• Read more about Mobomo Partnerships Win Muse Awards

Mobomo Wins Muse Creative Awards

Mobomo is excited to announce that our partnerships with The USO, RGS 365 and NOAA Fisheries have been awarded the Muse Creative Award in the Rose Gold Category.  The Muse Creative Awards are “an international competition for creative professionals who possess the unique ability to inspire with a concept, idea, or design - whether through traditional materials or electronic media.”  This competition is inspired by the concept of following your inner muse which pushes one to a success and original design. The 2018 theme for the awards is “Rise Together”. This award celebrates designers that push boundaries and defy cultural norms. The idea behind this theme inspires the community to “Rise Together and to improve the world”. “The Muse Creative Awards recognize you – the communicators that touch us all in a universal way – with art and craft that soars.” Mobomo was incredibly excited to honor these partnerships!

The USO

Mobomo was able to recognize the USO and the mobile application that we partnered with them to create.  This application fosters greater discoverability of locations where USO provides services and programs offered by the USO through its distributed locations and online.  Prior to discovery, USO was seeking to design, develop, and deploy a cross-platform mobile application that introduced an additional channel for United States military service members and their families to better engage with USO centers and programs.  Currently, there are 200+ USO locations that all create their own content. We were able to pull the CMS data and integrate it into the app so that the service member receives the content from the service center that they are physically at or that is most adjacent to them.

RGS 365

In addition, Mobomo also submitted the web, iOS, and Android application that we worked with RGS 365 to create. RGS 365 is a provider of solar, storage and energy services. RGS sells, designs and installs solar energy systems for small businesses and residential homeowners. RGS approached Mobomo with the need to transform their complex sales, installation and service processes into a simplified, uniform software solution for their employees and customers.  The app was to allow a customer to navigate through the sales phase, track progress through their installation phase, and finally submit service requests and track their money savings post-installation.  RGS continues to work with Mobomo to add features as needed and iterate on existing features. Customers are already using the application, and submitting feedback to further improve and grow the program. Within the next year, RGS hopes to reduce cancelled appointments, increase sales and efficiency within their processes using Solar 365.

NOAA Fisheries

Lastly, Muse had created an additional category specifically for government entries and we chose our work with NOAA Fisheries to be showcased within this new category.  Mobomo partnered with National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), or NOAA Fisheries, to assist in restructuring and redesigning their digital presence.  NOAA Fisheries as a whole covers many areas of information dealing with marine life. Each of the 10 core properties containing up to 10,000 pages and 5,000 pdf files. Together, we worked with 50+ stakeholders to discover the inconsistency in their content and workflow. We then created ways to automate their content and move it over to a more tag driven system.

• Read more about Mobomo's UI Kit Vol. 2

We have launched the second kit of mobile navigation flow templates! It is incredibly helpful to have a template, such as this, in order to speed up a mobile design workflow.  This can happen because of it is easy to use and flexible. The package takes into account the latest trends in interface design.  It can also be easily manipulated with smart objects as well.

How is This Useful?

This can help apply your branding and styles across the screens. This kit includes many modern and multicolored designed components developed for the best user comfort and functionality. If you missed the UI Kit vol.1, here we tell you how to handle smart objects.  All you need to do is double-click on the thumbnail of the layer and edit the source file. This is also helpful to apply your branding and styles across the screens.

You can add your own content in a few simple steps:

1. Open the file in Adobe Photoshop.
2. Look for the layer labeled “Replace me” or “Add content here” and double click.
3. A second image (PSD) will appear to drag and drop your content in.
4. Save and close the PSD file.

The package contains:

• 8 Screens that cover the flow of login for any app.
• Canvas Size 320 x 560 for iPhone

The screens included are:

• Splash screen
• Menu
• Timeline
• Profile
• Gallery
• Search
• Comments
• People
• Settings

Fonts Montserrat https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Montserrat Format: PSD file Size: 12 MB

• Read more about Key Drupal Taxonomy: Part 1

Part 1:

When it comes to considering what is the best CMS for a website, most don’t know up from down or Drupal from WordPress.  At Mobomo, we consider ourselves Drupal experts and have guided many of our clients through a Drupal migration. Drupal is a content management system that is at the core of many websites.  Drupal defines itself as “an open source platform for building amazing digital experiences.” These simple Drupal terms, or taxonomies, make it sound easy, but it can, in fact, be very confusing. Listed below are some popular terms defined to help make the start of the migration process what it should be, simple and easy:

Key Terms:

1. Theme - this refers to the look and feel of a site and it is determined by a combined collection of template files, in addition to configuration and asset files.  Drupal modules define themeable functions which can be overridden by the theme file.  The header, icons, and block layout are all contained within a theme
2. Content-Type - Every node, see below for definition, belongs to a content type.  This defines many different default settings for nodes of that type.  Content Types may have different fields, as well as modules may define their own content types.

See Part 2 and Part 3 for more.  Any other questions? Check out Drupal.org!

• Read more about Mobomo Named Top Software Development Firm by Forrester

Forrester Names Top Custom Software Development Firms

Mobomo is excited to announce that we have been named by Forrester as a top custom software development firm. Forrester is best known as one of the most dominant research and advisory firms in the world.  Founded in 1983 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Forrester serves over 2,000 companies that strive to create change in their organization. Their surveys are taken by polling nearly 700,000 consumers throughout the world and businesses consistently rely on their meticulous and unbiased methods.  Forrester would describe its main purpose as “challenging the thinking of our clients to help them lead change in their organizations.” It is 2018, and it has become incredibly necessary for companies to create technology to target their current customer base.  Millennials and Generation Z are pushing technology to its limits and the newest trend is never good enough. No matter what industry, every company can find a way to incorporate technology.  Companies can no longer avoid this investment. In looking for a software provider to meet this need, Forrester advises that by going with a firm specializing in custom development, one can improve agility and innovation.  It is important to base vendor selection on their size and capability and to remember that bigger isn’t always better!

The Benefits:

There are two important factors to remember along the way: choose a vendor based on their size and capability and bigger isn’t always better.  While both larger and smaller firms bring industry expertise, larger firms can engage in projects that span across the globes and offer a variety of staffing solutions.  Smaller firms offer a much more personal experience and can allow for direct high-level engagement. Both very good solutions, but every company is different and each of these options has pros and cons.  As a whole, this report should help any organization that is interesting in making the jump and diving into technology find the right solution.

Why Mobomo?

Mobomo has built its reputation based on the strong process we have developed. Our process is one that turns your ideas into awesome products.  We work with companies and enterprises of all shapes and sizes, across all industries. From healthcare, education, real estate, and more - we have been able to design and develop solutions for some of the biggest brands. Contact us today and we can begin finding the best solution for you!

• Read more about Color: Not Only Eye Candy But Accessibility

The Use of Color in Design

Often when designers think about the heavy use of color with interfaces, the mind will usually travel to beautiful eye-candy posts from a variety of portfolio resources, such as Dribbble and Behance. These designs range from playful experimentation to serious concepts; most being incredibly pleasant to the eye of the viewer. However, one question is ever-present: are these artfully-crafted interfaces friendly and easy to use for all users? Color is much more than a shiny palette, it is a powerful tool in user experience design. Color is not only eye candy, but also about accessibility.

User Centered Design

Inherently, User Centered Design (UCD) for software is ultimately about communicating information between people. Even within very specific user types there are many considerations that good design must account for; non-the-least accessibility and usability of the graphical user interface (GUI) with most modern computer / communication devices. UCD is an inclusive design process generally, not exclusive. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Section 508 is a required consideration for all publicly accessible government Information Technology in the United States:

”...is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public. The purpose of the law is to make sure that people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else.”

In the context of our discussion here, there will always be a sizable percentage of any user base that suffers from some form of color vision deficiency. As designers, we have the responsibility to ensure as much as we can that any use of color in designs accounts for accessibility considerations of this subset of any user base.

Considering Color and Accessibility

In reality, not every single user’s accessibility needs with a product or interface can be completely addressed, even when that is the goal. However, there are many steps and considerations to take that can be applied to our work to ensure designs are as inclusive as possible. Though designs will require compliance with a variety of requirements like Section 508 of the ADA, they can still retain a high level of aesthetics; remaining an engaging experience and visually appealing to all users.

Color, in particular, is one such opportunity as a vehicle for communicating information, with the cultural background as one influence to its perception. Questions can arise such as: How does one apply color in a design system? Does it’s use align more with usability or just aesthetics? What happens if the user has a visual impairment and cannot read a color codification? The resultant communicated information of such a system could be compromised, leading to a frustrating, even inaccessible user experience. This is not an intention or result desired with any good design.

Regarding color-specific visual disabilities, there are different types of Dichromacy (two out of the usual three light cones are available to process light):

One finds it difficult to distinguish between blue and green or red and green because of defective long-wavelength cones or L-cones missing at all.

One lacks the medium wavelength sensitive cones which are green, then merges red and green and is unable to differentiate between the two colors.

This affects the short-wavelength cone (S-cone) making it confusing to distinguish between blue and green or yellow and violet.

The most common form of color vision deficiency in most populations is Red/Green color blindness, or Protanopia. Users with Protanopia and Tritanopia may have trouble while trying to collect visual information to interact so one should consider color as insufficient to establish the state as information (or buttons: enable/disable). For example, if our digital product has one red field for the error message and a green field for success, with no contextual wording or icons helping to decode, a user with Deuteranopia might not pick up on a status codification.

There is Support!

To ensure accessibility and inclusiveness in designs and interfaces, we can rely on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This will guide our work in terms of accessibility. US Federal agencies need to adhere to ADA Section 508 Compliance, ensuring electronic and information technology remains accessible to users among a wide range of special needs. The Revised 508 Standard requires conformance with WCAG 2.0 level AA.

If you work outside the US you can check Laws and Policies by Country here.

When Mobomo worked on the redesign of the Effective Interventions website and the Every Day Every Dose Mobile App, we applied the accessibility guidelines thus creating 508 compliant products. It's necessary to incorporate periodic checks of compliance in the design process. (checking color contrast here or another kind of simulations here).

Color is important in UX and it is a lot more than having great shiny palettes.  It is about using color as a relevant layer of communication that helps the user understand context, functionality and interaction.  One should remember that not everyone will see or read the same way, so inclusive thought is of the utmost importance and the essence of User Centered Design.

If you're a student interested in user experience and interfaces, it’s advisable (relevant to present and future direction of your skill sets but would also classify) to incorporate this knowledge and these considerations. If you're already a professional designing interface or involved a digital product project right now, you may start looking at this if you didn't before. If you're a great designer that already knows all this, you can pin and share this article to have the information gathered in one place!

• Read more about Navy Mutual: Deep Dive into Mobile

Navy Mutual's Mobile App

Navy Mutual Aid Association provides life insurance and annuity products to military families. In our previous blog, we discussed how an association’s struggle to face the challenge that investing in technology can pose.

 Navy Mutual Aid Association chose to face this challenge head-on and Mobomo helped usher Navy Mutual Aid Association through their first foray into mobile with the launch of their Survivor Benefits app.

The Navy Mutual Aid Association has a focus on educating members on their legally entitled government benefits, as well as on matters of financial security.  

In creating this app, Navy Mutual is now able to put appropriate resources directly in the hands of their members in an overall effort to increase awareness of government benefits.

It also allows Navy Mutual to more directly reach members through a new channel and increase its footprint in members’ lives.

Incorporating Legal Resources

One of Navy Mutual’s goals is to ensure veterans and veteran’s families fully understand their legal rights and benefits.  While the Navy Mutual website housed many valuable resources, the team wanted a tool optimized for, and easily accessible from a mobile device.

Throughout the process, the Mobomo team worked collaboratively with the Navy Mutual team, as well as their existing brand guidelines.  During all creative discussions, Navy Mutual ensured that the app would meet member needs and fulfill their mission.

We led them through the design, development, and launch of iOS and Android mobile apps. In order to meet these goals, we created various palettes to finalize a look and feel for the mobile app’s overall User Experience.   

For maintainability purposes, Navy Mutual opted to move forward with a React Native cross-platform application in order to create both iOS and Android apps from a single codebase.

The Benefit Calculator

One of the key features of the mobile app is a set of Benefit Calculators, which are on the website as well. These are for users to estimate survivor benefits and entitlements.

The calculators are processed through a legacy, internal backend database that did not have an optimized interface for plugging in new systems.

In order to make the backend accessible to the mobile apps, our team had to create new APIs for the apps to submit user inputs and retrieve the appropriate output to be displayed.

All of the tools that were created for use in the Survivor Benefits app are user-friendly as well as engage members throughout their experience.  

As discussed previously, members believe that the investment in technology was critical, but associations want their investment to last longer than the latest trend.  

The Navy Mutual Aid Association ensured that this app, not only was a financially sound investment but would meet their member needs long term.

• Read more about How Associations Manage Technology

Only 1 in 10

In 2018, there is an association for everything, and many people are involved with at least one of these organizations. While associations are created to serve member needs, there is one area that many are falling behind in: technology. According to ASAE’s article, “Tech Success for Associations,” only 1 in 10 associations are managing technology and tech integration in ways that can be considered innovative. Of those polled by ASAE, 60% consider access to digital documents through the association website to be critical. The poll also found that members would like access to registration for conferences and events online and that this was essential to member satisfaction. Resolving the disconnect between what associations are doing and what members want could be the key to member engagement. How associations manage technology could change the nonprofit industry for the better.  

Facing the Budget

Associations often face an uphill battle to meet members' needs. The most difficult challenge is budget; new technology can be a huge investment and a risk, which associations tend to want to avoid. Members' needs are also constantly changing, which makes investing in technology a nerve-wracking process. In addition, to justify the expense, any technology investment needs to also support the organization's mission. Imagine you are shooting at a moving target and that target suddenly shrinks—that is how associations feel when trying to decide on technology to improve their members’ experience.

Navy Mutual Aid Association

How do we solve this? Let’s take a shallow dive into a project Mobomo recently launched with the Navy Mutual Aid Association. One of Navy Mutual’s main goals was educating members on the government benefits they were legally entitled to. To achieve this, they enlisted Mobomo to create their Survivor Benefits app, enabling Navy Mutual to put appropriate resources directly in the hands of their members and grow awareness of government benefits. The app achieved their initial objective while simultaneously allowing Navy Mutual to reach members directly through a new channel and increase its footprint in members’ lives. In this case, Navy Mutual found a way to invest in technology that supported immediate member needs and their overall mission—providing an excellent example of how associations can utilize technology to ensure continuing success.

• Read more about Create High Fidelity Prototypes With Mobomo’s UI Kit

Mobomo's UI Kit

This freebie is designed to provide inspiration for your projects while guiding smart interactions: Simple and striking. Our process has been designed to turn your ideas into awesome products! 

The package is made up of editable elements so that it can be easily manipulated with smart objects. Replacing the contents of a Smart Object is very simple. All you need to do is to double-click on the thumbnail of the layer and edit the source file, especially useful to apply your branding and styles across the screens.

You can add your own content in a few simple steps:

The package contains

• 5 Screens that cover the flow of login for any app.
• Canvas Size 320 x 560 for iPhone
• Canvas Size 768X1024 for IPad
• Changeable background
• Changeable colors
• Drag and drop to create own composition

Splash screen

A splash screen is a graphical control element consisting of a window containing an image. It is used while the app is being launched.

Walkthrough

Screen revealing functionality to a user, changeable background and content

Login, Sign Up and Forget Password screens

Corresponding to to help you get started quickly design and build login flows.

Fonts

Montserrat

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Montserrat

Format: PSD file

Size: 1.5 MB

• Read more about Four Cloud Trends To Watch In 2018

As cloud technologies become an ever-more-critical part of the IT landscape, advancement in the DevOps and infrastructure space doesn’t look likely to slow down in 2018. We have outlined four trends that we expect to continue disrupting the ever-changing cloud ecosystem this year. 

Google and Microsoft Close Gap with Amazon

Over the years, Amazon Web Services has been the only leader in cloud services thus monopolizing the cloud market share and setting the pace of innovation. This year we expect Google and Microsoft to close the gap and begin to position themselves as true competitors to AWS.

As the number of fully-managed AWS services has grown -- now including multiple machine learning PaaS offerings, hosted graph database and “serverless” relational databases, as well as on-demand deep-learning-enabled video analysis -- Azure and Google Cloud have quietly been catching up in the market for core cloud services (storage and compute) which are core decision drivers for large enterprises.

Google has recently announced the lofty goal of building its cloud-services revenue to match what the company makes in advertising sales by 2020, an ambition which should leave Amazon wary given the Alphabet family’s ability to vertically integrate with its other robust brands.

At Mobomo, we have also noticed a pattern of customers wanting to build out parallel infrastructure in Azure or GCS, or even downsize AWS footprints to meet increasingly complex cloud posture requirements. 

Multi-Cloud is the New Hybrid Cloud

As market share in the public cloud space becomes less monopolized, “multi-cloud” will become the buzzword in 2018 that “hybrid cloud” was in years past.

More and more, the three major providers will compete on cost in mostly-commoditized markets like on-demand compute and short-term storage. This means the ability to bundle out workloads among the major public cloud providers will be at a premium.

Open-source tools like Terraform, which uses a lowest-common-denominator approach to allow architects to define cloud-agnostic infrastructure-as-code and deploy resources across multiple providers according to arbitrary metrics (resource cost per time unit, network latency to target, desired redundancy level or SLA requirements, etc).

The clear benefit of these open-source tools is the ability to avoid provider lock-in by using cloud-specific offerings like Amazon’s CloudFormation to define architecture.

If another public cloud offers better metrics for a particular workload, transferring those resources becomes a simple matter of lift-and-shift rather than a laborious re-architecture process.

One toolset that will continue to grow exponentially are microservice and container orchestration technologies, especially those based on the Kubernetes ecosystem.

With Amazon’s announcement of server-less ECS and Fargate in 2017, and competitor technologies from Azure and GCS there is no doubt containerization of workloads will be the most straightforward path to a true multi-cloud architecture.

Look for the microservice/container space to become even hotter in 2018, and for cloud consultancies to build practices around the Kubernetes ecosystem to enable true multi-cloud cost arbitrage.

Internet-of-Everything Brings Compute to the Edge

The story of cloud to date has been about decoupling compute power from physical hardware, enabling on-demand workloads to access arbitrary amounts of processing capacity.

Yet this model has retained the classic client-server architecture inherent in the previous generation’s paradigm: cloud compute exists in the cloud, and packets must make the full round-trip to cloud provider data centers in order for inputs to be transformed to outputs.

The year ahead looks to finally disrupt this last redoubt of traditional IT thinking. With the rise of ubiquitous Internet-of-Things devices and cloud-aware microcontroller hardware such as Amazon GreenGrass (not to mention extremely latency-sensitive applications like self-driving cars which need to communicate in real-time with other physically-adjacent devices without making an Internet roundtrip), compute capacity will move much closer to the edge in 2018.

Devices will intelligently determine which portions of compute workloads to process locally or offload to the cloud, based on factors like network availability and latency, output priority, compute market price, and application-level metrics.

Machine Learning Advances Insights-as-a-Service

As more deep learning compute moves to edge devices that push ever-increasing amounts of data into cloud storage, AI will find itself at a crossroads in 2018, with organizations of all sizes clamoring to implement machine learning algorithms to draw insights from larger and larger datasets.

At the same time, ML is moving further and further from the “metal”, as seen by 2017’s rapid advance from deep-learning IaaS solutions (such as hosted Apache MXNet) toward fully-managed ML PaaS services like Amazon SageMaker.

That means 2018 is the year machine learning takes another great leap toward the business intelligence user, becoming a key vertical in the turnkey SaaS market -- or, more accurately, enabling a new Insights-as-a-Service (iNaaS) solutions space in which cloud analytics platforms compete to combine multiple data streams, structured and unstructured (such as from sensors and IoT devices in addition to traditional application metrics and logs), and extract actionable conclusions for organizations.

The shift from machine learning PaaS to iNaaS will unlock artificial intelligence solutions for businesses at any scale, and all without the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building Big Data infrastructure and algorithmic compute platforms.

What is your cloud adoption strategy for 2018? Are you thinking about migrating to the cloud? Take our cloud readiness assessment to see how you compare in the market or speak with one of our cloud engineers to determine how these trends will impact your business objectives!

• Read more about GSA Awards Mobomo PSS Contract

On December 27, 2017, Mobomo, LLC, was awarded a Professional Services Schedule (PSS) contract from the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).

The Professional Services Schedule (PSS), formerly Mission Oriented Business Integrated Services (MOBIS) Schedule 874, program is a Government-wide Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) contract offering a full range of management and consulting services that can improve a federal agency’s performance.

Through Mobomo’s PSS Contract # 47QRAA18D002U, federal agencies can procure Mobomo’s world-class capabilities for SIN 541-3 Web Based Marketing Services, and 541-4F Commercial Art and Graphic Design Services.