• Read more about Mobomo, LLC Ranks #123 on Inc. Magazine’s List of the Mid-Atlantic Region’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies

Companies on the 2022 Inc. 5000 Regionals Mid-Atlantic list had an average growth rate of 161% percent. 

Vienna, VA, March 15, 2022 – Inc. magazine revealed today that Mobomo, LLC is No. 123 on its third annual Inc. 5000 Regionals: Mid-Atlantic list, the most prestigious ranking of the fastest-growing private companies based in Washington, D.C., Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. Born out of the annual Inc. 5000 franchise, this regional list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the Mid-Atlantic region economy’s most dynamic segment – its independent small businesses. 

The companies on this list show a remarkable rate of growth across all industries in the Mid-   Atlantic region. Between 2018 and 2020, these 131 private companies had an average growth rate of 161% percent and, in 2020 alone, they added 7,365 jobs and $1.9 billion to the Mid-Atlantic region’s economy. Companies based in the Richmond and Washington, D.C., areas had the highest growth rate overall.    

Complete results of the Inc. 5000 Regionals: Mid-Atlantic, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, metro area, and other criteria, can be found at inc.com/mid-atlantic starting March 15, 2022.

“This year’s Inc. 5000 Regional winners represent one of the most exceptional and exciting lists of America’s off-the-charts growth companies. They’re disrupters and job creators, and all delivered an outsize impact on the economy. Remember their names and follow their lead. These are the companies you’ll be hearing about for years to come,” says Scott Omelianuk, editor-in-chief of Inc.

Mobomo — a private company headquartered in the D.C. metro area — is a premier provider of web and mobile development services to commercial businesses, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. We combine technology expertise with disciplines in digital strategy, interactive marketing, and branding to create innovative applications and websites. From private sector companies to government agencies, we have amassed deep expertise helping our clients enhance and expand their existing web and mobile suite.

Interested in learning more about Mobomo? Take a tour of our capabilities, our past performance, the team members who make our clients look so fantastic, and feel free to reach out with any questions you might have

More about Inc. and the Inc. 5000 Regionals

Methodology

The 2022 Inc. 5000 Regional are ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2018 and 2020. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2018. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2019. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2018 is $100,000; the minimum for 2020 is $1 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. 

About Inc. Media 

The world’s most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent.

The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit www.inc.com. 

• Read more about User Interface In Flat Design

Flat design is no longer a trend but a design language that is best used for user interfaces in the digital realm. For some time interactions with the “black mirror” features a cleaner style that does not need resort to real world metaphors like raised buttons, textures, shadings and shadows. Everyone knows that the touchscreen is meant to be touched and most apps or websites contain certain actions that we as users are supposed to take. Flat design is a step ahead in terms of readability because screens are not always in the highest retina display resolution. It feels natural for the system to find its own graphic language that’s not mimicking physical objects but it has been observed that some users can have a hard time recognizing actionable elements within flat designed interfaces. A radical expression of this style may leave a bunch of users clueless about what they can do within the app or website. Operative systems’ design languages do offer some design elements like shadows in order to imaginarily place elements at different depths of the screen. The challenge of a purely flat interface design is making sure you (the designer) are making the user understand which items are meant for interactions - be deliberate with the shapes, colors, and margins.

How can we tell when something is actionable?

If we are going to keep the design strictly flat we will need color and context. For the most part the content, aside from images or videos, will be dark text over a white (or bright) background. Of course we are keeping it simple here, it could be the other way around (bright text over dark BG) or even color blocks where the text has enough contrast. But typically the first case is the better option for readability. Let's start by talking about buttons. The most clear call to action button is typically words that are on a button that indicate what your user should do by clicking on that button. The call to action is typically a word or short sentence expressing an action - enclosed in a flat colored rectangle shape (no matter how round or square its corners may be).   If the button has a strong color accent on the screen, its place as a CTA (call to action) is evident. As seen in the figure above it is possible to have style variations for secondary actions that we don’t want to emphasize, as well as disabled actions (as long as there is something the user can do to enable them). It’s important that the “air” around the word is enough for the element to be recognized as a button, but not that much for it to end up being a huge color patch on the screen (which starts to defeat the original purpose of playing along with content). We can see in figure 2 below that by using the exact same style but minimizing the margins around the word the element loses its button purpose. If it is used that way the call to action still poses an actionable property, maybe as a selectable item with on/off states or an item that is draggable:   Other buttons that are flat with no words may be useful for some situations even if they are less evident for the user. The trick for those is to have an action related to their context and visually be in the correct position. We can see in the next image below that the same round element can play different roles depending on its placement in relation to the content on the page. Google’s material design guidelines feature the “floating action button” which floats above the content carrying the main action intended for that screen. Icons have a similar two-face behavior. They can either be an active element to interact with and perform an action or an illustration supporting and decorating a message resulting in no user interaction whatsoever. Back to my original point, context is everything - once the context is in place, the user experience typically follows as to what action you should or should not take. Through users' past experience with navigating different digital platforms the user will quickly identify the icons on the top and bottom borders of the screen are a means of navigation. Normally icons over a certain size that are placed just above or to the left of a paragraph serve as an illustration element. Other positions and size ratios invite the user to interact as it becomes apparent they represent actions related to the piece of information that precedes. While not always depicted in color, we can see here the contrast color helps to distinguish them as something actionable: Tabs, fields and dropdowns pose less trouble- they do have a similar style because they have been a part of UIs for a long time. Their typology is strongly installed in users minds however, fields are the most striped down ones of the group, sometimes styled in a really minimalist manner. For example, imagine a line acting as a row with a label above it mentioning the expected input.   A rule of thumb for fields is that the labels should be aligned to the left since we type and read from left to right so the text input is prepared for the content it expects. That would be one of the main aspects that help reveal their function because as we can see in the following deliberately inflated examples the line dividing one type of element from the other can be very thin, coming all down to type style and alignment: Flat design is the standard today, but as technology evolves devices transform and new type of design interactions are needed. Due to graphic resolutions and computing power growing higher each product generation we are seeing subtle but powerful graphic effects starting to get into the mix. There’s always a learning curve for users, but as designers we should at the very least not stand in their way!

• Read more about Design: UX vs. UI

Being a designer is a very broad term in which many can misuse and confuse easily. You could be an industrial, print, interior or tech designer, all have different job descriptions in different industries. Speaking in terms of the tech industry there are two commonly used types of web and mobile app designers, UX and UI.

You often hear the terms UX and UI, but what do they actually mean? UX stands for User Experience and UI is User Interface. While they are two distinct concepts and have different actions in the design process they are both closely intertwined to the point one cannot exist without the other.

“User Experience” tends to be used as a broad term and often times different things can be grouped under the larger term but speaking in the realm of digital it is the inception of a product dedicated for a User always defined as the user or group of users and it’s goal is to establish the best form of engagement between the product and it’s user within a designated goal. The UX focuses on all the processes required to build this product which is ruled by purpose.

Once the User Experience is determined, “User Interface” or UI comes into the picture. Since the UX defined the clear goal, and a purpose for the interface, guides the interaction with the user has to be created for the product, it is now time to figure out how the layout will work. This will not be a random array of controls and style choices, but custom made efforts that target the specific needs and behaviors of the user, and will achieve the overall goal and purpose of the product. UI designers are responsible for creating a cohesive style guide, as well as ensuring that a consistent design language is carried out throughout the product. The UI designer must be able to make sure that the screens they are creating communicates clearly to what the UX designer has laid out.

Can one exist without the other? No, UX without UI is a plan, a thought, a strategy. UI on it’s own is just a graphic anecdote that lacks clear purpose. Be sure to check out our design page.

• Read more about World Usability Day - Bring It On

Nov 8th brings upon us World Usability Day, now eight years in the running. This year’s major theme is the Usability of Financial Systems, with the event growing larger every year from record participation in international conferences and increasing media coverage.

First of all, let’s all take a moment to say “Go, world!” for anointing a full day to usability. This gives us design nerds yet another excuse to wax poetic about our favorite buzzy terms and hipster-geek out together in giant conference rooms at swanky hotels over our Macs and steaming cups of coffee (locally-sourced beans, of course).

Cheekiness apart, we can agree that this is important. Never before has such attention been paid, by design folks and “normals” alike, to the collision of form, function, visual design and sensory experience in one gigantic meta-ideal we call the “usable”. Apple’s stock price knows no bounds, Steve Jobs is a demi-god, and people somehow keep shopping at IKEA despite swearing they’ll never go back.

The fact is it’s not just about aesthetics anymore (it never was). It’s about “How fast does it load?” and “How smooth are its curves?” It’s about “How heavy is it on my shoulder?” and “Can I find the menu quickly enough?”. It’s about “Can I carry it on the subway?” and “Does this make me feel stupid?”. And even, “Is this inexpensive-yet-stylish enough to be worth my time crouched on the floor hammering together random pieces of wood with the lofty goal of furnishing my apartment?” (clearly, IKEA and I have unresolved issues).

It’s also about creating habits, making users want more, building in “social hooks”, and making it “go viral”. It’s about developing reward systems, demanding user commitment, toying with psychology, and considering disabilities. It’s about touch and smell, hardware and software, bits and bytes, wood and steel, and the air in between.

Usability, in other words, is like a giant dinosaur’s mouth that seems it will swallow you whole--except, when you stop to realize, that at the end of the day it’s all about bringing a smile to the user’s face and having them come back for more.

Simple, when you look at it that way, but certainly not easy. And this brings us to this year’s theme - The Usability of Financial Systems.

I would say it was somewhere around mid-2007 that people stood up and started to take notice about the importance of usability in finance. That’s when Mint.com exploded on the scene, with a drop-dead gorgeous interface showcasing slick, colorful dashboards, and “No way, really?” functionality bringing together personal credit cards, debit cards, bank accounts, student loans, mortgages, and more, into one so-easy-your-grandma-would-get-it, eat-it-like-it’s-cake online software package.

In my view, that’s really when things changed, and they’ve never been the same. Mint has spawned an entire industry of personal finance me-too software products including CakeHealth for managing health insurance and Simple.com as a close competitor. Let’s not forget Mint’s influence on the payments space as well, what with Square, Dwolla, and WePay boasting beauty, simplicity, and powerful functionality all rolled into one.

But things have come a long way since 2007, and usability isn’t a luxury any more--it’s just expected. Finally, it seems, Big Finance is catching on too. Intridea has been proud to develop interfaces for giants like Citi, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Agilysys’ point-of-sale systems. We’re just glad some folks are stepping up to the plate, and that we get to be part of the revolution.

On a separate note, the reason I love this year’s theme so much is because it invites discussion on usability in an area where people least expect it, an area that’s still wide open for disruption. Let’s face it--people expect a designer scarf to be gorgeous, rich in color, featuring complex textures, and soft to the touch. But a bank’s interface? Not so much. Until it is. And you see it. And it all comes together. And everything changes.

This year, it’s incumbent upon everyone--not just the design industry--but Big Finance too, to take the usability of financial products seriously and do something about it. It’s only fair--you shouldn’t be allowed to experience the joy of a BMW test drive, the ripping open of a new iPad package, or the other-worldliness of Disneyland, if what you put out in the world yourself is utter and complete crap. Quid pro quo, I say, quid pro quo. Karma. Do unto others. What goes around comes around. All that jazz.

So there, I said it. Bring it on, World Usability Day. Bring it on, Big Finance. Show me what you’ve got.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my steaming cup of organic Guatemalan coffee.