BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Every site or service will fail eventually. An emergency communications strategy can get you through the crisis faster and reassure your users while you're putting out the fire. Learn to imagine, prioritize, and prepare for everything that can go wrong, assign roles in advance to get you through the crisis, and communicate effectively with your customers throughout the experience.

Everybody has one: the inner critic that tells you you’re just faking it, that others have more talent, that you’ll never achieve the success you seek. The inner critic is an unconscious deterrent that stands between the seeds of great ideas and the fruits of achievement, making you hate your designs, giving you “writer’s block” as your deadline looms, keeping you stuck in a project’s initial thinking stage because something isn’t quite right. Denise Jacobs anatomizes and shows how to quash your inner critic, giving you the mental space and energy to let your true talents emerge.

Mystifying design with jargon only we understand makes us feel like heroes and creates a sense of job security. But it also creates an “us and them� atmosphere which excludes non-designers, obscures the true value of design, and generates antagonism when only cooperation will yield the best product. By revealing our process and inviting others into our world, we can create a team that is invested in the success of our work, and deliver better design. Jeff Gothelf discusses the steps we can take to increase the value of our practice and of ourselves as practitioners.

Do you consistently work to stay engaged, or do you get comfortable with clients? With new projects, it's easy to make the extra effort. The longer you work together, the easier it becomes to feel satisfied with the status quo, while giving your best energy to the shiny new client. Rather than pretend this won’t happen, prepare for it and create a strategy to combat it. Shane Pearlman shows us how.

Customers aren't shy about shouting their experiences—good and bad—to the world via Twitter and Facebook. When you see customer service as a cost center, you risk treating customers as a liability. Yet, customers are a valuable resource: their feedback is integral to shaping your product and building your brand. Customer service, by definition, is about serving people; it should be genuine, personalized, and compassionate—or, simply put, human.