We just celebrated 24 years of Viget. That’s two dozen years! This year, our Spring TTT in celebration of “Viget24” was a virtual extravaganza. We’ve put on a lot of virtual events over the years. Some with really strong themes and swag bags; some that focus on simple, meaningful time together; and others that let us enjoy learning something new as a team. Regardless of the rest of the experience, a key component of all of our virtual events is joy, achieved often through intentional levity. We think it’s important to laugh together! We see laughter as a way to expedite connection, and connection leads to rapport which makes us better at collaborating — and in turn leads to more quality products for our clients. 

Experimenting and iterating is a critical way we try to continually get delight right. We’re pretty pleased with one of our experiments from Viget24 that we called “Lovely Spring Day”.

A Lovely Spring Day

As we were brainstorming for this TTT, we thought about how to throw some joyful levity pizzazz into the pieces of our virtual events puzzle that have become pretty standard. How do we add lots of delight without adding lots of time to the action-packed schedule? We zeroed in on the virtual backgrounds we’ve been creating for every event — they add a layer of specialness. Of place. This isn’t any old virtual meeting. This is a TTT! 

Another key consideration for our team is figuring out creative ways to tie in inspiration from our industry and our work. AI has been an obvious contender —  we’ve discussed it and tied it in to some extent for the past several TTTs. But this time, we wanted to see how we could use AI for delight — marrying it with virtual backgrounds felt obvious. And so, a ”Lovely Spring Day” was born. 

The TL;DR is that we generated custom virtual backgrounds for every Viget employee that encapsulates their “ideal spring day.” We then played a 15-minute guessing game where people tried to guess who the background “belonged to.” Then, people had access to the full folder of AI-generated virtual backgrounds to look through. Vigets could then choose the background that spoke to them most and set it as their background. 

Read on for more on how we put this together!

Pre-Event Survey

To support all of our TTTs, we send out thoughtful pre-event logistics surveys 2-3 weeks before the big day. The survey lets us know where folks are joining from (where can we send their activity + snack packages?) and gives folks a chance to provide input on how the People Team can help folks enjoy and be present for TTT. This time, we also snuck in three questions, just “for giggles.”

• In one sentence, describe your ideal spring day.
• List three things that spark joy.
• What color do you think suits you best?

We did not share why we asked these questions. Sneaky, sneaky! When it’s low-key like this, the element of surprise is often a quick way to level up the delight.

Asking for a Friend

With rich data in hand about what makes people happy in spring, we were ready to generate the backgrounds. I was stoked! I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT for some time, so it was fun to be able to use the DALL-E 3 side of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. 

Who knew Prompt Engineering would be part of my role as a recruiter-who-helps-support-TTT-planning? I played around with a couple different prompts to generate these background images. Ultimately, my goal was to create backgrounds that were meaningfully different from one another but still felt good (i.e., something you might feasibly want to set as your virtual background and nothing freakily AI, like uncanny valley hands).

Here are the prompts I landed on that got me to our set of virtual backgrounds:

• Please generate an image (dimensions of a virtual meeting background) that encapsulates the vibe of a day with [ BLANK ].
• Please generate an image (dimensions of a virtual meeting background) that features [ BLANK ].

In the blanks, I wrote the things people included in their surveys. Those blanks were filled with everything ranging from dogs, cats, and friends to beverages, specific temperatures, yard games, carbohydrates, hammocks and more! Sometimes, I’d include a detail I knew about that person myself, even if it wasn’t in their survey. Yes, I occasionally editorialized for both clarity and whimsy! This was for delight purposes, but also helped serve my goal of having the backgrounds be “meaningfully different from one another.” It’s amazing how many people’s ideal spring day is as simple as having 1) moderate temperatures and 2) no pollen!

I generated 55 images. Throughout the process, DALL-E nailed it. I only needed to regenerate 2 or 3 images with clarifiers (and only because they included AI-specific outliers like disembodied hands). Huzzah!

Here are some of my favorites, along with their prompts in the captions. Can you guess who they belong to?

IRL

Ok, so for the actual activity we had the images ready to go in a private Google Folder. I took twelve of the images and put them in a very simple deck. I shared my screen, introduced the activity, and invited people to guess who they think each image belonged to in Slack. It was so fun seeing people throw out guesses and then narrow in with any verbal hints I gave!

Each image took about a minute. Then, we shared access to the Google Folder, gave folks a couple minutes to choose a background that called to them (their own image or someone else’s), and set it as their background. It felt like a magical moment to witness people finding and resonating with their own image or delighting in the ridiculousness of their coworkers’. We saved about 5 minutes for this piece, which felt right.

The whole Lovely Spring Day activity took just over 15 minutes! It was a perfect way to transition from a long meal break into our next grouping of content. And, we got to see the different backgrounds throughout the rest of the meeting.

Oh, the humanity!

I think this activity was successful for a couple of reasons.

1. People laughed! 

2. People felt seen. Some of these backgrounds were incredibly on point. Some of that was due to key folks having well-documented interests and a Slack-Famous Dog. 

But some of it was due to the People Team knowing about our people — our coworkers — beyond the sentence they wrote in. This uniquely human involvement helped me call an audible as needed and tweak prompts slightly to make the backgrounds feel even more relatable.

3. We could commiserate about our eventual AI overlords. (Did you notice that I say “please” in my prompts?!) Listen, Viget has plenty of practical, healthily skeptical people who are dubious about AI. GenAI is not always a fun, lighthearted thing. But using it in a fun, lighthearted way to do something it’s really good at was a nice use case and thought-provoking exposure even for people who are not into it.

4. We could see where we all align, and where we differ! It was amazing to see just how many people love picnics, covet their caffeine, and appreciate a bike ride. It was also cool to see some unique folks who simply crave a rainy spring day, or some beloved Buc-ee’s. What a rich tapestry of individuals — literally!

Users expect a website to load fast. An average web page loads in about 2.5 seconds. The longer the user has to wait, the higher the user bounce rate. There are a lot of factors that go into site speed, but images account for about 75% of the page weight on an application or website. Google’s Core Web Vitals uses several metrics to rank sites. Visual site speed or largest contentful paint affects ROI as slower sites have fewer repeat users and fewer sales.

Without properly sized images, both site speed and image quality are affected. Accordingly, we use several methods to deliver properly sized images. Our primary solution is imgix because it is easy to implement and saves managers and clients time and effort. 

Imgix Key Features

Imgix provides a lot of features — some we consistently use on projects, and others we use in very specific situations. 

Responsive Images

Setting up responsive images can be complex. As the variety of devices and their screen resolutions continue to expand, managing all the different image requirements is increasingly challenging.

Consider this scenario: a website’s images look crisp and clear on a high-resolution monitor. When that same page is viewed on a mobile device, the images are so large the page takes forever to load. A solution could be to upload a smaller image for mobile, right? It's not quite that simple. We need eight or more different sizes of the same image to account for different screen sizes and retina screens. Keeping track of all the image sizes and saving each size gets complex and would be nearly impossible to do manually on a site that has hundreds or thousands of images. 

One of our clients, National Park Foundation (NPF), wanted to clarify its message to better target major donors. Their gorgeous, large scenic images are essential to their website strategy.  NPF needed the images throughout their site to be crisp and clear at all screen sizes. Using imgix, NPF content managers can load high-resolution images to the CMS and not worry about the site's speed or performance. They rely on imgix to deliver the correctly resized image for any user's screen.

Imgix does this with their Device Pixel Ratio and Client Hints which automatically sets the pixel density for the image based on the user's device. Those API parameters can be easily set in the URLs for the image’s `srcset`. This allows developers to set an image width for an image `srcset` and then imgix delivers the right pixel ratio image to the user. We use `srcset` with imgix on other client sites like Bezos Earth Fund and Human Rights Campaign as well.

Resize and Cropping

Imgix allows you to crop images in addition to setting an image’s focal point. So, only one image needs to be uploaded and it can be used at multiple sizes and croppings throughout the site. Let's say we upload a large landscape image, but on some pages we only need to use a portion of the image cropped as a square. Imgix will crop the image and deliver the smaller versions on the pages we need while persisting the larger versions on other pages.

At Viget we use resizing and cropping on our own website, including our articles, to crop the staff photo to a smaller size at the top of the articles. This makes it possible for us to upload the staff photo once and the article image gets created automatically. 

Color Palette 

Another feature that we've used on client sites is the Color Palette API which allows you as many colors as you want from an image. For example, the Shedd Aquarium website that we built uses this feature by pulling a vibrant color from the image and setting it as the background color for the page hero. Aside from taking the manual work out of closely aligning photography with a page’s design, there’s an additional benefit: if you are on a slow connection, you will see a dynamic colored banner at the top before the image loads.

Image Upscaling

Another valuable feature is the ability to upscale images. Even if you upload an image that is low resolution, it can still be used at a higher resolution. This is especially useful for e-commerce sites or applications where users are uploading their images.  The upscale feature uses Generative AI to take a pixelated image and create a higher-resolution image. The final image will not be perfect, but it looks more professional. See the upscale demo on imgix.

PDF Preview Images

There is also a PDF page to image option in imgix. The API enables the generation of a page-specific image preview from the PDF, which can serve as both a thumbnail and a full-size preview. When we built AHIP.org, they had a resources section for their members containing quite a few PDFs. To help with clarity and findability, we used imgix to show previews of the PDF documents to non-members. This feature allows AHIP to upload resource PDFs without having to also upload any thumbnail images. 

Face Detection

Another nice feature is a face detection parameter that you can pass to the API. This allows you to upload a photo and no matter the cropping or size it will keep the face as the focal point of the image. We used this feature on NEA for their team member page. It's great for user profile images that are used in different contexts throughout the site. 

Video Streaming

Videos have become a key design element on websites. However, determining which service to use for embedding those videos is an ongoing topic of discussion. Video platforms enable you to integrate the video onto the page, yet they introduce scripts that may impede page loading speed. Imgix offers a video embed service that allows content managers to keep all the images and videos in one place. The videos are automatically encoded to Adaptive Bitrate Streaming to get the best compression and video quality. So, videos load fast and look great on mobile and desktop. 

Performance 

A lot of CMSs have image transformations built in. An image transformation encompasses everything for that image including responsive sizes, cropping, resizing, and face detection from the original. This is great for small sets of images, but transformations quickly get out of hand the more images there are on a site. For example, the homepage of the National Park Foundation has a minimum of 96 image transformations. 

Processing all of those image transformations uses a lot of server resources. Imgix saves the images and delivers them through their CDN. The imgix image CDN has an average of 0.15 milliseconds return on requests which enables images to load as quickly as possible. The CDN also caches the images on CDN edge nodes making them immediately available for future requests. 

Flexibility

Imgix is flexible enough to work with almost any site structure; including WordPress, Craft CMS, Shopify, React, Ruby on Rails, Python, and more (see the full list). So, whether a site is a WordPress site or a Rails application, imgix fits right into the ecosystem. And, even better: you don’t have to rebuild your web app or website to gain the benefits of image performance, which can save you a lot of time and money.

Setting up imgix on an existing website is easy. Imgix can connect to existing asset storage sources like AWS, Azure, or a web folder on the same domain. Once the image source is set up, a developer can start passing parameters to the API. 

Cost

Imgix is free for 1,000 images which makes it easy to integrate and grow with your site. Pricing goes to $750/yr for 5,000 images and $3,000/yr for 25,000 images. In their pricing structure, “images” are categorized as origin images, so the count only includes original images and not transformed ones. So, you could have hundreds of images and thousands of image transformations all being delivered through a CDN for free.

Conclusion

Ensuring fast site speed isn't just important. It is vital. It's the cornerstone of a successful online presence, directly influencing search engine rankings, user satisfaction, and ultimately, your return on investment. Properly sized and optimized images are key to ensuring your site loads quickly and displays correctly for users across various devices.

We have found that imgix enables our team to efficiently create projects with diverse image options, saving managers and developers valuable time. Our clients benefit from reduced server space and an increased site speed. Imgix’s API is comprehensive, so you can use one tool for all features and options around site images — from cropping and resizing to face detection and automated color palettes, to video and beyond. Having used imgix for the past five years to support the wide-ranging needs of our clients, we feel confident recommending it and using it again and again. 

Users expect a website to load fast, and imgix is a reliable way to make sure that happens. 

When onboarding a new partner to redesign your website, take over maintenance, or rescue a project going sideways, you'll need to carefully transition access to a variety of critical systems and tools. And if you're navigating a contentious relationship or onboarding into a new organization without documentation, you might not know where to start.

Does that sound scary? It doesn't have to be. 

Here's a comprehensive checklist to ensure that you retain full control of your website and avoid any potential hiccups during a transition.

1. Codebase access. Ensure you have ownership or administrative access to the existing codebase or code repository. Popular platforms like Bitbucket and GitHub are often used for this purpose.
2. Content Management System access. Ensure you have the highest level of access (super admin) for your Content Management System (CMS). 
3. Hosting information and access. Gather all hosting information and ensure you have access to the account that owns the workspace. This is crucial to prevent unauthorized updates or changes to your site. For hosted platforms, you’ll need Owner access, not just Administrator access. 
4. Additional services information and access. This might include your domain registrar (e.g., GoDaddy), DNS settings, email services, your content delivery network (CDN), if applicable. This could also include any third-party services that are integrated with your website. Common examples might include: Algolia, Hubspot, Stripe, etc. 
5. Analytics and Data. Make sure you have access to all analytics tools used to monitor your website traffic and user behavior. This might include both old Google Universal Analytics data and current GA4 data, Google Tag Manager, or any other analytics services used on your website (e.g., Mixpanel, Hotjar, Adobe Analytics, etc.). 
6. Backups. Secure a full backup of your site, including the file system. Plugins like UpdraftPlus for WordPress can be very helpful for this process. Also, ensure you have backups of shared files, such as those in Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox.
7. Design Assets. Retain copies of raw design assets (e.g., Figma files). We always transfer ownership of Figma files to our client teams to ensure they have the ability to extend the design system in the future.
8. Licenses. Make sure you own any required licenses, such as font/photo licenses, CMS licenses, API keys, or premium plugins. We insist that our client teams purchase any required licenses/subscriptions using their corporate information so we’re never blocking access to those critical resources.

Transitioning website partners can be a smooth process with foresight and preparation. While ideally there would never be gaps in access to these critical resources and services, by following this checklist, you can ensure that you’re not missing anything when offboarding old partners or getting your bearings with a new team or organization. 

Do you need help figuring out how this checklist might apply to your situation? Be in touch, and we’d be happy to discuss your current status and suggest next steps for your website transition. 

When starting a new project, decision makers are faced with the dilemma of choosing a content management system (CMS). Sometimes, it’s not that simple and they must choose whether to go with a traditional CMS or a headless CMS. Both offer unique benefits and cater to different needs, making it crucial to understand when each makes sense for your project. Let’s take a look at some considerations that can help you make the right decision.

What is a Traditional CMS?

Traditional CMS’s – like Craft CMS, WordPress, and Drupal – offer a pre-packaged solution for content creation, management, and delivery. They include powerful interfaces with content editing capabilities and templating out of the box, enabling you to create sites with ease. A traditional CMS can be monolithic because the back-end and front-end are tightly coupled. Using a traditional CMS typically means you are using all of the tools included to achieve your goal.

What is a Headless CMS?

A Headless CMS is like a Traditional CMS in that it includes content creation and management tools. But it differs in the fact that the back-end content management system is decoupled from the front-end (presentation layer), allowing developers to use any technology stack they prefer for building the front-end of the site. The back-end acts as an API with its only purpose being to serve content from the database. There are CMS options like Contentful, Payload, and Strapi that are built to be headless. Popular traditional CMS’s like Craft CMS and WordPress also offer headless variants.

The Restaurant Analogy

Let’s simplify things a bit more and look at the decision using an analogy; a restaurant.

Traditional Restaurant (Traditional CMS)

Imagine a restaurant where the kitchen and dining room are connected. The chefs cook the food, and the waitstaff serve it directly to the customers in the same building. This setup means that everything is closely integrated, and the kitchen (back-end) is tightly coupled to the dining experience (front-end). Picture a scenario where the restaurant decides to change from table service to buffet style. The food now needs to be prepared in advance and delivered to the front of house in a different way, potentially even requiring new equipment. The restaurant needs to be reconfigured to not only accommodate the buffet but also to interface with the kitchen differently. Because the restaurant and kitchen are coupled, both sides would require work in order to accommodate a shift in strategy. 

Ghost Kitchen (Headless CMS)

Now, think of a ghost (or cloud) kitchen where food is prepared centrally but can be delivered to various locations or dining experiences. The kitchen (back-end) focuses solely on cooking (content creation and management) and doesn't worry about where the food is served. Instead, the meals (content) can be delivered to different endpoints like food trucks, home deliveries, or partner restaurants (or in our case websites, mobile apps, etc.). This separation allows more flexibility in how and where the content is delivered without changing the core cooking process. If a new experience requires new equipment or processes, the kitchen can be expanded without affecting the front-end experience.

When to Use a Headless CMS

Omni-Channel Content Delivery 

If you consistently need to deliver content across multiple platforms (websites, mobile apps, IoT devices), a headless CMS is ideal because it can serve the same content through APIs to any front-end. The front-end can be swapped out without any need for development to the back-end.

Scalability and Flexibility

If you want the ability to keep your content management system up-to-date independently of the presentation layer, a headless CMS can allow for more agile and scalable development. This could be especially useful if you anticipate needing to redesign or update parts of the front-end frequently without affecting the back-end content.

Front-end Framework Preferences

Maybe your team has developers who are very proficient in a particular JavaScript framework, like Next.js, SvelteKit, or Astro. The time needed to learn a new templating language could push you past your deadline. Maybe you have some cool interactive interface in mind? A headless CMS can provide the raw content for your developers to build highly custom, tailor-made front-ends in whatever language or framework they please.

Security

Going headless can offer security advantages due to its decoupled nature. By communicating via API to the front-end, data access can be controlled more granularly. Because the back-end is only responsible for content management and delivery, fewer plugins are typically used which means a smaller chance of vulnerabilities due to third-party software.

Hosting & Infrastructure

A cloud-based headless CMS offers additional advantages over a self-hosted headless CMS. It can simplify maintenance and operating costs since the cloud provider is responsible for updates and security of the platform. Cloud-based solutions like Strapi Cloud often come with integrated security features, automatic backups, and disaster recovery options.

Which will you choose?

While the flexibility and security a headless CMS offers may be great benefits, it may not be necessary for every project and could even introduce complexity. It’s important to consider the long-term purpose of the project and who will be responsible for maintaining it as well as authoring content. If your primary focus is on managing and delivering content in a structured manner with rapid development, a traditional CMS can be an excellent choice. But if you feel any of the examples I’ve laid out above align with your project’s requirements then a headless CMS may be right for you! 

Whatever route you take, remember that both Craft CMS and WordPress can be used in traditional or headless applications and are a fine choice either way! Now you know the differences between a traditional and headless CMS, and an informed decision can be made. If you have more questions or a project you think could benefit from a traditional or headless CMS, we’d love to help!

If you’re like us, you’ve likely built ‘page builder’ fields in Craft CMS using Matrix. But sometimes you need more than a block. We use Super Table to create ‘page sections’ that include some extra settings (like background color, controls for width, etc.). We can then nest a Matrix field to control page blocks within the Page Section (Super Table). This has worked well for us in the past but there's a new, simpler way to achieve this starting in Craft 5.

Upgrading a site from Craft 4 to Craft 5 can seem intimidating. Even more so when your site relies on complex content models like the one I described above. You might think, okay I'll upgrade to Craft 5 and then look into migrating to the newer method in the future. Well, now is the time. Verbb has announced that Super Table has reached end-of-life.  While there is a Craft 5 compatible version available, it won't receive updates. That means now is the perfect time to migrate your Super Table fields to native Matrix fields.

Craft 5 makes the process easy by converting Matrix blocks to entry types automatically during the upgrade. This guide will walk you through the process. We'll cover preparation, the upgrades themselves, and steps to clean up afterward. As you’ll see below, the process is actually quite simple and nothing to stress over!

Preparing for the Upgrade

The first step in any upgrade is preparation. Start by backing up your site’s database. This ensures that you can restore your site to its previous state if anything goes wrong during the upgrade process. We use (and love) DDEV here at Viget, so this guide will be leveraging it. But you can easily adapt the commands if you are not. To create a database backup, run:

It's also essential to familiarize yourself with the Craft 5 Upgrade Guide. This guide provides detailed information on the changes, new features, and potential breaking changes in Craft 5, helping you understand what to expect. It serves as a fantastic set of instructions to get your site upgraded.

The Upgrade Process

Once you're prepared, you can begin the upgrade process. Per the Craft Upgrade Guide, we will update Craft and plugins at the same time. Open your editor and modify your composer.json with the new versions of your plugins. The two for sure we will need to modify are:

Updating Super Table Fields and Templates

With the Matrix blocks converted to entry types, you need to reconfigure any Super Table fields to be Matrix fields.

Update Super Table Fields:

• Browse to Settings > Fields and edit any Super Table fields
• Change the field type from Super Table to Matrix (there will be no content loss when switching from Super Table to Matrix)
• Select the entry type to use (Craft has already created one for you)
• Save the field
• That's it!

At this point, you have removed your dependency on Super Table and have a page builder entirely built with Matrix fields. What were previously Super Table blocks are now a custom Entry Type and what were Matrix blocks are now also Entry Types. This allows you to have nested Matrix within Matrix thanks to Craft’s Entrification plan.

Cleaning Up After the Upgrade

After updating your fields and templates, it's time to clean up. First, uninstall the Super Table plugin. Navigate to Settings > Plugins in the Control Panel to uninstall the plugin. Then remove it from your project by running:

Thoroughly test your site to ensure everything is functioning correctly. Pay close attention to the entry types where you used Super Table fields, confirming that authoring and your front-end work as expected.

Additionally, you can also take this opportunity to clean up your fields and entry types. Craft 5’s reusable fields and entry types give you ample opportunity to consolidate and Craft 5 provides new utilities to make this process as simple as possible.

• fields/auto-merge — Automatically discovers functionally identical fields and merges their uses together.
• fields/merge — Manually merge one field into another of the same type and update uses of the merged field.
• entry-types/merge — Merge one entry type into another and update uses of the merged entry type.

That’s it!

Upgrading from Craft 4 to Craft 5 and transitioning from Super Table is incredibly simple, thanks to Craft 5’s automatic conversion of Matrix blocks to entry types. Super Table will no longer be maintained moving forward, and it's better to switch to the native Craft solution for better long-term support. By following these steps, you can quickly tackle the change and take advantage of the new features and improvements in Craft 5. With careful planning, thorough testing, and a few commands, you’ll have your page builder working again in Craft 5 in no time. Happy upgrading!

Concept testing is a research method that explores how a user perceives or interacts with a new idea. It usually takes place early in a project, and involves putting ideas into the “real world” to see how users will react to them.

Not every project needs to include concept testing, but it can make your solutions more user-centered. Involving users in the design process leads to products, sites, and experiences that are more aligned with user wants and needs — and ultimately more successful.

Concept testing is most useful when exploring ideas that are novel, complex, or risky. It can also help your team:

• Generate more purposeful, user-centered ideas.
• Identify which ideas provide the greatest value to users. 
• Prioritize the most promising idea(s), saving time and money.
• Evaluate any significant changes you make along the way.

I’ll cover how we use concept testing at Viget to help our clients gain clarity and develop user-centered solutions. 

This article will be part of a three-part series focused on concept testing. First, we’ll focus on planning out your concept testing. 

Form a clear plan

A successful concept test has a well-defined plan at its foundation from the start. At Viget, we work with clients to define what you want to learn, and who you want to learn from. 

Let’s imagine that you and your team are redesigning an online food delivery platform, and you have some new concepts that you want to test to see if they resonate with users.   

Focus on what you want to learn.

Start by defining research objectives. Think of these objectives as your north stars that will guide you and your team. You’ll use these for initial alignment, and then to frame what the prototype needs to do, and what feedback you really need.

You can create a strong set of objectives by asking:

• What initially sparked the motivation to test?
• Where do you have the most uncertainty about your concept?
• What are the key things you need to know through testing?

Teams usually have a lot of questions, and feel pressure to answer all of them at once. Resist the pressure! Instead, focus on the most pressing and critical — it will allow you to dive deeper into the most important areas in a session. Otherwise, you may not have the depth you need to move forward when you finish the testing.

Let’s say you've developed new solutions that span the whole user journey of online food delivery. You could spend a whole research session asking questions that cover all that breadth, but you would get much more depth by focusing on one particular moment in the journey, like the online ordering experience.

Think about who you want to talk to (and be holistic).

If you aren’t intentional about who you test with, you can end up with feedback that may not be applicable. Ideally, you’re talking to existing customers or people who would use the website or product in the future. Look at behaviors, like whether they’ve used a competitor, or hold specific sentiments, when recruiting participants. Perhaps you’re trying to expand your audience for your new food delivery app, so you may want to talk to people who cook at home frequently as well. 

Don’t forget to think holistically. Consider every person who might interact with this solution, from beginning to end, and who might be affected by it. For your new app, you'll want to test with the diner, but your solutions may also affect the restaurant host/hostess, cooks and cashier’s workflows for example. So you may need to capture their perspectives. 

Opinions aren’t strong evidence.

You may gravitate towards seeking preferences or opinions about your concepts (i.e., “which concept is better?”). But rather than focusing on which concept users like most, it’s more important to uncover user behavior. Preference-centric concept testing won’t teach you about how someone might actually interact with this concept. 

For instance, you’ll learn much more about which new concepts for online food ordering are most beneficial to users if you ask about how they might use it in a scenario. Or even better, you actually have them interact with each one.   

Questions like the ones below will give you stronger indications of user behavior:

• When was the last time you used [the competitor]?
• How might this concept fit into your day to day?
• How would you accomplish this task with the concept?

Avoid asking questions like “Which concept is better?” or “which one do you prefer?” Instead ask why one concept has advantages or disadvantages over another for a user, or how they actually envision it in their daily life. 

Even if the focus of the test is on preference (as is the case for branding or marketing research) it’s still helpful to dive deeper into what a user feels the design is communicating to them and why that prompts a specific reaction.

These key strategies that I’ve covered should get you a jump-start for successfully planning out your first concept test.

In the next article in the series, I'll dive into prototyping.

Behavioral analytics are a great way to get a sense of what users are or are not doing on your website or app. While behavioral analytics may not provide insights into why users are behaving a certain way, this method does provide a quick and cost-effective way to see what your users are currently doing at scale. Knowing how your users are engaging with your website or product can help you make informed decisions that have a positive impact on engagement and conversions.

Here at Viget, we use behavioral analytics data for a number of use cases:

1. Our client has a specific question about a certain aspect of their website or app (e.g., a specific user flow or content type) and wants to learn more about how and when users are engaging. 
2. We are redesigning a client’s website and want to get a sense of where the current experience is excelling or falling short.
3. We are conducting an annual analysis to help clients keep an eye on potential areas of growth or stagnation. 
4. We are reviewing behavioral changes on a site or app after launching a new experience or feature to assess performance.

But what kind of insights can you expect to find from behavioral analytics data? 

It ultimately depends on the website or app, the users, and the kinds of questions you are asking, but let’s go through a few different examples of what kind of information you can gain from behavioral analytics tools.

Who is using your website or product?

Understanding who is using your website can provide helpful context on your user base and potentially unlock growth with new user groups you may have been unaware of. To investigate this, we may look at geographic location, language, device type, and any other demographic information that may be available. Sometimes this kind of data provides what I like to call descriptive information—information that often doesn’t feel immediately actionable but can become more useful relative to other data points. This could come from comparing your data to last year, to industry standards, to other content on the website, or it might come from comparing it to an assumption that an individual or organization holds. 

Here are some examples of findings that shed light on who was using the website or product:

How do users get to your website or product?

Knowing how users navigate to your website or product can highlight what traffic sources are particularly effective in driving conversions, but it can also help to provide important context on user expectations or goals. To understand this, we look at both the source/medium that brought them to the website as well as the first page they viewed. 

For example, users might:

• Come from google and land on a blog article
• Go directly to your home page
• Come from an email referral to a donation page 
• Learn about you from ChatGPT and land on your About page

From there, we might look at engagement rate, conversion rates, or other metrics to get a sense of what these users are doing and whether anything stands out as particularly effective or ineffective. 

Here are some examples of acquisition insights that informed our understanding and approach:

What content or features do users engage with?

Here is where we start to get to the meat of what your users are actually doing on your website or product. Knowing what users are doing and what they’re not using can help to establish priorities and inform decisions. You might be surprised to learn that users are actually engaging with specific features or content quite a bit, but others are barely used. If the content or feature is surprisingly popular, then we likely don’t want to outright remove it and may instead consider iterating or leveraging that offering more. If users aren’t engaging with content or a feature, it may be worth considering the effort to maintain and iterate on that offering. 

Here are some examples of engagement insights that helped us identify opportunities related to content or features:

What is the user journey or path?

Another major area of investigation is the sequence of steps users take when viewing content or completing certain actions. This could be perusing content on the website, going through a signup funnel, or checking out to make a purchase. 

This helps us identify:

• the actual paths that lead to conversions (which is not always the path we assume it is) 
• areas where users drop off at key points in the funnel
• moments where users have to “turn around” in the journey, because the path laid before them doesn’t align with their needs 

This information can help you build towards a frictionless experience that encourages users to sign up, complete a purchase, or find the resources they need.

Here are some examples of user journey insights that helped us understand where there were existing points of friction for users:

What “turning around” in the user journey can look like:

What dropoff can look like at different stages:

The Ecosystem at Large

Some clients have a larger ecosystem of products or services, and it’s important to look at how users engage with and navigate across the ecosystem. This might include subdomains for a shop, a marketing site versus the product site, help documentation, etc. By looking at the larger ecosystem we can reveal important connections that are missing or connections that could be strengthened.

Here are some examples of insights that demonstrated a need for changes in those ecosystem connections:

Here at Viget, there are a wide variety of insights we may discover for any one project through behavioral analytics. These insights can help to identify new user groups, help to prioritize content or features maintenance and updates, or bring to attention moments in the user journey that are causing friction. These opportunities can help you bring in new users and retain your existing users, by providing an experience that aligns with their needs, whether that is finding resources, getting involved in a community, or making a purchase.  

If you’re interested in making your website or application more effective for your users by leveraging the power of behavioral analytics data, we’d love to hear from you. 

In recent years, as distributed work has become the norm, all-hands trips have become more commonplace. Even companies that have always done them now see their importance in a new light. They are expensive and demanding for everyone involved, but when they’re done well they can be incredibly impactful. Are you bringing your team together and feeling the stress of getting it right? Designing the time together takes strategic thinking, logistics planning, and the confidence to ask everyone to contribute to the event’s success.

Last week, we came together to connect, celebrate each other, and look forward to a bright future in our quarterly all-hands event we call Third Third Thursday or TTT. It was our first in-person all-hands event since May 2023. At Viget, we actively build our culture together. The responsibility doesn’t fall on just a few individuals' shoulders. Our events are successful because individuals show up, speak up, listen, and honor the limited time we have together in-person. This is evident in the chats over breakfast pastries, the all-in approach to competitions breakout sessions, and the peer talks and discussions throughout our events. This connection and camaraderie doesn’t just happen, we work hard to make it happen. 

Reflecting on last week’s event (and 7 years of other events), I want to share these five key planning tips to help you craft a successful event. 

Leverage your physical space to help achieve your event goals. This fall we had a smaller number of attendees and we wanted to encourage discussion throughout the event so we set up the room in large U shape to foster conversation. We also made the most of our exterior space, which featured a fire escape staircase, by hosting an egg drop competition. 

Over communicate, especially around when team members can expect breaks and when they can expect to be fed. As the event lead, I share my phone number multiple times ahead of and throughout the event. We also make sure to communicate in dedicated channels, including an event Slack channel for all attendees, a behind-the-scenes Slack channel for presenters only, and an event website. We share important key information like bus schedules and flight confirmations via email. In advance of the big day, we shared this slide with our team to both inform and inspire. 

Leave room for unstructured time and connection. Over the years we learned that some of the best discussions and a-ha moments come from chats over a meal or a snack during the “unplanned” parts of the event. Now we plan ahead for these, leaving ample time for unplanned, impromptu a-has. We think about airport Uber rides, charter bus rides, morning runs, evening board games, or late-night drinks and look for ways to grease the wheels of serendipity. This was especially important for us this fall since it had been so long since the last time we all gathered together. 

Look for ways to celebrate what is unique to your company. One pretty fantastic thing that comes with a quarter century in business is the community we’ve built along the way. We make a point to keep up with previous Viget employees who we proudly call our alumni. We love our alumni and enjoy recognizing their contributions to Viget. One way we do so is with annual picnics, which we host when the most current Viget employees are in town for an event. These picnics are often a great mix of reconnections and networking.

Find ways to surprise and delight. Think big and small. For example, this fall we put colored pencils and butcher block paper out during our meeting time. Our autumnal decor included blue(ish) and orange pumpkins (Viget colors!). We made a subtle callout to an internal project by serving french fries as our afternoon snack. And we surprised our team with Unreal treats for their bus rides home. The treats served as dessert and a means for us to introduce our next in-person event, our spring TTT, aka Viget25. 

Some companies advocate for all-hand retreats to be social and relaxing, but not “productive.” They tout a meeting-free event. At Viget, we see the meeting time as crucial because that is when peers share knowledge, reflect on their recent work, showcase client impact, and highlight new ideas and personal growth. Similarly, our co-founders reflect on Viget’s performance and share thoughts on the upcoming business direction. The meeting sparks genuine inspiration and creates a time for us to remember what brought us to Viget in the first place – to build world class tech in support of our clients. 

On the heels of a successful gathering, it’s time to start planning the next one. For our next event we’ll head to the Allegheny Mountains where we’ll leverage a unique and memorable venue, offer plenty of unstructured time for connection (with each other and nature), loop in alumni where appropriate, plan inspiring meeting content, enjoy many meals and treats together, and of course find ways to surprise and delight. 

Work-related travel isn't for everyone, but if you know someone who appreciates the idea of dedicated time to connect with and celebrate their peers, we’re hiring. And to all the culture champions and event planners out there, good luck with your next all-hands!