Insights

The Hertsmere Dragons’ Apprentice Challenge kicked off last week. Our CTO, Sylvain and New Business Manager, Tom were invited to become dragons! Drawing on their digital and business experience, they will support teams of local students. Each has just 6 months to turn £100 of seed capital into £1000 or more for local charities.

We are enthusiastic supporters of Wirehive 100! They celebrate the wealth of digital talent based in the South of England, beyond the capital. Last year, we built the Wirehive 100 Agency Finder… but it’s even bigger (and better!) for 2016. 

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.