Our work creating Ask Blue Medicare received a coveted Silver Award for the Web Based Resource Category. This interactive web application helps users understand Medicare health care coverage options from Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.  With closed captioning as well as the ability to increase the type size, this application was designed to educate people around 65 years old on the benefits available through Medicare.

We launched this highly interactive and accessible application in August 2010.  To offer this helpful tool to an even broader audience, the application was also launched in Spanish in April 2011.

We’re really excited about this accomplishment and look forward to developing more award-winning web applications, Drupal websites, and interactive user experiences in 2012.

The ad campaign setup consists of what seems to be three simple steps. But as the user moves through the experience, what initially felt simple becomes rigid and constrictive when trying to make changes, update, or delete.

The top three key items LinkedIn Ads could fix to improve usability and the user experience:

1. No delete? You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve heard this complaint within other areas of LinkedIn before, so I wasn’t surprised to find it in LinkedIn Ads. Once created, there is no way to delete an ad campaign or ad variation. You can hide them, but not delete them. Users should always be allowed to delete anything they create (just make them confirm it’s really what they want to do).
   
2. No “Save” option. If you leave the ad campaign setup process at any time, LinkedIn saves everything you started. This is great, except they don’t tell you they’re going to do that. So if you leave before finalizing a campaign, you would assume you’re losing what you started. Upon coming back to find it’s still there—you might be surprised, and also annoyed you didn’t know it would be saved in the first place. If the functionality is there, tell the users upfront so they can plan for it.
3. Cannot add new ad variations. I love that LinkedIn gives users 15 ad variations per campaign. But after you go through the initial three steps, there’s no way to come back and simply “Add a new variation.” You have to use a workaround where you duplicate an existing variation and just make changes to that. Users should never have to use a workaround for something that should be basic functionality. In fact, they should never have to use a workaround, period.
   

Despite my rant here, I love LinkedIn, and am very pleased to see it growing so much (100 million members as of March 2011!). As they grow, usability and the user experience is definitely something they’ll want to put more focus on. For now though, these few items would make a nice improvement.

Don’t forget to follow our usability and user experience design agency  on LinkedIn!

Sandstorm Design recently launched AskBlue Medicare, a health care web application for Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.  The interactive experience educates users on Medicare health care coverage options. To offer this helpful tool to an even broader audience, the application has now launched in Spanish! Ver aquí la nueva aplicación! (See the new application here!)

Meet Drew Jarvis, our newest User Experience Web Developer – We are so thrilled to add Drew to our technology and usability team! Not only does he live by pixel-perfect front-end web design, he also brings years of Drupal expertise, social media intelligence, video editing, and SEO marketing (oh yeah, and 3d modeling – is there anything he can’t do?). When Drew’s not online, he can be found traveling the world, making his own videos, or adding to his LEGO collection.

Welcome Drew. We can’t wait to work with you!

We’re looking for someone with a passion for building user-friendly experiences and creating elegant and dynamic UIs for the web. Required skills include 2-4 years experience with HTML/CSS, JavaScript, and JQuery (XML and AJAX a plus!) and 2-4 years experience developing web pages and front-end solutions from provided wireframes and designs. The successful candidate will have a strong understanding of web standards and web browser peculiarities, the ability to create cross-browser and cross-platform compliant pages, proficiency in Adobe CS3-4 Creative Suite (Photoshop and Illustrator) and knowledge of Drupal development, WordPress and other open source tools and frameworks.

Any experience in the following will be a bonus: Flash/Action Script, PHP, Ruby on Rails and/or ASP.NET, Facebook and other social media integration, SQL, MySQL or other databases, Apache and/or Microsoft IIS.

We work in a team environment, so we need someone with a demonstrated ability to work both as a member of a team and independently. We’re looking for someone with a commitment to excellence, usability, coding standards and an intense attention to detail. The successful candidate will need to be flexible in day-to-day activities and embrace change as required, working both independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced environment with many projects, priorities and opportunities.

Sandstorm Design offers competitive salary, health insurance, paid vacations, paid holidays (including your birthday!) and a fun and creative atmosphere.

Please send your resume, cover letter and links to work samples to jobs@sandstormdesign.com. No phone calls please.

We are proud to announce the launch of the new F.H. Paschen, S.N. Nielsen web site! We love working with this construction company, some say we’re almost as “Paschen”-ate as they are. Great people, great work, and a great history. We couldn’t wait for this site launch!

In addition to a new branded look and feel, the web site is filled with interactive video and functionality. We built a searchable project database that includes over 100 of their top projects. We also created an interactive experience on the homepage, new custom videos, an interactive map and a dynamically building ‘Contact Us’ form. To top it all off, custom photography highlights one of the company’s strongest points of pride – their people. We couldn’t be more passionate about launching this web site for F.H. Paschen, a company we are proud to call our client and partner.

Sandstorm Design is proud to announce the launch of our second Blue Cross Blue Shield interactive health care web application, AskBlue for Federal Employees. Federal employees have the opportunity to answer a series of questions and get a customized recommendation to help them find the right insurance plan. Along the way, learning moments are integrated throughout the experience, educating the user to make better decisions. We love working with Blue Cross Blue Shield as much as we love creating interactive tools to make people’s lives a little easier, and that’s why we’re so excited to launch this quick and easy-to-use web application to help Federal employees!

After months of collaboration, health care education, Medicare explanation, web application development, voice over talent selection and a bit of instructional design, we are proud to announce the launch of Ask Blue Medicare, an interactive health care web application to help users understand Medicare health care coverage options from Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. After going through the application, I feel confident I can help my parents through the Medicare process and explain the difference between A, B, D, gap and advantage. If you can’t, and you know someone who is around 65 years old, you should send them to check it out. (There’s closed captioning as well as the ability to increase the type, too.)

Today they started the demo in the space next door that we are taking over! They are doing a really great job as it’s not too loud nor disruptive. Thanks Hugh and Joe Hayes! We’ve decided to add a larger lunchroom and kitchen area, along with two huddle rooms for brainstorming, conference calls, quiet meetings, private phone calls and some more work space as we continue to grow – all to enhance our user’s experience (which in this case, our users are our staff).

It’s a really fun and exciting time here at Sandstorm as we continue to grow with our user centered design methodology, creative facebook applications, and strategic interactive tools. We are all looking forward to a busy and exciting 2010.

Congratulations to… ME! (OMG – this is my official first time winning and my staff now thinks I cheated). And here’s why. It’s all about my super secret ingredient where they think I swayed the judges and the user experience. My super secret ingredient I talked about for weeks, and tested up in Lake Geneva about a month ago with friends and family to perfect my recipe. My super secret ingredient that no one was worried about because last year it was dill and I lost miserably. My super secret ingredient was… tequila. (he he he).

The most fun thing about guacamole is that is really does taste so different depending on what you decide to put in. This year’s samples included mayo and sour cream to apples and jalepenos. Zak even brought a dessert guacamole which was my personal favorite (I didn’t vote for myself as I don’t personally like tequila) – he added raspberries and raspberry jam to be eaten with cinnamon crisps. Yum! And Zachary made guacamole for the first time ever.

So for the next year I get to be the “Guacamole Queen at Sandstorm”. A title I am most proud of considering I can’t cook very well to start off with. Not sure what my super secret ingredient will be next year. Better watch out Zak.

However, the blue is a little smurf-life as Janna said. And so far no one has eaten a cupcake but me. Hmm… Now I’m not a bad baker (I’m actually decent) as I’ve brought cupcakes before and they are usually gone by noon – so it got me thinking what was different about these Sandstorm cupcakes and I think it’s the blue frosting? Could the blue frosting impact their desire to eat the cupcake, therefore creating a more negative user experience?

This got me thinking about our company color blue, and how blue is a color associated with a positive user experience from a web site and corporate perspective. But when it comes to food, I can’t think of a restaurant or fast food restaurant that uses blue except White Castle and that alone proves my point. Color can make a big impact on the user experience. The big question now is if hunger will take over and will the cupcakes be gone this afternoon?

At Sandstorm Design, we had an incredible time designing and building the Broadway in Montgomery web site this summer! Our creative team explored a very visual, experiential design concept to draw the user into the essense of theatre – taking cues from Broadway. Adding to the theatrical drama are subtle hints of interactivity from the rotating home page show display to the interactive season ticket package selections.

Aligned with our mission, we had a great time challenging ourselves and our client to create a memorable and intuitive online user experience! Plus as an added bonus, we got the opportunity to take this brand and execute in print including ads, posters and brochures.

We’ve been in more meetings that we can count where we’ll spend an hour or two discussing what we “think” the user wants, what we “think” the user needs for education and content, what we “think” the user will do when we build our site – and we “think” how much easier it would be if we just picked up the phone and asked a few. So we do, and more often than ever before, user research is driving more and more of our web design decisions – ultimately enhancing a user’s experience.