Insights

Cyber-Duck sponsored StartupBus UK this year. In just 72 hours, ‘Buspreneurs’ pitched, designed, developed and marketed brand new startups. I was lucky enough to get a space on the bus! My team developed ‘Squill’ and even got a space in the Pirate Summit final. Here’s my experience on the road trip, along with extra tips for success at hackathons.

StartupBus Europe is a hackathon like nothing you’ve seen before! They challenge participants to conceive, build and launch a startup in just 72 hours. But here’s the catch… they have to build (and pitch!) everything on a roadtrip around Europe. As big fans of hacking and R&D, we were excited to host the British bus.  

Last Thursday I travelled up to Birmingham for Canvas Conference. Aimed at product designers and managers, we heard insider stories from Facebook, Netflix, Slack and many more. I’d like to share a few of the stand out themes that really resonated with me. 

Apple finally unveiled new versions of the designer’s best friend – the first Macbook Pro update we’ve seen in eighteen months! But it’s the new hardware that has got us excited. I’ll take you through the TouchBar feature and its potential for MacOS and web apps (hopefully!).

Have you ever started to read an awesome article and been obstructed by a ‘Continue Reading’ button? Used by the Huffington Post and Mashable, it’s a regular user interface (UI) pattern on the web these days. These big name sites must have a reason to stop users reading the content they’ve requested. So… what’s going on?

SEO is as important as it has ever been, but goes beyond the usual meta tags and keywords. As Google continues to update its search algorithm, marketers need to factor in user intent and queries to help improve rankings. 

Barely a day passes without members of the design community complaining about their clients. I mean who else could *possibly* be at fault when a project goes awry? Well, I think the answer often lies closer to home. In this article, I look at how we can extend our pursuit of delivering great user experiences to how we work with clients. So we can deliver fantastic client experiences, by design.

Cyber-Duck has just become certified in ISO 27001 for information security management. We are now the UK’s most accredited digital agency!

Workshops are a powerful way of extracting important insights into the problems, concerns and needs of clients or their users. Here at Cyber-Duck, we have extensive experience running workshops with a wide range of clients including the Bank of England, University of London and Institute of the Motor Industry. Here I’ll share some tips on how to get the most out of workshops, from effective structuring to dealing with unexpected questions.