Defining our industry's methodologies, standards, and culture have long been a part of Happy Cog's values.
We started Cognition as a product to offer advice, create a dialogue, and serve our industry and clients to help them with their goals and aspirations.
Learn more about Happy Cog at happycog.com.
Let’s face it: life has undergone a significant change for virtually everyone around the world, as the novel coronavirus has forced us to morph from a world of togetherness to a world of social distancing. This has led to a shift in consumer behavior and Internet usage. After evaluating data across our portfolio of clients, we’ve noticed a few significant shifts and trends that are worth highlighting:
Stereotypes are often associated with law firms – That they can be aggressive, sharp, and cutthroat, amongst other characteristics. The competitive nature of successfully practicing law directly parallels the level of competition found online as law firms attempt to build brand awareness and garner qualified leads that have the potential to develop into actual clients and cases.
Tech leadership is a mystery to many. As one racks up years of experience as a developer, there’s often an assumption that one must eventually move into tech leadership to continue to grow. And while this may be true, given the structure and hierarchy of the company you work for, the jump from individual contributor to tech leader isn’t always smooth. The two roles have some crossover in skills, but each also requires its own unique set of skills to get the job done as well.
If you’re an online retailer, Q4 ‘tis the season to be jolly. You’ve likely already started to prepare your strategy for making the holiday shopping season as successful as possible, which is great. Based on our experience working with a variety of online retailers over the years, we’re highlighting some best practices and effective optimization tips to make this year be the best one yet.
Happy Cog’s Project Management Team is a well-oiled machine built upon a solid foundation. But with an ever-expanding clientele, growing cross-departmental teams, and external competition always chasing us, we needed to elevate the team that is the heart of the agency to the next level. Starting in Summer 2018, we developed a series of initiatives designed to help strengthen that foundation. We started with the basics – adding structure and levels to the team. We began to define our methodology as Hybrid – think of that as a mixture of waterfall and agile! We tried and tested our tools and found what works for us. We totally re-hauled the project life cycle by introducing phases, which in turn has made the management of our Greenfield and Retainer projects consistent and manageable. Something we are really proud of is our team camaraderie. Through weekly 1:1s, weekly department meetings, and those ever-popular monthly nights out, we are stronger and better than ever!
A few years ago, a fellow developer (Santiago Sosa) and I were brainstorming ways to foster our company culture when we came up with the idea to bring our developers together more often for informal discovery sessions. In the company’s early days, we were a fairly small and close-knit development team that usually had a decent idea of what everyone else was working on and what technologies everyone was using. However, as the team began to quickly grow, we realized that developers were working on a wide variety of projects and were bringing with them a diverse set of skills and knowledge that many other developers were unfamiliar with. Often, developers weren’t aware of all the exciting projects that others were involved with. We felt it would be an incredibly valuable opportunity for the team to share what they were working on with each other on a regular basis.
When I started design school, I was surprised to hear my professors say things like “there is no right answer” or “keep exploring, you’re not there yet.” Coming from the world of high school calculus and definitive, objective answers, it all felt a little too open-ended for me. However, I quickly learned that with this iterative way of thinking and experimenting, there weren’t any wrong answers either. As designers, we need to be willing to share a spectrum of ideas, including ones we might be unsure about, in order to receive the most helpful feedback, collaborate with our teammates, and ultimately produce the best designs.
Claude Shannon, the late American Mathematician, largely known as the ‘father of information theory,’ once remarked that he can “visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans.” Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are no longer mere buzzwords. They’ve evolved to be an integral part of society, powering everything from self-driving cars to Amazon’s Alexa. Within the MarTech space, it’s now hard to find a software package or technology that doesn’t tout its use of machine learning. Indeed, machine learning and AI have been incredibly powerful in the paid media space, automating tasks that practitioners could do, but would rather not. This is especially true for tasks that take a disproportionate amount of time relative to the benefit earned.
I am currently the Author Experience Lead at Happy Cog and I’ve been making websites for the past 12 years, starting in middle school. I’ve been involved with the ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS communities for the bulk of that time.
At Happy Cog, we pride ourselves on the level of attention and detail we put into planning our CMS projects, which extends deeply into thinking about the Author Experience – an area that is typically neglected.
Let’s face it – SEO and UX design don’t have the greatest history together. In the early, nascent days of the web, designers used to joke that if you talked to an SEO professional, they’d advise that your website should include nothing more than a white background with black text, lots of hyperlinks, and repetitive, monotonous copy, all in the name of “keyword density.” Indeed, in the early days of search (going back to the era of Yahoo!, Excite, Hotbot, and Dogpile – before Google was even a public company), simplicity was key — and search engines could do little beyond scanning text on a page.
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