It’s been a whirlwind few weeks at CDG, punctuated by the launch of several high-profile international sites for Australia-based travel insurance company Cover-More. Over the past week, we’ve launched a total of four sites serving B2C markets in New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia.

Cover-More New Zealand: An Immersive Experience

Cover-More Travel Insurance New Zealand is a major milestone in our ongoing collaboration to rebrand and enhance the online B2C presence for Cover-More. The core of new site is a streamlined and intuitive quote process that makes it easy for users to select and purchase the best travel insurance product for their needs.

The site’s design and content frames the quote process in an immersive environment that serves up customized information about the destinations where the user intends to travel.  (In addition to providing a compelling experience for the user, this vast library of content is also optimized to draw organic search traffic.)

Built in CDG’s content management system, ZeusCMS, the site integrates with Cover-More’s purchase process for a seamless user experience.

“We intended to create a site that’s not only highly usable, but that also pushes the boundaries of what you expect from an insurance site,” says CDG President Scott Adams, “We came up with an environment that both appeals to a traveler’s sense of adventure and presents Cover-More insurance as a valuable addition to your travel experience.”

Malaysia Airlines: An Integrated Approach

In addition to offering travel insurance in a B2C environment, Cover-More also partners with travel providers who want to make travel insurance available to their customers. That’s case with Malaysia Airlines. CDG worked with Cover-More to create an experience that integrates with the airline’s existing brand and website, while providing users with all the information they need in order to make a smart decision about travel insurance coverage.

Malaysia Airlines customers can get a quote on travel insurance before or after purchasing their tickets.  The travel insurance section on the site provides a fast and easy quote and purchase process, as well as comparisons of the available policies, and quick, scannable information about the benefits of travel insurance.

Customers who don’t initially choose to get travel insurance have a second chance after they purchase their airline tickets. An ad on the confirmation page provides a fast track to the quote process.

The travel insurance section is integrated into Malaysia Airlines' Singapore, Australia, and Malaysia sites.

To find out how CDG can help you create more effective digital environments, contact us.

Score one for 51% of the population! CDG has just launched forwomen.org, the new website for the Ms Foundation for Women. The launch marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter for the Ms. Foundation, which has been a driving force in the women’s movement since 1973.

The Ms Foundation is the premiere organization in the United States that addresses the entire spectrum of women’s issues—from reproductive health to equal pay to child sexual abuse and much more. In recent years, Ms had directed much of its energy to grant-making and grassroots activities and kept a lower profile with the general public.

Last year, the organization decided to complement its grant-making focus with increased supporter engagement. They were ready to be bold, provocative and even controversial, and they turned to CDG to execute a site and strategy that matched their vision.

The result is forwomen.org, an energetic and somewhat irreverent site that compels users to get mad, get motivated, and get involved on women’s issues. The centerpiece of the site is its “Action of the Week”; each week visitors to the site are given a new action to take on behalf of a specific women’s issue. (This week, Ms is asking you to tweet and email key members of Congress and tell them to pass the Violence Against Women Act before the end of the year.)

CDG also worked with Ms to streamline the site’s content and present it in a way that would appeal to a wider, yet targeted audience within the “general public.” Visually vibrant and arresting, the site highly integrated with social media, and is designed to encourage activism and education through sharing among an ever-expanding community of followers.

“We are thrilled to share our new website with the world,” says Kelly Parisi, vice president of communications for the Ms. Foundation for Women, “It is the perfect vehicle to raise awareness about our issues, reach a new audience, and expand our base. CDG truly integrated with our team to create an exciting and compelling digital platform to carry us into the future.”

We at CDG are extremely proud to unveil this powerful new site ForWomen!

Being based in Washington, DC, we at CDG are literally surrounded by world-class muesums. (In fact, if we hurled a rock off of our balcony, we could probably hit the Phillips Collection—not that we would want to, of course.) Plus, we count the wonderful Muscarelle Museum in Williamsburg as a client. We’ve begun to think more and more about the online presence that museums provide to their audience, from online collections to logistical help to mobile apps. This post explores the realities and possibilities of the digital museum experience in the first entry of a new blog series.

So, there is this big idea brewing among the minds and talents who curate and run museums across the country. It’s about re-conceptualizing the function or role of museum websites in order to enhance the user’s online experience.

Up to now, the typical museum website has basically been used as a virtual replacement for the brick and mortar building it represents (as well as a logistical guide for potential visitors). That approach made sense back when museums were first venturing online.

But we are living in a culture where Internet and mobile technologies are evolving rapidly (read: daily!) and people’s expectations of an “online experience” are different than they were five years ago—or even two years ago.

Museums should start thinking about ways to re-position their websites to serve new functions in order to meet the demands of a mobile-savvy and social media-captivated audience. After all, visiting a museum website is not like physically being at the museum. Why should it try to be?

We wanted to start thinking about how museums can start to create a new type of user experience. And we came up with three guiding words: enable, enlighten, and engage.

• Enable: For every person that can visit a museum, there are literally millions more who can access it through technology, mobile or otherwise. Rather than merely replicate their collections online—although that’s a good start—museums could view their websites as a way to experience their collections and content in new and expansive ways. Using social media, museums can also proactively enable their audience members to not only experience content, but to share it with others. By allowing the visitor to comment, tag, or pin information, the museum will reach a much wider (social) network.
• Enlighten: Museums, and the people who curate them, are regarded as experts in their fields.  But the majority of visitors (online and offline) to museums are not experts—most are unfamiliar with the academic language of art, history, science, etc. Most museums have educational programs or components, so why not extend that online? There’s no reason that museum websites can’t interactively educate users directly on their sites. By exploring innovations in online education, museums could attract a younger, more diverse audience that could eventually translate into more actual visits to the physical museum.
• Engage: Museums have one incredible asset when it comes to the digital space--content. They should take advantage of the possibilities inherent in digital technology and innovate on the ways users experience content. Videos, podcasts, streaming collections and apps are only a few of the tools that museums could use to create a truly unique online experience for users.

These are initial thoughts about expanding the online museum experience.

[Edit 9.20.12]: The next post in this series reviews the interactive Smithsonian exhibit "The Art of Video Games" and how it leverages viewer participation through social media and other channels. In a future post we'll also take a field trip to the Phillips Collection to give their mobile app a try, and see how it adds to the museum experience.

In the meantime, if your museum is looking for a digital solution, contact CDG.

Yesterday the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) launched the new afb.org, designed and developed by CDG Interactive.  This redesign of AFB’s flagship website marks the organization’s latest collaboration with CDG; over the past seven years, we’ve provided multiple interactive solutions for AFB’s wide and diverse audience.

In redesigning its site, AFB wanted to capitalize on technology and mark-up advancements that allowed for greater aesthetic and functional flexibility—while still maintaining a 100% accessible site. In addition, AFB needed an information architecture strong enough to support its immense and growing amount of online resources and information. It was a challenge that CDG approached with enthusiasm.

“Working with AFB gives us the opportunity to really explore what’s possible in a fully accessible environment,” said Matthew Snyder, CDG’s creative director, “We’ve always embraced the idea that accessibility can—and should—coexist with a highly compelling online experience.”

Collaborating closely with AFB’s team, CDG streamlined afb.org’s IA and provided a comprehensive search optimization strategy for the new site. We then created a design that supported AFB’s image as a dynamic and vibrant organization. Both the IA and the design were subjected to several rounds of user testing, in order to validate assumptions and refine the final result. CDG then coded the site’s HTML templates and handed off the markup to AFB’s developers for implementation into the AFB content management system.

The newly launched website provides an online presence that reinforces AFB’s position as the nation’s premiere organization for people with vision loss. We’re proud to continue to support AFB and its mission.

If you want to make your online environments more accessible and more effective, contact CDG.

Yesterday AARP launched the Health Law Guide, an interactive tool designed and developed by CDG in partnership with Avalere Health LLC. The Guide helps users understand how they will personally be impacted by the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act—both now and in the future.

To use the tool, users answer several questions about their personal situation (age, income, health insurance status, etc.). Based on the data, the survey provides the user with a personal report that he or she can view online, download, and print. The results page also includes a timeline that gives an overview of how your coverage will change year by year as the law is implemented.

Avalere Health, which prepared all of the content and source data for the Guide, chose CDG to design and develop the interactive tool. The result of the collaboration is a hugely useful tool for people who are wondering how exactly the new health care law will affect them personally.

“The real challenge to this project was giving people an easy way to consume and understand a great deal of complex information,” says Matthew Snyder, CDG’s creative director. “We developed a very straightforward and intuitive user interface with a welcoming look-and-feel to ensure that people would feel confident and comfortable using the tool and understanding their personal reports.”

We are pleased to help Avalere and the AARP answer the needs of millions of individuals who are seeking understand the personal impact of the ACA.

Need an interactive solution for your audience? Contact CDG.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post with an urgent message – you MUST do usability testing on your website.

Although it might sound daunting—and expensive—usability testing is nothing more than a fancy term for getting an objective opinion. As the wonderful Steve Krug (who has a PhD in Awesome) has pointed out, usability testing doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. And it always gives you insight into how you can improve your site.

Last week at CDG, we conducted formal usability testing sessions with a client who’s redesigning a site for a very specific audience. In testing just seven users over the course of two days, we found—happily—that users had a quite positive reaction to the site. Much more importantly, however, we identified several, crucial, forehead-slap inducing changes that we need to make. These changes aren’t huge, and they won’t be difficult to fix, but without getting objective opinions from the target audience, we wouldn’t have known that there was a problem to fix (at least, not until the redesigned site was launched—and that’s too late).

At CDG, we regularly do formal testing sessions on behalf of clients, but we also do informal testing as well—and it’s always revealing and useful

So, how can you get the benefits of usability testing? Easy.

• Round up five people who aren’t familiar with your site. Ideally, they’ll be somewhat representative of your target audience.
• Ask them to look at your site and give some general impressions
• See if they can perform two or three key tasks (buying a product, finding a contact form, etc.)
• Take some notes

That’s it.

I guarantee that if you get five people to give you an objective opinion about your site, you’ll come away with ways to improve it. Maybe your site just needs few tweaks, or maybe it needs some bigger fixes. Either way, knowledge is power.

If you want to learn more about usability testing, check out Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems.

Need more help? Contact CDG. We’re happy to help.

If I had a dollar for every time a client fretted over “the fold”—well, I wouldn’t be a millionaire, but I could certainly afford an iPhone 4S. The idea of a page fold (and the fear of it) is a widely accepted bit of conventional wisdom, but that’s changing. We want to do our part to explore the myth of the fold and explain: what it is, whether it still exists, and how much agita it should cause you and your marketing team.

What is the fold?

The fold is a term adopted from newspaper publishing, where the most important items were featured in at the top of the page, visible above the paper’s fold. In the interactive industry, the fold refers to the point at which the user needs to scroll to see content. Anything visible above that point is considered to be “above the fold”.

Where is the fold?

Some people argue pretty passionately that there is no fold. I’m going to simply concede that—unless all of your content can be consumed on any device (including mobile) without scrolling, that the fold does exist. But pinning down its precise location is harder than geo tagging the Loch Ness Monster. Sure, your web stats can help you approximate where the fold falls for a portion of your users. However, given the varieties of screen resolution, monitor size, browser usage, and devices available (computers vs. mobile devices) there is literally no way to know where the fold resides for all—or even most—of your viewers.

How important is the fold?

This is the big question. When clients express concern about the fold, what they’re really worrying about is the kernel at the center of the fold mythology, namely:

The Myth that Users Will Not Scroll

<sinister music>dum dum DUMMMM. . . </sinister music>

Now here’s a myth worth BUSTING.

Like most myths, this one has some basis in fact. Back in the day when dinosaurs roamed and we all had dial-up connections, scrolling wasn’t the easy breezy task it is today. In fact, AOL did not allow page-level vertical scrolling. Beyond that, we were all learning how to consume information on the web. So it’s true that users didn’t scroll – in 1994.

Times have changed. As early as 1997, usability guru Jakob Nielsen retracted his recommendation against scrolling pages. And many studies have proven that users do scroll, and even use the scrollbar itself to assess the page length. Yet in 2011 people still are afraid that any content below the fold is effectively invisible.

To be fair, above-the-fold content does get the most attention, and the most clicks. The problem is, when you try to cram everything above the fold, you short-circuit you’re the users’ attention with information overload. When every department in an organization is clamoring for their stake at the top of the homepage, you need to remind them:

When everything is important, nothing is important.

Should we just forget about the fold?

Yes and no. The fold does still exist, but its existence doesn’t lead to hard-and-fast rules. Instead of shoving everything into the top of the page, good designers will create an environment that keeps key items featured at the top, yet implies that there’s valuable content below. Jakob Nielsen calls this an “information scent”— the page layout, design and content should allow the user to pick up the expectation of more content and follow it down the page.

Instead of completely disregarding the fold, I propose that we call a fold truce. Stop fighting to place every little bit of content in the very limited space above the fold and trust the intelligence of your users. If you give them a reason to scroll and reward them with quality content that matches their expectation, you’re going to iron out that fold pretty darn fast.

Need help getting the wrinkles out of your site? Contact CDG.

Just as the 2012 election cycle got hotter than a fried butterstick in Iowa, CDG launched a new and improved site for CQ Roll Call.

CQ Roll Call is the premier provider of non-partisan legislative and electoral news and analysis, as well as legislative tracking and advocacy tools. The new site features a streamlined structure that gives users a comprehensive, yet concise picture of what CQ Roll Call has to offer.

But it’s not only end-users who enjoy a better experience on the site—so do the editors and producers at CQ Roll Call. The new site was implemented in Zeus, CDG’s content management system. Zeus’ powerful functionality and intuitive interface makes it easy for CQ Roll Call to add, edit, and manage the site content.

Also, Zeus allows CQ Roll Call to track the users who request free trials of their products—information that had previously gone un-captured. With its new Zeus-powered site, CQ Roll Call can track conversions precisely and communicate more effectively with its current and potential subscribers.

“The new website is a great showcase for our products and services,” says Andrea Birdsong, Director of Interactive Marketing at CQ Roll Call, “And because we can better manage our content and track our conversions, we can serve our subscribers more effectively.”

So, Beltway insiders and intrepid politicos, visit the new CQRollCall.com and see if it gets your vote of approval.

Looking to improve your website? Contact CDG Interactive.

  Scan a parenting magazine and it won’t be long before you see headlines about celiac disease, reflux, GERD, and childhood obesity. Fortunately, there’s a new resource for parents and patients dealing digestive and nutritional disorders: GastroKids.org.

CDG created the site for our long-time client, The North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition (NASPGHAN). The association asked us to create a site geared to an audience parents and patients, rather than the doctors who typically visited their site.

In 2009, CDG had designed a site for NASPGHAN’s foundation, which contained a large amount of the parent and patient focused content as well as information for health care professionals. The design still held up well, as did the basic information architecture. So rather than start from scratch, we leveraged the design elements of the existing foundation and performed a “content redesign.”

We created a new logo and tagline to rebrand the site, but its essential look and feel remained the same. Meanwhile, we re-wrote and re-optimized content to focus it exclusively on the parent and patient audience. We extracted the information for medical professionals and housed it within NASPGHAN’s main site. The result: two specific destinations for two very different audiences.

We implemented the site in Zeus, CDG’s content management system, making it easy for site administrators to add, manage, and remove content (including meta content). This was a key concern for NASPGHAN, as it has plans to grow the site into an ever-more robust resource for parents and kids.

Is your website ready for a tweak, a touch-up, or a full-on redesign? Contact CDG.

It’s here! CDG's new iAd for GEICO has just launched. The “Secret Savings Society” iAd takes the user on a compelling journey of tests and trials to unlock the secret of savings.

The iAd was created to drive home GEICO’s signature brand message of saving on insurance—and to generate new quotes—through a highly engaging environment.  As the driving creative concept, our team developed the idea of the Secret Savings Society—a mysterious group that had discovered the ultimate way to save. The action, and interaction, of the iAd introduces users to the world of the Secret Savings Society and challenges them to join it.

Once inside the iAd interface, the user challenged to pass four tests, in order to gain entry into the Secret Savings Society. Each of the tests is a different game-like interface. After completing each test, the user receives a crucial piece of a code that ultimately unlocks the door to the Secret Savings Society. Once admitted, the user learns the true secret of savings. (Hint: GEICO figures prominently here!) Capitalizing on social media, the iAd allows the user to share their experience with the Secret Savings Society via an iAd Twitter interface.

Designed to encourage user engagement with the GEICO brand, as well as to generate new online quotes, the iAd offers a variety of content and user interactions beyond the four challenges. Users can access free GEICO ringtones and wallpapers, videos, and apps. They can also get a free online quote and/or contact GEICO with the tap of a button.

The “Secret Savings Society” is currently running in a variety of apps, and is featured on Apple’s iAd gallery app. Since its launch, it has been achieving impressive results, in terms of both the number of people who are viewing the iAd, and the amount of time they spend in the interface.

CDG’s second iAd for GEICO comes on the heels of its successful “Wheel of Wisdom” iAd, which launched in October 2010. This first ad not only received high traffic and a large number of repeat visits; it also won several industry awards, including Best Insurance Online ad (IAC Awards) and Platinum Award, Mobile Device Advertising 41st (Creativity International Awards).