Episode 8: Designing User Experiences

In this episode, I'm chatting with Diane Kinney. She is a web designer and developer with over 17 years of experience running her own boutique agency. We're talking all about design and how it is evolving, responsive vs adaptive, clients, SVGs and so much more. Diane shares a wealth of knowledge and experience in this episode, that will be sure to have you rethinking something. A complete transcript of this podcast is available. Let's get started. Meet Diane Kinney Yes, I’m a mega WordPress nerd and I’d love to share the things I’ve learned in the last 17 years of building both simple and complex sites in WordPress. Born and raised in Wisconsin (#gopackgo), my adult life has been spent on the gulf coast of Florida in sunny Sarasota. I delight in the sunshine and weirdly wonderful things that regularly happen in this state. I live with my husband, college student daughter, five cats and three dogs. All of the cats were rescued from certain death by my animal loving daughter and our first dog was a refugee after Hurricane Charley. It’s all very crazy and brimming with love. Show Notes Diane's Business Website: The Versatility Group Diane's Personal Website: DianeKinney.com Diane's Twitter link: @dkinney Helpful Links: Practical SVG by Chris Coyier SVG Support Plugin CodePen.io - CodePen is a playground for the front end side of the web. Using SVG Animation in WordPress Why Encrypting Your Website Is Now Something You Need to Do Val Head - Web and UI animation This episode of Rethink.fm is sponsored by: Erin E Flynn - Business help for web designers and developers. Having trouble with the business part of running a web design business? Check out Erin E Flynn for articles, e-courses, workshops, and a friendly community to help you run your web design business like a pro! Join the crew and become Unstoppable at erineflynn.com! I've tried a few of Erin's products. The Email Templates, Welcome Packet and Intro Packet - I highly recommend then - a great resource to help you run your web design and development business. -Jackie D'Elia Complete Transcript: Open PDF version of this transcript Jackie: Hey everybody, this is Jackie D'Elia with another episode of Rethink.fm for you. I have my guest, Diane Kinney, on board. Hi, Diane. Diane: Hi, Jackie! Jackie: Thank you very much for joining me. Diane: Thank for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Jackie: Our topic is very interesting to me. I know you and I had been chatting earlier for a topic for the show. We were both interested in talking about design. You had some really interesting take on how you wanted to approach that and talk about it. Diane: Absolutely. I have a thought process around design. I love graphic design. I love doing print design and invitations. I've done interpretive signage plans for large organizations. That specific skill of graphic design is something I'm passionate about, but I find to be very very different from the concept of design. When I think of the word design and I think of what we do in the context of websites, social media, and marketing, we're really designing for an outcome. We sit down and ideally think about what experience do I want to create for the user? What feeling do I want to give them? What course of action do I want them to take? That's not strictly limited to ... You know there's a whole discipline around convergent path optimization, which is to get a visitor from point A to point B when they take an action like signing up for a list or buying a product. There are other paths along that journey that build to that result that I don't think people talk about quite enough. I don't know if you are familiar with retargeting in online marketing, but it's the idea that not everybody buys on the first visit, so I''m going to connect with you and try to maintain that connection with you overtime.