Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 3 (The Creative Process)

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 3 (The Creative Process)

When designing your publishing platform, there are many factors to consider to deliver an optimal user experience. It’s critical to establish a user-first driven process.

As discussed in parts 1 and 2, it is imperative that your web publishing platform be designed with accessibility, responsiveness, and consistency for all users and devices. Publisher websites are often built using templates and components to help present content in a familiar pattern that users recognize and can easily access. But when designing the “skin” for these experiences, maintain your stylistic uniqueness to strengthen your brand presence. Your brand’s attributes and voice must be visually communicated.

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 2 (Accessibility Improves Experience)

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy, Part 2 (Accessibility Improves Experience)

Website accessibility is not a new topic. In fact, it’s been a factor since 2010 when the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) published standards that digital technology and information must be accessible to all people. At that point, most companies did not think that responsibility for website accessibility applied to them, or that they were required to address it unless they were receiving federal funds/grants. Additionally, the general perception was that creating accessible websites was more costly and entailed a lengthier process to implement. Not surprisingly, the ROI to include accessibility as part of the web design process was not considered valuable enough to be a default priority.

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The Classroom of the Future: Advances in Remote Learning

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The Classroom of the Future: Advances in Remote Learning

Over the last two decades, technology has gained wider acceptance in the classroom. Since the pandemic, when teachers and students have been abruptly forced apart, tech solutions from video calls to virtual classrooms to online learning platforms have leapt into widespread use and become a lifeline for education this term—a topic we wrote about in a previous blog post.

But as we look toward the next school year and beyond, will these advancements remain a stopgap measure for connecting with students and delivering instruction during unusual circumstances; or has the way children learn been changed forever? The following are some key innovations in digital learning that are likely to be part of K-12 education for a long time.

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy: Part 1

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy: Part 1

Tracey Greene is the Chief Creative Director at Digital Artisans, KGL PubFactory’s lead design partner. In this three-part blog post series, Tracey shares valuable insights into maximizing discoverability and accessibility when creating your digital content platform.

Your website platform should be available to every person on any device. The following are critical considerations in a “mobile-first” world for maximizing discoverability and accessibility when creating the optimal user experience for journeys across all of your digital content.

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Teaching with Tech: Five Tips for Navigating K–12 Distance Instruction

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Teaching with Tech: Five Tips for Navigating K–12 Distance Instruction

It would be an understatement to say that these are challenging times for teachers. Plunged into lockdown with no time to prepare for it, educators are quickly adapting to the new realities of distance instruction while getting up to speed with technology platforms, unfamiliar teaching techniques, and changing district and institutional guidelines. Throw in pressures to ensure students don’t fall behind juxtaposed with advice to refrain from overwhelming students and their families, and the situation becomes even more delicate.

Technology has without doubt been the great enabler of education during the COVID-19 crisis.

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A Look Ahead at Publishing in 2020: AI, AR, Plan S and More

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A Look Ahead at Publishing in 2020: AI, AR, Plan S and More

As 2020 begins, we look at what the year holds for publishers of all kinds, and how technology can help them improve their systems, increase revenue, reach new readers, and more.

#AI #technology #innovation #automation #workflow #AR #PlanS

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Unleashing the Untapped Potential of Digital Learning

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Unleashing the Untapped Potential of Digital Learning

A free report from KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Across most levels of education, students now expect learning experiences to be broadly in-line with their fast moving, digitally native, on-the-go lifestyles. And the pressure to cater to this need and deliver learning in a dynamic way is something which educational institutions feel on a daily basis. Innovation in this area has unfortunately not always evolved quickly enough to match the expectations of this new generation of learners, who now require digital curriculums which embrace quick and easy access, cross device capabilities and multimedia elements.

Our recently published report Six Approaches to Effective Digital Learning highlights some of the most exciting trends, transformations and technological developments in this booming sector, and in this post we explore just a few of the report’s findings.

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AI Goes from Disruptive to Imperative

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AI Goes from Disruptive to Imperative

This article first appeared in the Publishers Weekly Frankfurt Show Daily on October 16, 2019.

Publishers have looked on as machine learning technology has developed—but now it’s time to leap.

Over the course of the last five years, AI, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) have been much talked about, as well as trialed and tested, in the publishing industry. These technologies are often the focus of panel discussions at conferences such as this one, discussions that have illustrated how AI could be used for a variety of purposes: discovery, peer review, bestseller predictions, and, perhaps most importantly, improving publisher efficiency.

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Educating the Netflix Generation: Digital-First Strategies for Textbooks Take Hold

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Educating the Netflix Generation: Digital-First Strategies for Textbooks Take Hold

Publishing giant Pearson boldly announced recently that it was moving towards a digital-first strategy, thus rendering the century old traditional textbook model as good as dead. Meanwhile, higher education specialist Cengage has been steadily expanding its online textbook subscription offering globally, experimenting with new cost-effective digital distribution models to cater to the Netflix and Spotify generation.

There are a number of reasons why, in this day and age, digital-first strategies make more sense than ever for education publishers.

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The Future of EPUB: Facts Regarding the IDPF and W3C Merger

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The Future of EPUB: Facts Regarding the IDPF and W3C Merger

The IDPF and W3C are working to combine the two organizations. Working together, they will strive to foster the global adoption of an open, accessible, interoperable digital publishing ecosystem that enables innovation. The primary motivation to combine IDPF with W3C is to ensure that EPUB’s future will be well-integrated with, and in the mainstream of, the overall Open Web Platform.

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Higher Education Textbooks: Student Watch Key Findings

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Higher Education Textbooks: Student Watch Key Findings

As colleges and universities welcome students back to campus, it's a good time to revisit some of the findings from the National Association of College Stores' (NACS) Spring Study. Higher Education publishers are deep in the trenches, dealing with disruptions from Amazon, proliferation of digital distribution channels, and pricing transparency issues

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