on the upper left corner of the website because that’s where most people will look for it. You should also link the logo’s image to the home page.
   
   Logo size is also important. So make sure that the logo is big enough to get noticed immediately by your visitors.
6. Present value proposition
   First-time visitors will have several questions upon landing on your site. What products or services are you offering? Can it provide solutions to their problems? This is where your value proposition comes in.
   
   A value proposition is a short statement that visitors can easily see on your page. It should be placed high up on the page just after the logo and menu.
   
   You can only afford yourself a few words to tell what benefits the visitors will get from your site. So make sure the value proposition is:
   • Clear
   • Short
   • Concise
   • Answer the question what and why
   • Use the appropriate voice
   The language or tone you’re going to use should support the brand’s personality and emotions. If your audience is millennials, the tone could be informal. If you’re catering to stock market investors, a formal tone is more appropriate.
7. Make your brand unique
   Using all these elements is not enough. To truly set your brand apart from the rest, you have to make it unique.
   
   The colors, personality or voice doesn’t matter if your website looks the same as your competitors. How could prospective buyers distinguish? Yes, it will take a bit of effort to create a brand that’s different from the others. That hard work, however, will pay off since your visitors will likely remember you. There’s also a greater chance that they will come back again once they are satisfied with your products or services.
   
   Creating a brand makes sense even for small businesses as well as personal websites and blogs. In the face of fierce competition, having a good brand will help you get noticed. So in designing a website, these tips will help your brand get a head start from your competitors.

7 steps to develop the best mobile application

Mobile applications have become an inseparable part of our lives lately. There are more than 5 billion mobile users in this world. This number is growing exponentially with each passing day and so does the importance of mobile applications.

There is a dire need to deliver apps that work both for web and mobiles. Consequently, while developing enterprise applications, many developers have adopted the motto that “web is not enough”. Hence, to manage the customers’ needs, most of the web applications are now coming up with their mobile counterparts.

1. Conception of Idea
   Your experience having hundreds of apps for sure give you an advantage of knowing what app could have the potential, market appeal, tech complexity, resources innovation, etc. How can we evaluate an idea objectively? Conception of an idea is just knowing the building blocks of everything that you have to work with. You got all the stuff; web hosting, the camera, GPS, different sensors, cloud services, maps, developers, programmers. But when you think of all those things – it is like being in a kitchen and knowing what things you have, so, you know what you can cook, right? So, a lot of times, when you are coming up with ideas, you need to know what they are and what potential they have.
2. Devising the strategy
   It is necessary to take this thought out of your mind that in this world, you work in isolation. You will be competing with hundreds or thousands of other developers and businessmen. To identify your competitors, you can always ask your potential customers how they solve the same need you solve. Conduct a competitive analysis by assessing the current and potential strength and weaknesses of your competitors and then comparing it with your own unique selling propositions. Draft a plan to stay ahead of your competitors for a long time.
   
   When you think of an idea, it does not necessarily be unique. Look at all those businesses that have flourished over the years, Walmart, McDonald’s or Apple – are big companies, they are not necessarily the innovators of those things. They were the incremental innovators, but they were not the inventors of them. Ray Kroc did not invent the hamburger or Walmart did not invent retailing. The product or process was there before, but they found a market and then capitalized on it.
   
   If you do something that is completely and totally new, you are not only building something that hasn’t been built before, but you must build a market that is not there before. Developers usually think that a unique idea will make them successful but on the contrary, it is the marketing strategy that makes their idea successful.
   
   Monetizing the mobile app is very difficult, particularly when there are number of free apps available. People will only pay for those apps that could give them some unique value. However, there are some other ways of getting monetary benefit out of your app. If your app depends on download from the app stores, you better off having a free app to the users because the free apps are easier to market and promote inside mobile app stores and so therefore your app will be competitive. Once your app reaches a hefty number of user base, you can earn money from adds.
   
   Another strategy can be to offer free app usage for one month, make the users like your app and then shift to subscription model. Or you can make in-app purchasing options.
   
   Once you conceive the idea, identify your competitors, devised marketing strategies and potential revenue sources from the app, you are good to go to development phase. However, don’t just jump into programming and developing the app. Instead make a thorough action plan starting from designing User Interface to prototype to development and testing.
3. User – experience and interface design
   A good user experience design (UX) is vital for the success of your mobile app. Why? Because, it is the users, you are building your app for. And if they don’t like the experience of using your app, they would switch to something else. So, try to make a design that is engaging and can captivate the attention of its users. Use a good style guide that can help you build an attractive application.
4. Design-to-development handoff
   Do you standardize on a single platform or use different approaches for each platform? For instance, Swift is used for IOS based applications and Java is used for Android based mobile apps. One the other hand, a single platform of Xamarin can be used for both IOS and Android. However, in order to save efforts and resources, it is generally suggested to use a standard approach with a single platform, without any device-specific code.
   
   While organizations are turning to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to assemble, deploy, and manage applications – they need to carefully consider support for mobile. It is important to select a PaaS that provides a rich mobile experience without custom code and also offers support for both private and public cloud deployment. Without these capabilities, you won’t reach your goal of quickly building, deploying, and managing compelling apps.
   
   Expert generally suggest using industry standard frameworks such as React Native to build mobile applications that provide a familiar, yet customizable user interface using the popular JavaScript. React Native allows building native mobile apps, compared to simple adaptation of web applications to mobile phones or even a hybrid app. It uses the mobile’s native UI building blocks, making it indistinguishable from a mobile app built in Objective-C (iOS) or Java (Android). When specialized API is required, React Native lets us use native components as well, making possible the mixing of existing components with JavaScript code.
5. Development and Iteration
   Creating a reliable mobile application is an iterative process. Once you decided whether to build an iOS app or an android app, you can plan on the how to develop it and how to write the code for it. The first and arguably most pivotal step to building an android based mobile application is installing an integrated development environment. You also have a choice between Eclipse (ADT Bundle) and Android studio.
6. Testing and quality assurance
   As the mobile economy grows, so does the pressure to provide excellent products. Mobile users demand high-quality apps, ruthlessly abandoning or deleting those with bugs. The highly competitive market also demands that mobile teams release apps faster and more often. Add to that the challenge of supporting different device types across a fragmented market, and mobile teams are left with a daunting amount of work to ensure quality, consistency, and velocity. Hence, mobile application testing has a great value for mobile app development process.
   
   You need to carry out functionality testing, user acceptance testing, performance testing, Load testing, regression testing, usability testing, so on and so forth.
7. Deployment & Monitoring
   Last but not the least step in mobile app development process is its deployment in the real world. You can either deploy your mobile app through Web server (API) or launch it at a play Store (Google or Apple). Deploying it at your own web server can involve additional responsibilities and protocols. You will have to take care of the scale, traffic, server downtimes etc. or you can purchase cloud platforms such as Rackspace or Amazon Web services etc.
   
   After deployment, keep track of your mobile app for possible crashes, updates, performance improvements and new features. Through this way, you will be able to keep it alive for a longer time period.

8 Benefits of Using WordPress

WordPress vs. the Competition
WordPress tops the list of the three most often used site building packages in the world, followed by Joomla and Drupal. All are free to download and use, all come with numerous add-ons for specialized functionality, and all can be customized to suit the needs of individual users.

But, both Joomla and Drupal require a certain level of technical know-how and familiarity with HTML and the programming language PHP. WordPress allows experienced users to work at that level, too—but, unlike Joomla and Drupal, it also includes features for beginners, so that they can set up a site quickly with no knowledge of code or programming. Here’s a look at a few key benefits of using WordPress to set up and run your business or personal site.

1. Flexible and Adaptable for Changing Needs
   Although WordPress was originally designed to support blogging and related types of online publishing, it also powers a wide range of sites with other purposes. WordPress is used to run complex sites for large multinational corporations, manage small businesses, and create personal blogs. WordPress sites can contain full service ecommerce stores, showcase a portfolio, or host a social network, group, or podcast. Whatever a company’s requirements, the core WordPress package plus a combination of its many plugins can make a site to suit. Thanks to its many themes and easy access to its source files, WordPress is also endlessly adaptable to a company’s changing needs.
2. User-friendly—Even for Beginners
   A WordPress site can be installed and up and running in a matter of minutes, even without any technical expertise. All a user needs is a domain name and a hosting account.WordPress can be installed free through your WordPress hosting provider or uploaded directly from WordPress.org. From there, an intuitive and easy to manage Admin dashboard has all the features needed to customize key features like a site’s heading and layout, and to start creating pages and posts right away.
3. Themes Offer Multiple Options
   WordPress themes offer users an array of choices for fine-tuning the appearance and functions of a new site, thanks to its large and growing directory of themes. Many of these are instantly available to a new site owner through the WordPress theme directory, and thousands more can be purchased through design marketplaces and third-party designers from around the world. Themes can be previewed live and installed at any time to change the look and layout of a WordPress site.
4. Plugins Extend Functionality
   WordPress includes all the elements needed to create a basic site, but many users want more specialized functions related to a site’s specific needs. The WordPress plugin directory includes hundreds of plugins—small pieces of code designed to perform specific tasks—that allow users to add features such as shopping carts, galleries, contact forms, and more to any compatible WordPress site. Users can also purchase and install hundreds of custom plugins from third-party developers. Plugins can be activated or deactivated and uninstalled as needed as a site evolves.
5. WordPress Sites Rank High
   Searchabiility is key to ranking high on Google and other search engines. WordPress sites tend to rank high for their keywords, largely because they’re constantly being updated and because WordPress includes a variety of tools and plugins for optimizing content for SEO (search engine optimization).
6. WordPress Sites Are Mobile Responsive
   Mobile responsiveness is also a factor in Google rankings, so websites need to look good on any device. WordPress offers a variety of responsive theme designs, and users can also make a static site responsive with plugins and adjustments to theme files.
7. WordPress Sites Have a Built-In Blog
   Since WordPress is a content management system, it has multiple features that make publishing content easy. One of these is a “built in” blog feature that can be accessed from any device, at any time, so that users who want to add a blog to their website don’t have to create one separately. That makes it possible even for sites unrelated to blogging to use the blog feature for adding updates or announcements.
8. The WordPress Community Offers Support
   Because WordPress is free and open source, it’s supported by WordPress-loving communities around the world. This community of WordPress lovers is responsible for making changes to the source files and keeping WordPress updated and secure. The WordPress community also engages in plenty of outreach to users, hosting WordPress camps around the world and supporting the growth of local WordPress user groups.
   WordPress is used by over 30 percent of CMS-based websites worldwide, and it’s easy to see why. WordPress makes the essential tools for building a website available to any user, not just experienced web developers, and those tools can equally support a small personal site and a large, complicated corporate web portal. With an array of features such as themes and plugins designed to extend its functions, WordPress works for all kinds of sites.