Mediacurrent Open Waters Podcast

In this episode, we catch up with Cristina Chumillas. Cristina comes from the design world and is passionate about front-end development. She works at Lullabot (though when we recorded this, she worked at Ymbra) and has been involved in the Drupal community for years, contributing with code, design, and organizing events. Her contributions to Drupal Core are mainly focused on front-end, design and UX. Nowadays, she's a co-organizer of the Drupal Admin UI & JS Modernization Initiative and a Drupal core UX maintainer.

Welcome to Mediacurrent’s Open Waters podcast. A podcast about open source solutions. I’m Mark Casias, surrounded by my wonderful co-hosts, Bob Kepford… and Mario Hernandez.

This episode we will be talking with the creative director here at Mediacurrent, Sheree Hill. With 15 years of award-winning agency experience, Sheree has been privileged to work with iconic brands including Harley-Davidson, AT&T, Kellogg’s Special K, Tupperware, Budweiser, The Home Depot, Toyota Scion, Listerine, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, Southeastern Conference Sports, NCAA and Sony Pictures to create branded entertainment, rich media, games and interactive motion marketing and product sites. With our design team, has recently launched projects including Georgia Tech’s Workforce of the future and Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business.

Open Source Design

A: As Creative Director at Mediacurrent, I lead the design team in brand-led engagements, website, design and user experiences by practicing empathy and behavioral science. We practice design thinking use a component-based design process to create scalable web sites for higher education, non-profit and financial services verticals.

A: Component based design is unique in that the design elements are reusable and scalable rather than one-off designs. Our team is versed in building well-structured design systems, this means that we design on an atomic level, viewing each component and design element as a part of a larger whole. Often we base our designs on our basic install profile, which is a set of wireframes we have created that address standard content needs. Basic components, such as heroes, cards, accordions, left/right components are already wired out. We can use them as a base, which eliminates the need to duplicate prior efforts. It's transformed our process.

Brands are intimate and have personalities. We create moodboards to set the tone of the digital brand extension. We perform discovery including UX and brand audits We ask questions. There is power in knowing which questions to ask. Our digital strategists partner with our UX designers to create iterative design. We rapidly prototype and map out MVP needs for components and lay out with matrix’s.

A: If you’re on a marketing team for a university there are many unique challenges. There are multiple stakeholders (often more than the corporate clients we work with) with different goals and objectives. Design needs to appeal/solve problems for a larger stakeholder audience in higher ed because there are often agendas and priorities that are duplicative or competing. We solve this by doing a deep onsite discovery engagement where we get to know an institution’s unique set of needs. We have a team of developers, strategists and designers that work together at the onsite to have an understanding of what is needed, we practice agile methodology and partner with your team to co-create a scalable solution.

Agile methodology typically works well in a higher ed project because of the dynamics and evolving discussions on requirements between various stakeholders. When it comes to search technologies, universities have deep repositories of data that they need to get into their students hands, we worked with USC Libraries to create bento box search functionality.

A: Often times if the Design process is not in line with development this can create problems. If designs have not accounted for realistic content flow or placement on different device sizes, this can lead to poor performance, poor accessibility and poor user experience.  As you know our team of developers is brought into design discussions early to be able to identify potential problems. Solving these early on is a win-win for everyone, including clients.

A: When we understand why and how people make decisions, it informs our UX strategy and art direction. Understanding human needs informs and desires informs our content strategy through empathy and persuasion.

So, if you’re a CMO at a university and wanting to focus on lead generation, it’s important to understand how to nudge visitors to sign up to visit your campus. You have to also keep in mind that not every visitor is a prospective student - some are faculty, staff, or donors. It’s critical to understand how each of these different personas interacts with a website. What’s motivating their action? When do they typically make decisions related to actions that impact a site’s KPIs? Understanding human biases and neuromarketing allows us to make a more compelling UX that will lead to conversions.

Check out the blog post reference in this podcast: Human Centered: Brand Intimacy in Emotional Design, and stay tuned for the next episode of Open Waters.

In this episode of Open Waters, we talk with our own Bob Kepford, creator of the weekly newsletter The Weekly Drop, to discuss Open Source Serverless solutions. Bob presented this topic at DrupalCon Seattle and it was very well received. You can catch the recording on the DrupalCon site.

Pro Project Pick: Serverless Framework

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Mediacurrent is proud to announce the launch of our new podcast with the release of our pilot episode. Open Waters is a podcast exploring the intersection of open source technology and digital marketing. It’s made especially for CMO's, Directors and Managers of Marketing, technology, and digital strategy.

We think open source is an ocean of opportunity to maximize your martech investment.

We encourage you to listen and learn about using open source technology and forward thinking marketing strategy to generate and convert leads, improve security, increase speed to market, and identify the ROI of your digital investments. Our goal is to educate about the challenges and solutions we see with our own clients and in the market.

In this episode:

Upcoming Episodes:

New episodes will be released tri-weekly on Tuesdays.

Subscribe, leave a review, and share about us on social media with the hashtag #openwaterspodcast. Have an idea for a topic? Tweet at our hosts Mark Casias, Bob Kepford, and Mario Hernandez. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast platform. Links to follow.