A world without third-party cookies is fast approaching. Big-name browsers like Safari and Firefox already block them by default, and Google Chrome —  the biggest browser of them all —  is set to follow. 

First, a quick refresher: Websites use cookies to store data in your browser specific to that website and other sites. The question, though, is who the website is storing the data for. Third-party cookies store data that allows advertising services to track your behavior on any given site, while first-party cookies are those a website uses for its own purposes. 

Like most things, not all cookies are created equal. As browsers transition to these new defaults, some will make the grade, while others will be blocked for good. What does this mean for your website, and how can you get ahead of the change? We’ll walk you through it. 

Are Cookies Really Going Away? 

That depends on the type of cookies your site uses. Browsers are slowly blocking third-party cookies by default — those associated with cross-site tracking for ad networks like Facebook or LinkedIn — but first-site, or same-site, cookies will remain. 

That means that if retargeting is essential to your paid marketing strategy, you may need to rethink your approach. But any cookies you use to support your site features and functionality can keep on keeping on, assuming your users have agreed to the use of those cookies on your site. For example, you may be able to keep track of previously viewed content and use that information to suggest other relevant content to that user. So don’t say goodbye to your cookie consent services either; you still have to give users the chance to opt out of any first-party cookies. 

Why Now? Haven’t We Been Using Cookies Forever? 

While cookies have been a web-surfing staple for almost as long as we’ve been using the internet, that’s not necessarily a good thing. 

Legislation like GDPR in Europe, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and the New York Privacy Act are tightening restrictions on the use of consumer data, and rapidly increasing cybersecurity threats in recent years have illuminated the risks of large-scale data storage. Consumers have also begun to prize their privacy, realizing that their information is valuable and no organization should be looking over their shoulder as they browse. 

Ultimately, phasing out third-party cookies is about doing what’s best for your users. Making the move now can help instill trust in your website, since users know you aren’t capturing their data behind the scenes. Cookie consent forms also put the data you do use out in the open, showing users that your organization takes their privacy seriously and is prepared to protect it. 

How Will The End of Third-Party Cookies Impact My Industry? 

Not all organizations will feel the shift equally. We’ve seen some verticals get ahead of the curve, while others are naturally less reliant on third-party cookies. Here are some key industry-specific areas to consider. 

Healthcare

Strict privacy laws and regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have turned healthcare organizations into pioneers in this area. The Office of Civil Rights even published a bulletin warning organizations about third-party cookies. 

Many of the healthcare brands we support at Oomph are already focused on safeguarding user privacy because they’re used to doing it with medical records. One of our clients, for example, is already exploring adopting an in-house analytics tool hosted on their own server. If your healthcare organization is relying on third-party cookies for any marketing efforts, analytic insights, or other website features, start thinking now about the best way to phase them out. 

Higher Education

Many institutions we work with are using third-party cookies because of digital efforts to drive student enrollment. When implementing personalization cookies, be sure they are implemented with the proper “SameSite” attribute value. Then be sure to engage your vendors; we’ve encouraged many of our higher education clients to explore how their vendors are preparing for this transition.  

Nonprofits

Like higher education, nonprofits should review the vendors and larger ad networks they rely on to build their volunteer base or drive donations. Many nonprofits don’t use these services, but those that do should get ahead of the change, otherwise you may stand to lose an important fundraising channel. 

4 Steps To Prepare for the End of Third-Party Cookies

Cookies, analytics, and cross-site tracking might all sound like areas best left to the pros. But there’s a lot you can do to prepare your organization for the move away from cookies, as well as critical opportunities to pull in a vendor to maintain the functionality you need. 

Audit Your Site

A website audit should always be your first step. Taking stock of the cookies you use is the best way to get a handle on the changes you’ll need to make. Tapping your web partner is a great idea here, too. Your vendor should be able to identify existing third-party cookie warnings, which can help shape your audit. 

For example, while we were updating a client’s email marketing integration recently, Chrome notified our developer that our client’s vendor was sending third-party cookies. We then reached out to the vendor to continue the conversation, knowing that those cookies had to be addressed.

Identify Affected Cookies 

The goal of your audit is to identify all third-party cookies that won’t make the cut. Don’t stop by just listing the cookie, either. Review what function it serves and the role it plays in your organization’s digital footprint. You may have to get rid of the cookie, but that doesn’t mean you have to ditch the strategy it’s tied to. 

Reach Out to Your Vendors

Ask vendors about their plans to handle the transition away from third-party cookies, and feel out whether they’ll still be able to offer the service they currently provide. Consider it a red flag if the vendor is uninformed or unprepared; you might have to seek out alternatives if there’s even the slightest chance your current vendor will be defunct by the end of the year. 

Design Alternatives

The end of third-party cookies is daunting, but it’s also exciting. Take this opportunity to innovate on your users’ behalf. How can you design engaging new experiences that still exceed their expectations? That’s more than possible, so long as you have the right tools in place.

This could be a self-hosted analytics tool you build yourself or new local storage solutions to replace the role of cookies. You might also consider a fully authenticated experience for the users of your site. Lean on a trusted partner here, too. Vendors with website expertise can guide you toward the right solution for you and your users.

Cookies on the Brain? 

For many organizations, this is the most they’ve thought about cookies in years. Third-party cookies have become so essential to building a business online, and yet they’ve largely flown under our radar. But while this change may feel overwhelming, making the switch doesn’t have to be. 

Here at Oomph, we see this as a golden opportunity for organizations to put their users first, and we’re already taking steps to help our clients do just that. 

Need a hand bringing your website into a world beyond third-party cookies? Let’s talk about it.

High-quality content management systems (CMS) and digital experience platforms (DXP) are the backbone of modern websites, helping you deliver powerful, personalized user experiences. The catch? You have to pick your platform first. 

At Oomph, we have a lot of love for open-source platforms like Drupal and WordPress. Over the years, we’ve also built applications for our clients using headless CMS tools, like Contentful and CosmicJS. The marketplace for these solutions continues to grow exponentially, including major players like Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, and Optimizely.

With so many options, developers and non-developers with a project on the horizon typically start by asking themselves, “Which CMS or DXP is the best fit for my website or application?” While that is no doubt an excellent question to consider, I think it’s equally important to ask, “Who is going to implement the solution?” 

CMS/DXP Solutions Are More Alike Than You Might Think

I recently attended the annual Healthcare Internet Conference and spoke with quite a few healthcare marketers about their CMS tools. I noticed a common thread: Many people think their CMS (some of which I mentioned above) is hard to use and doesn’t serve them well. 

That may very well be the case. Not all CMS tools are created equal; some are better suited for specific applications. However, most modern CMS and DXP tools have many of the same features in common, they just come at different price points. So here’s the multi-million dollar question: If most of these products provide access to the same or similar tools, why are so many customers displeased with them? 

Common Challenges of CMS/DXP Implementation

Often, we find that CMS users get frustrated because the tool they chose wasn’t configured to meet their specific needs. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it was set up incorrectly. That’s the beauty of many of today’s CMS and DXP products: They don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, they allow for flexibility and customization to ensure that each customer gets the most out of the product.

While enticing, that flexibility also burdens the user with ensuring that their system is implemented effectively for their specific use case. In our experience, implementation is the make-or-break of a website development project. These are just a handful of things that can derail the process:

1. The implementation partner didn’t fully understand how their client works and configure features accordingly.
2. The demands of user experience overshadowed the needs of content editors and admins. 
3. Hefty licensing fees ate away at the budget, leaving behind funds that don’t quite cover a thorough implementation. 
4. The project was rushed to meet a tight deadline. 
5. The CMS introduces new features over time that add complexity to the admin or editing experience. 
6. Old features get sunsetted as new capabilities take their place. 

Most of the work we do at Oomph is to help our clients implement new websites and applications using content management systems like Drupal. We have decades of combined experience helping our clients create the ideal user experience for their target audience while also crafting a thoughtful content editing and admin experience that is easy to use.

But what does that look like in practice? 

4 Steps for a Successful CMS Implementation

Implementation can be the black box of setting up your CMS: You don’t know what you don’t know. So, we like to get our clients into a demo environment as soon as possible to help them better understand what they need from their CMS. Here’s how we use it to navigate successful CMS implementation: 

1. Assess the Capabilities of the CMS

The first step can be the most simple at face value. Consider what the CMS needs to do for you, then find a CMS that includes all of those features. Content modeling (more on that below) is a key part of that process, but so is auditing your team’s abilities. 

Some teams may be developer-savvy and can handle less templated content-authoring features. Others may need a much more drag-and-drop experience. Either use case is normal and acceptable, but what matters is that you identify your needs and find both a CMS and an implementation process that meets them. That leads us to the next point.

2. Test-Drive the CMS Early and Often

You wouldn’t buy a car without test-driving it first. Yet we find that people are often more than willing to license a CMS without looking under the hood.

Stepping into the CMS for a test drive is a huge part of getting the content editing experience right. We’ve been designing and engineering websites and platforms using CMS tools for well over a decade, and we’ve learned a thing or two along the way about good content management and editing experiences. 

Even with out-of-the-box, vanilla Drupal, the sky’s the limit for how you can configure it. But that also means that nothing is configured, and it can be difficult to get a sense of how best to configure and use it. Rather than diving into the deep end, we work with our clients to test the waters. We immediately set up a project sandbox that offers pre-configured content types, allowing you to enter content and play with a suite of components within the sleek drag-and-drop interface.

3. Align User Experience with Content Authoring

Beyond pre-configured content and components, our sandbox sites include a stylish, default theme. The idea is to give you a taste both of what your live site could look like and what your content authoring experience might be. Since so many teams struggle to balance those two priorities, this can be a helpful way to figure out how your CMS can give you both. 

4. Finalize Your Features & Capabilities 

While a demo gives you a good idea of the features you’ll need, it might include features you don’t. But discovering where our pre-built options aren’t a good fit is a good thing — it helps us understand exactly what YOUR TEAM does and does not need.

Our goal is to give you something tangible to react to, whether that’s love at first type or a chance to uncover capabilities that would serve you better. We’ve found this interactive yet structured process is the CMS silver bullet that leads to a better outcome. 

Content Modeling

Another key part of our project workflow is what we call content modeling. During this phase, we work with you to identify the many content types you’ll have on your website or application. Then, we can visualize them in a mapping system to determine things like: 

• What relationships exist between these different content types?
• Who should have access to a content type, and what governance should be in place to ensure all content is accurate, on brand, and approved for publishing?
• What features do you need to support content at every level? For example, at the field level, do you need a drop-down with predefined values that only certain people can edit, or do you need an open-text field a content editor can customize? 

With a solid content model in place, we can have a higher level of confidence that our CMS implementation will create the right content editing experience for your team. From there, we actually implement the content model in the CMS as soon as possible so that you can test it out and we can make refinements before getting too far along in the process.

Content Moderation & Governance

Many clients tell us they either have too much or too little control over their content. In some cases, their content management system is so templated or rigid that marketing teams can’t quickly spin up landing pages and instead have to rely on development teams to assist. Other teams have too much freedom, allowing employees to easily deploy content that hasn’t been approved by the appropriate team members or strays from company brand standards. 

Here at Oomph, our mantra is balance. A good content editing process needs both flexibility and governance, so teams can create content when they need to, but avoid publishing content that doesn’t meet company standards. Through discovery, we work with clients to determine which content types need flexibility and which ones don’t. 

If a content type needs to be flexible, we create a framework that allows for agility while still ensuring that users can only select approved colors, font types, and font sizes. We also identify which content needs to be held in moderation and approved before it can be published on the website. 

Taking the time to discuss governance in advance creates a CMS experience that strikes the right balance between marketing freedom and brand adherence. 

Implementation Turns a Good CMS Into a Great One

Modern CMS/DXP solutions have mind-blowing features, and they will only continue to get more complex over time. But the reality is that while picking a CMS that has the features you need is important, how it’s configured and implemented might matter even more. After all, how helpful is it to have a CMS with embedded artificial intelligence if making simple copy updates to your home page is a nightmare? 

Implementation is the “it” factor that makes the difference between a CMS you love and one you’d rather do your job without.

Interested in solving your CMS headaches with better implementation? Let’s talk.

The world of digital accessibility can be daunting. There are many regulations and ways in which a website can be accessible or inaccessible. Many of us don’t understand what a good or bad experience looks like, and we think we can’t possibly understand people who rely solely on assistive technology to use the web. 

It doesn’t have to be daunting, though. And with anything, the key is to start small. To those who create websites or own/manage one, the first step to understanding accessibility is empathy. If more people used assistive technology, more people would understand the difference between a terrible experience and a great one. Don’t be scared of learning about accessibility tools, because you might already be more familiar with them than you realize.

Have you ever broken your dominant hand and been forced to use a keyboard instead of a mouse or trackpad? Have you tried to complete a payment form really quickly to snag concert tickets, and figured out that using the keyboard can be much faster? 

Have you been in loud surroundings and tried to watch a video? How great are captions? Have you realized that captions are assistive technology? There are alternate modes of consuming content and using a digital product that are beneficial to a much wider audience than the audience it was created for. 

With some instruction, we hope more people feel comfortable using a keyboard to navigate a website. We also hope that more of you are brave enough to try a screen reader as well, or at least watch our video to experience what that experience can be like. 

Video Tutorial

Our video is 37 minutes and we provide a break-down of the different minute-marks below if you’d like to jump to a certain area. (All cookies must be accepted for the video to play. You may also view on YouTube directly.)

Table of Contents

1. 00:00 — Using a Keyboard
   1. 02:00 — The tab key
   2. 02:20 — A “Skip to Content” link and why that is so useful
   3. 03:40 — “Focus ring” style
   4. 04:20 — An example of an inaccessible drop-down menu
   5. 05:40 — An example of an inaccessible link (no focus ring)
   6. 07:40 — Common article card patterns and how they work with a keyboard
2. 10:45 — The Screen Reader Experience
   1. 11:10 — Invoking VoiceOver with Command F5
   2. 12:35 — Tabbing through interactive elements
   3. 12:54 — Skip to Content link
   4. 13:07 — Company logo
   5. 13:55 — Projects link
   6. 14:31 — Topics
   7. 15:55 — About Us link, inaccessible to keyboard users
   8. 16:16 — Reading of non-interactive elements with Control Option arrows
   9. 16:50 — Reading content, Headings, links
   10. 18:50 — Visually hidden heading but screen reader accessible
   11. 19:55 — Alt text image examples
   12. 20:06 — Kittens, no alt tag present
   13. 21:06 — Doggos, empty alt tag
   14. 23:00 — Squirrels, descriptive alt text
   15. 23:48 — Article content examples
   16. 23:53 — Article 1 example, too many links
   17. 25:37 — Article 2 example, too much content
   18. 26:32 — Article 3 example, hidden content
   19. 27:44 — Article 4 example, alternate pattern
   20. 30:02 — Voiceover’s Rotor Feature, control option U
   21. 30:15 — Headings menu
   22. 30:55 — Empty heading element
   23. 31:50 — Other Rotor menus
   24. 32:18 — Non-visited Links menu
   25. 33:01 — All Links menu
   26. 33:40 — “Click here” and “Read more” link text
   27. 35:09 — Landmarks menu
   28. 35:25 — Form Controls menu
3. 36:06 VoiceOver off and wrap up

For those who want to learn a little more, below we collect a few keyboard command cheatsheets for navigating a webpage or using VoiceOver on a Mac. Links to additional resources for setting up and getting started with VoiceOver are also included.

More Resources

Keyboard User Cheatsheet

• Tab key — Navigate from link to link
  • For sighted users who can still use a mouse: Getting started on a page might mean clicking into the top left corner to get the keyboard focus to be within the browser window and not on the desktop or in the browser (URL bar)
  • In a Checkbox list in a form, the tab key will move from one element to another
• Return key (Enter) — “Presses” a link to open the destination or perform the one page action (for buttons)
• Spacebar
  • When over an interactive element in a navigation, spacebar opens the element. Arrow keys may move up and down through the open list, or the tab key can be used. Spacebar again should toggle the element closed.
  • In a Checkbox list in a form, the spacebar chooses the element currently in focus
• Escape key — Close most items that have been opened, like pop-up modal windows
• Arrows Up/Down — Generally, scrolls the page
  • In a Radio Button group in a form, Tab will select the group of options while arrow keys will traverse the list
  • With a Select list in a form, Tab makes the list active. Arrow keys traverses the list. Enter key selects the option in focus.
• Any letter key — With a Select list in a form, Tab makes the list active. When active and open, a letter key will jump to that letter in the list. Useful for long lists, like States or Countries.

VoiceOver Cheatsheet

These key commands reflect the default set-up for Mac OSX — I have not made any modifications. Of course, power users will modify these commands to fit their needs. 

The default VoiceOver key command combination is ^Control ⌥Option. This combination is used to ensure key combinations do not conflict with other quick key commands through the OS and Apps.

Many key commands for navigating a webpage are the same as a Keyboard user. Return, Spacebar, and Arrow keys all work the same.

• ⌘Command F5 — Open and start Voiceover
• ^Control ⌥Option Arrow Right — Read next string of text
• ^Control ⌥Option Arrow Left — Read previous string of text
• ^Control ⌥Option Space — “Presses” a link or button
  • For some elements, VoiceOver will announce that there are “Actions available.” Access the Actions menu with ^Control ⌥Option Space, and navigate the menu with the up and down arrow keys; press VO-Space to select a custom action.
• ^Control ⌥Option M — Access the Apple Menu (File, Edit, View, etc.). Escape Key returns to the web page content.
• ^Control ⌥Option H twice quickly — Commands Help menu
  • While inside, arrow keys move up and down in lists. Left and Right arrows move from one list to another. Return key chooses an element from a list
• ^Control ⌥Option K — Keyboard Help. Similar to Command Help, but here, keys can be pressed without having any effect on the system (like a practice session). Escape key exits the Keyboard Help session
• ^Control ⌥Option U — Open the Rotor
  • While inside, arrow keys move up and down in Rotor lists. Left and Right arrows move from one list to another. Return key chooses an element from a list, closes the Rotor, and moves focus to the selected element. Escape key exits the Rotor
• Traversing the page by Element Type:
  • ^Control ⌥Option H — Find next heading
  • ^Control ⌥Option L — Find next link (different from the Tab key as it will look for Links only, not buttons that perform on-page actions)
  • ^Control ⌥Option J — Find next form control
  • ^Control ⌥Option T — Find next table
  • ^Control ⌥Option X — Find next list
  • ^Control ⌥Option F — Find next frame

Additional Resources to Start Using VoiceOver

• Welcome to VoiceOver, Apple website
• Deep dive into using VoiceOver and customizing the system to work the way you prefer

Conclusion

With some practice, we hope you might find that using a keyboard to navigate can be your superpower. When filling out forms, for example, I use the keyboard almost exclusively to quickly move from one field to another and to find my state in a long drop-down list. Unless, of course, I run into another poorly coded form that is not accessible. Lucky for me, I can go back to using a mouse. But some do not have that option, and for them, our empathy should turn into empowerment and we shall demand better from our design and development practices.

For questions or to discuss how to make your next project more accessible, please contact us anytime.

More in Our Accessibility Series

Notable articles from the Accessibility category:

• Supporting Personal Safety: Best Practices with a Quick Exit Button

There’s a new acronym on the block: MACH (pronounced “mock”) architecture. 

But like X is to Twitter, MACH is more a rebrand than a reinvention. In fact, you’re probably already familiar with the M, A, C, and H and may even use them across your digital properties. While we’ve been helping our clients implement aspects of MACH architecture for years, organizations like the MACH Alliance have recently formed in an attempt to provide clearer definition around the approach, as well as to align their service offerings with the technologies at hand. 

One thing we’ve learned at Oomph after years of working with these technologies? It isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. There are many degrees of MACH adoption, and how far you go depends on your organization and its unique needs. 

But first, you need to know what MACH architecture is, why it’s great (and when it’s not), and how to get started. 

What Is MACH?

MACH is an approach to designing, building, and testing agile digital systems — particularly websites. It stands for microservices, APIs, cloud-native, and headless. 

Like a composable business, MACH unites a few tried-and-true components into a single, seamless framework for building modern digital systems. 

The components of MACH architecture are: 

1. Microservices: Many online features and functions can be separated into more specific tasks, or microservices. Modern web apps often rely on specialized vendors to offer individual services, like sending emails, authenticating users, or completing transactions, rather than a single provider to rule them all. 
2. APIs: Microservices interact with a website through APIs, or application programming interfaces. This allows developers to change the site’s architecture without impacting the applications that use APIs and easily offer those APIs to their customers.
3. Cloud-Native: A cloud-based environment hosts websites and applications via the Internet, ensuring scalability and performance. Modern cloud technology like Kubernetes, containers, and virtual machines keep applications consistent while meeting the demands of your users. 
4. Headless: Modern Javascript frameworks like Next.js and Gatsby empower intuitive front ends that can be coupled with a variety of back-end content management systems, like Drupal and WordPress. This gives administrators the authoring power they want without impacting end users’ experience. 

Are You Already MACHing? 

Even if the term MACH is new to you, chances are good that you’re already doing some version of it. Here are some telltale signs:

• You have one vendor for single sign-on (SSO), one vendor to capture payment information, another to handle email payment confirmations, and so on. 
• You use APIs to integrate with tech solutions like Hubspot, Salesforce, PayPal, and more. 
• Your website — or any website feature or application — is deployed within a cloud environment. 
• Your website’s front end is managed by a different vendor than its back end. 

If you’re doing any of the above, you’re MACHing. But the magic of MACH is in bringing them all together, and there are plenty of reasons why companies are taking the leap. 

5 Benefits of MACH Architecture

If you make the transition to MACH, you can expect: 

1. Choice: Organizations that use MACH don’t have to settle for one provider that’s “good enough” for the countless services websites need. Instead, they can choose the best vendor for the job. For example, when Oomph worked with One Percent for America to build a platform offering low-interest loans to immigrants pursuing citizenship, that meant leveraging the Salesforce CRM for loan approvals, while choosing “Click and Pledge” for donations and credit card transactions. 
2. Flexibility: MACH architecture’s modular nature allows you to select and integrate individual components more easily and seamlessly update or replace those components.  Our client Leica, for example, was able to update its order fulfillment application with minimal impact to the rest of its Drupal site. 
3. Performance: Headless applications often run faster and are easier to test, so you can deploy knowing you’ve created an optimal user experience. For example, we used a decoupled architecture for our client Wingspans to create a stable, flexible, and scalable site with lightning-fast performance for its audience of young career-seekers.     
4. Security: Breaches are generally limited to individual features or components, keeping your entire system more secure. 
5. Future-Proofing: A MACH system scales easily because each service is individually configured, making it easier to keep up with technologies and trends and avoid becoming out-of-date. 

5 Drawbacks of MACH Architecture

As beneficial as MACH architecture can be, making the switch isn’t always smooth sailing. Before deciding to adopt MACH, consider these potential pitfalls. 

1. Complexity: With MACH architecture, you’ll have more vendors — sometimes a lot more — than if you run everything on one enterprise system. That’s more relationships to manage and more training needed for your employees, which can complicate development, testing, deployment, and overall system understanding. 
2. Challenges With Data Parity: Following data and transactions across multiple microservices can be tricky. You may encounter synchronization issues as you get your system dialed in, which can frustrate your customers and the team maintaining your website. 
3. Security: You read that right — security is a potential pro and a con with MACH, depending on your risk tolerance. While your whole site is less likely to go down with MACH, working with more vendors leaves you more vulnerable to breaches for specific services. 
4. Technological Mishaps: As you explore new solutions for specific services, you’ll often start to use newer and less proven technologies. While some solutions will be a home run, you may also have a few misses. 
5. Complicated Pricing: Instead of paying one price tag for an enterprise system, MACH means buying multiple subscriptions that can fluctuate more in price. This, coupled with the increased overhead of operating a MACH-based website, can burden your budget. 

Is MACH Architecture Right for You? 

In our experience, most brands could benefit from at least a little bit of MACH. Some of our clients are taking a MACH-lite approach with a few services or apps, while others have adopted a more comprehensive MACH architecture. 

Whether MACH is the right move for you depends on your: 

1. Platform Size and Complexity: Smaller brands with tight budgets and simple websites may not need a full-on MACH approach. But if you’re managing content across multiple sites and apps, managing a high volume of communications and transactions, and need to iterate quickly to keep up with rapid growth, MACH is often the way to go. 
2. Level of Security: If you’re in a highly regulated industry and need things locked down, you may be better off with a single enterprise system than a multi-vendor MACH solution.  
3. ROI Needs: If it’s time to replace your system anyway, or you’re struggling with internal costs and the diminishing value of your current setup, it may be time to consider MACH. 
4. Organizational Structure: If different teams are responsible for distinct business functions, MACH may be a good fit. 

How To Implement MACH Architecture

If any of the above scenarios apply to your organization, you’re probably anxious to give MACH a go. But a solid MACH architecture doesn’t happen overnight. We recommend starting with a technology audit: a systematic, data-driven review of your current system and its limitations.

We recently partnered with career platform Wingspans to modernize its website. Below is an example of the audit and the output: a seamless and responsive MACH architecture. 

The Audit

1. Surveys/Questionnaires: We started with some simple questions about Wingspan’s website, including what was working, what wasn’t, and the team’s reasons for updating. They shared that they wanted to offer their users a more modern experience. 
2. Stakeholder Interviews: We used insights from the surveys to spark more in-depth discussions with team members close to the website. Through conversation, we uncovered that website performance and speed were their users’ primary pain points. 
3. Systems Access and Audit: Then, we took a peek under the hood. Wingspans had already shared its poor experiences with previous vendors and applications, so we wanted to uncover simpler ways to improve site speed and performance. 
4. Organizational Structure: Understanding how the organization functions helps design a system to meet those needs. The Wingspans team was excited about modern technology and relatively savvy, but they also needed a system that could accommodate thousands of authenticated community members. 
5. Marketing Plan Review: We also wanted to understand how Wingspans would talk about their website. They sought an “app-like” experience with super-fast search, which gave us insight into how their MACH system needed to function. 
6. Roadmap: Wingspans had a rapid go-to-market timeline. We simplified our typical roadmap to meet that goal, knowing that MACH architecture would be easy to update down the road. 
7. Delivery: We recommended Wingspans deploy as a headless site (a site we later developed for them), with documentation we could hand off to their design partner. 

The Output 

We later deployed Wingspans.com as a headless site using the following components of MACH architecture:

1. Microservices: Wingspans leverages microservices like Algolia Search for site search, Amazon AWS for email sends and static site hosting, and Stripe for managing transactions.
2. APIs: Wingspans.com communicates with the above microservices through simple APIs. 
3. Cloud-Native: The new website uses cloud-computing services like Google Firebase, which supports user authentication and data storage. 
4. Headless: Gatsby powers the front-end design, while Cosmic JS is the back-end content management system (CMS). 

Let’s Talk MACH

As MACH evolves, the conversation around it will, too. Wondering which components may revolutionize your site and which to skip (for now)? Get in touch to set up your own technology audit.

Feel like you’re seeing a lot more website pop-up banners these days asking about your cookie preferences? Those cookie banners are here to stay, and they’re a vital part of compliance for websites of all sizes. 

As global standards for consumer privacy and data protection continue to climb, businesses are burning more time and resources to keep up. One VentureBeat article pegged the cost for a business of maintaining data privacy compliance at an eye-popping $31 million — and the costs of non-compliance can be even higher. Failing to stay on top of this complex patchwork of regulations can trigger real consequences, from steep fines and penalties to the indirect costs of reputational harm and lost business. 

Cookie consent is one part of a holistic data privacy strategy — and an increasingly important one. Global privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD), require companies to inform visitors about the data collected on their website via cookies and provide them with granular choices about what they’re willing to share. Cookie consent management solutions help users manage cookie preferences when they enter your site, presenting a banner  that informs users about how cookies are used and letting them decide which information (if any) they want cookies to collect. 

Cookie consent management solutions are rapidly evolving to keep up with changing data privacy standards. CookiePro is a solution from OneTrust designed specifically for small to medium businesses, offering a more automated way to ensure website and mobile applications stay compliant with cookie consent and global privacy regulations. At Oomph, we’ve helped several clients integrate CookiePro into their sites in recent months and think it’s on track to become an industry standard for cookie consent management. 

For organizations that are already juggling multiple site integrations, does it make sense to add another? To answer that, let’s take a look at why cookie consent matters, how a tool like CookiePro can help, and if it’s right for you. 

Why Do I Need a Cookie Consent Solution?

To comply with privacy laws and provide a transparent experience that builds trust, many website owners are rethinking how they manage compliance. Adding a cookie consent tool to your website can improve the experience for you and your users. 

Ensure Compliance

Not taking data privacy seriously can cost you. In December 2022, Meta (the parent company of Facebook) agreed to pay $725 million to settle several class-action lawsuits that found Facebook had let third-parties access users’ private data and their friends’ data without user permission. Oracle has been sued for collecting 4.5 billion personal records from consumers who have specifically opted out of sharing, and Starbucks is potentially facing a lawsuit for continuing to “track customers ‘after they’ve declined all but required cookies.’” 

While big-name companies get most of the bad press around data privacy, you don’t have to be a global enterprise to face similar consequences. In 2022, the total value of settlements for class-action lawsuits set a new record at $63 billion — and data breach and privacy class action settlements were among the top 10 settlement categories. Instead of risking a costly settlement, a much less expensive approach is to invest in a solution to help manage the work of compliance.

Build Trust

Beyond protecting your organization from legal action, demonstrating that you care about compliance helps your business build trust and long-term relationships with users. Data privacy is becoming more important to consumers of all ages, with 74% of people ranking data privacy as one of their top values. 

A cookie consent solution lets users know that they’re in charge of their own data. It clearly discloses which information your business collects and uses, putting the power in their hands to control the data they share. If users want to change what they’re comfortable sharing later, they can easily update their settings. That level of transparency helps set the tone for your customer interactions, turning users into loyal brand advocates. 

Optimize Efficiency

If your website serves users in multiple states or countries, keeping up with the patchwork of state, federal, and international laws is virtually impossible without software. Eleven states have unique data privacy laws in place right now, and 16 states introduced privacy bills during the 2022 to 2023 legislative cycle. 

Factor in international regulations like GDPR, and it would take more hours than there are in a day to curate the individual preferences of your customer base. Plus, which of your team members is watching in case any regulations change? The most efficient approach is to use an automated cookie solution to curate consent requirements based on the user’s location and more. 

What Is CookiePro?

Developed by OneTrust, which offers more robust data privacy solutions for enterprises, CookiePro started as a product in the OneTrust platform. After recognizing the need among small and medium businesses for a turnkey consent tool, OneTrust spun off CookiePro as a standalone solution.

CookiePro offers plans starting at around $40 per month, making it a budget-friendly alternative to enterprise solutions like OneTrust (or the cost of a lawsuit settlement). CookiePro comes with core compliance features like user-level consent management, acceptance customization, data mapping and recordkeeping, support for over 250 user languages, and additional security features. 

After helping several of our clients implement CookiePro, there are a few key features that stand out for us:

• Easy installation: It just takes a few minutes to add a snippet of code to your website to enable CookiePro. It’s compatible with Drupal, WordPress, and other major site platforms.
• Automated cookie blocking: CookiePro’s auto-blocking tool scans your website to identify third-party tracking technologies, categorizes the cookies, and automatically blocks all cookies until users have given consent.  
• Robust customizations: You can tailor your CookiePro banner to match your branding by customizing colors, content, and consent language. CookiePro also allows you to customize the user experience by choosing your consent approach and giving users granular control over their cookie settings.   
• Upgrade path: Whether you have a small site or one with hundreds of thousands of visitors, CookiePro can support growing business needs. If you find that you need more support or functionality, you can upgrade to OneTrust’s Trust Intelligence Platform to unify all your data privacy management activities.
• Tag management system integrations: You can integrate tag management systems with your cookie consent solution if you use analytics and other platform tags on your website. CookiePro has integrations with many major tag management systems, including Google Tag Manager and Tealium, so you don’t have to change your current setup.

Beyond CookiePro, there are a growing number of other cookie consent solutions on the market, such as Termly and Cookiebot by Usercentrics. The right choice for you will depend on your existing tech stack, budget, and goals  — the most important step is to put something in place to protect yourself and your users.  

Where Should I Start?

Taking a proactive approach is key to ensuring data privacy for your users and avoiding costly consequences. Educate yourself on the different regulations and requirements, figure out the gaps in your compliance approach, and invest in tools that can help reduce risk and manual effort for your team. 

Feeling overwhelmed or need a fresh perspective? Oomph’s accessibility and compliance audit is a great place to start. We can help you go beyond cookie consent to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), and other regulatory standards, helping you mitigate risk and deliver on user expectations. Reach out to us to schedule your site audit. 

In our previous post we broadly discussed the mindset of composable business. While “composable” can be a long term company-wide strategy for the future, companies shouldn’t overlook smaller-scale opportunities that exist at every level to introduce more flexibility, longevity, and reduce costs of technology investments.

For maximum ROI, think big, then start small

Many organizations are daunted by the concept of shifting a legacy application or monolith to a microservices architecture. This is exacerbated when an application is nearing end of life.

Don’t discount the fact that a move to a microservices architecture can be done progressively over time, unlike the replatform of a monolith which is a huge investment in both time and money that may not be realized for years until the new application is ready to deploy.

A progressive approach allows organizations to:

• Move faster and allow for adjustments as needed
• Begin realizing returns on investments faster
• Reduce risk by making smaller investments and deployments
• Ease budgeting process by funding an overhaul in stages
• Improve quality by minimizing the scope of tests
• Save money on initial investment and maintenance where services are centralized
• Benefit from longevity of a component-based system

Prioritizing the approach by aligning technical architecture with business objectives

As with any application development initiative, aligning business objectives with technology decisions is essential. Unlike replatforming a monolith, however, prioritizing and planning the order of development and deployments is crucial to the success of the initiative.

Start with clearly defining your application with a requirements and feature matrix. Then evaluate each using three lenses to see priorities begin to emerge:

1. With a current state lens, evaluate each item. Is it broken? Is it costly to maintain? Is it leveraged by multiple business units or external applications?
2. Then with a future state lens, evaluate each item. Could it be significantly improved? Could it be leveraged by other business units? Could it be leveraged outside the organization (partners, etc…)? Could it be leveraged in other applications, devices, or locations?
3. Lastly, evaluate the emerging priority items with a cost and effort lens. What is the level of effort to develop the feature as a service? What is the likely duration of the effort?

Key considerations when planning a progressive approach

Planning is critical to any successful application development initiative, and architecting a microservices based architecture is no different. Be sure to consider the following key items as part of your planning exercises:

1. Remember that rearchitecting a monolith feature as a service can open the door to new opportunities and new ways of thinking. It is helpful to ask “If this feature was a stand alone service, we could __”
2. Be careful of designing services that are too big in scope. Work diligently to break down the application into the smallest possible parts, even if it is later determined that some should be grouped together
3. Keep security front of mind. Where a monolith may have allowed for a straightforward security management policy with everything under one roof, a services architecture provides the opportunity for a more customized security policy, and the need to define how separate services are allowed to communicate with each other and the outside world

In summary

A microservices architecture is an approach that can help organizations move faster, be more flexible and agile, and reduce costs on development and maintenance of software applications. By taking a progressive approach when architecting a monolith application, businesses can move quickly, reduce risk, improve quality, and reduce costs.

If you’re interested in introducing composability to your organization, we’d love to help! Contact us today to talk about your options.

Digital customer experience (DCX) is fast becoming a key factor in how consumers choose whom to do business with. Every digital interaction contributes to an overall feeling about your brand — which means digital touchpoints like apps and chatbots can play a big part in what customers think of your company.

What story do you want those interactions to tell? What kind of experiences do you want people to share with others?

This article covers five ways to assess and improve your digital customer experience so you can attract, delight, and retain your target customers.

But First – What IS Digital Customer Experience?

Customer experience, or CX, is the perception that customers form based on all of their interactions, in-person or online, with your brand. If CX is about carefully and consistently meeting your customers’ needs, Digital Customer Experience is the online expression of those efforts.

Digital customer experience is the part of your CX journey that involves digital interactions via your website, mobile app, social media accounts, digital kiosks, etc. Wherever your customers are engaging with your people, products, or services through the internet, it’s a digital experience.

DCX is their perception of those moments.

Brands with a great DCX provide a personalized and consistent online experience throughout the customer journey. Whether someone is considering becoming a client, placing an order, or searching for information, every digital interaction has to be easy and enjoyable.

5 Ways to Improve Your Digital Customer Experience

Technology is a wonderful tool for improving the customer experience, whether mining data for customer insights or leveraging AI for personalization. But technology alone can’t deliver an exceptional digital customer experience. Your DCX strategy must include a human component — one that focuses on customer care through empathy and authenticity. Here’s how to ensure your digital customer experience lives up to your users’ expectations.

Know your target audience

To deliver the kind of digital experience your customers will love, you have to know what they want. Who’s buying your product, and why? When they visit your website or app, what are they hoping to accomplish?

Delighting your customers requires knowing their goals, understanding their pain points, and providing interactions that meet their specific needs. The upshot? 68% of customers will spend more money with a brand that understands and treats them like an individual.

Here are three crucial steps:

1. Use qualitative and quantitative analyses to learn about your audience. The more you understand their preferences and behaviors, the better you can create an experience that meets their needs.
2. Apply a user-centered design process, which relies on deeply understanding your audience to craft usable, accessible digital interfaces.
3. Incorporate personalization techniques to adapt the digital experience for individual users. More than anything else, this will help make the customer journey smooth and enjoyable.

Adopt an omnichannel mindset

Customers expect seamless interactions from brands throughout their journey, whether through digital or non-digital channels. In fact, brands with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, in comparison to 33% of companies with weak strategies.

Knowing that today’s consumers often jump from channel to channel as they browse, buy, or get in touch, DCX leaders embrace an omnichannel strategy. Note that this is different from a multichannel approach, where customers access multiple channels in separate interactions. An omnichannel approach integrates all digital touchpoints to create a seamless, personalized experience.

Here are a few key ways to create personalized experiences that resonate across all your digital channels:

• Use instantly recognizable brand elements and visual designs
• Make the transition from one channel to another easier
• Save search history and preferences across devices
• Synchronize ads and other promotional content

Get help from experts

Expert assessments can remove the guesswork around optimizing your digital customer experience. A digital CX audit, for instance, will show you what’s working and what could be better, as well as providing actionable insights and a prioritized roadmap.

CX specialists will look beyond the basic digital experience (clunky design, system bugs, etc…) to assess whether your digital channels are effectively serving your customers’ needs. A professional audit can help determine things like:

• Are there critical issues affecting usability and access?
• What elements of the journey most impact users’ experience?
• What are your competitors doing, and how can you differentiate?
• Where are your greatest strengths and growth opportunities?

Make customer feedback easy

Most companies know that customer feedback is crucial for improving the customer experience. But many fall short in providing easy, effective options for people to reach them.

Offering multiple, easy-to-use communication options across your digital channels is one more way to delight your customers. Help people engage with you via the medium of their choice, so they can communicate through the interface they’re most comfortable with.

That could be a chat function or contact form on your website, or the commenting and messaging features on your social profiles. Or, maybe it’s good old-fashioned phone calls and emails. Whatever the avenue, make it easy to find and intuitive to use.

One more thing: when someone does reach out, respond quickly. The faster a problem is resolved, the better the experience.

Plan for the post-launch reality

You might design and launch an amazing new website, app, or service that delights your customers and sends revenue through the roof. But, without a long-term plan to keep it effective and relevant, your digital CX will likely diminish over time.

To maintain the quality of customer experience across all your digital touchpoints, apply a measurement framework based on the principles above:

• Are you meeting users’ current and evolving needs?
• Do you provide a seamless omnichannel experience?
• Are you gathering — and implementing — user feedback?

Remember, too, that new technological trends are going to keep emerging and influencing consumer expectations. Be prepared to evolve what digital CX looks like for your business, especially if it means extending your digital services to new platforms or devices.

Putting the “C” in Digital CX

Technology has made so many things possible for today’s consumers that, ultimately, the power is in their hands. As digital capabilities continue to evolve, people may become increasingly selective about which brands earn their trust and business — and companies will need to make the digital customer experience more beneficial for both sides.

As you can see from the steps above, the key is putting your customers’ needs above all else.

If you’re not sure where to start, you’re not alone! We’ve helped dozens of clients dive into customer research, omnichannel strategies, and strategic planning for digital platforms. Reaching out to a digital CX expert (like Oomph) can help you do things right the first time, saving you time and money and, most importantly, building a foundation to get results.

Excited about crafting an exceptional DCX? So are we. Check out our DCX audit service to learn how we can help set you up for success.

If you’ve been tossing around these two terms interchangeably, it’s okay. We won’t hold it against you. With some overlapping features and functionality, websites and digital platforms are easy to confuse at first glance.

In reality, they provide very different user experiences — and knowing the difference can be crucial to meeting your business needs.

How are Websites and Platforms Different?

The fundamental difference between a website and a digital platform lies in how you approach user engagement. Websites provide one-way engagement, with users ingesting whatever content the website delivers. Platforms offer reciprocal engagement, with interactions between a platform and its users generating personalized experiences.

Websites rely on implied audience data capture, meaning that users are grouped into broad buckets. If, say, lots of people click on a particular article, the site will assume that most visitors are interested in that topic and will feature it prominently. Essentially, websites are always working with the majority, not the individual.

By contrast, platforms use expressed data capture, where users provide identifying information by registering and logging in. Once someone becomes an authenticated user, you can learn about them directly through multiple touchpoints. That might include filling out forms, participating in discussions, adding comments, completing quizzes or surveys, or bookmarking content. By supplying a platform with real data, users get experiences tailored specifically for them.

Personalized data also allows platforms to streamline business workflows. Take HR processes, for example. When someone logs into a company intranet, they could receive a reminder to complete any unfinished HR forms — a tool that’s convenient and efficient for both the employee and the HR department.

Website Examples

Users generally can’t personalize anything on websites; they visit them for information. Here a few kinds of traditional websites:

• Editorial news: MSNBC, Buzzfeed, The New York Times
• Non-profits: United Way Worldwide, Tourism Saskatoon, Girls Who Code
• Marketing: Well, this one that you are reading right now 🙂

Platform Examples

Platforms encourage users to actively contribute to the digital experience. Here are some examples of what you can do with a platform:

• Amazon: lets you shop faster and more efficiently with personalized recommendations
• Wingspans: uses personalized content discovery to help students explore careers
• MyFund: an easy-to-use, mobile-friendly web app for charitable donations
• Company intranet: provides digital interactions that enhance company culture
• Mirror: customizes workouts based on your goals, preferences, and performance

The Impact of Engagement

Owners of both websites and platforms are generally aiming to increase engagement as a measure of success. But what does that look like?

For a website, increased engagement is indicated by metrics like increased page views, longer “time on page” stats, lower bounce rates, and higher conversions (such as contact form completions or button clicks). Note that all of those metrics point to things that benefit website owners, not users.

News sites want more page views and longer page sessions so they can sell more advertising. Business sites get people to download whitepapers or fill out contact forms, generating sales leads. These are marketing websites designed to capture users’ interest. When a user clicks on a call to action, it shows they want to know more about what the site is advertising.

Platforms are more likely than websites to turn users into loyal brand ambassadors because they get something of value in return.

Once someone engages with a digital platform’s content, however, a two-way conversation begins. The goal is not to just push out content, but to ensure the audience interacts with it. That’s why platforms measure engagement in terms of personalization, community building, and loyalty metrics — things that indicate whether the platform is meeting the needs of both owner and users.

Platforms are also more likely than websites to turn users into loyal customers and brand ambassadors. To get someone to be an advocate for your company, they need to get something of value in return. Websites provide information that’s convenient, but users aren’t getting anything personal from the experience. A platform, by contrast, provides a highly personal connection between a business and its audience.

Which One is Right For You?

The answer, as with many things business-related, is that it depends on your goals.

The purpose of a website is to get users to consume content and return to the site to consume more. If you mainly need an informational site that serves as marketing for your business, a website is likely a good fit.

But what if you need more than that? Maybe community-building is important for your business, whether you need the network effects of a large user base (like social media) or you’re looking to increase employee engagement (as with an intranet). If your business goals require truly understanding your users and building meaningful two-way relationships, you need a digital platform.

In the end, it comes down to how much you need to personalize the user experience to support your business goals, and whether the extra engagement will provide a real return on investment. If you’re pushing out content for marketing purposes, go with a website. If personalization and loyalty are core factors in your business success, build a digital platform.

Looking for a partner to build the right platform for your business? Contact us today to learn how we can help.

In the age of hyper-personalization by the likes of Amazon and Netflix, customized user experiences are now table stakes for digital platforms. Businesses that invest in personalization are rewarded with loyalty and revenue. Those that don’t, get left behind.

But making that investment isn’t a straightforward affair. Many services that pitch themselves as personalization tools don’t even come close to creating a truly customized experience. And today’s savvy web users aren’t fooled:

• 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content isn’t personalized.
• 84% of consumers say being treated like a person, not a number, is important to winning their business.

Where we’ve seen businesses stumble is in substituting personification for true personalization. While personalization involves tailoring content based on direct personal information, personification is based on categories of consumers, not individual people.

Here’s what you need to know about the difference.

Perils of Personification

Gartner defines personification as “the delivery of relevant digital experiences to individuals based on their inferred membership in a defined customer segment, rather than their personal identity.” It’s the digital equivalent of calling someone “buddy” or “champ” because you can’t remember their name. I know that I know you, but I don’t know who you are.

Personification tools can track user behavior and use AI to place users into, say, one of several marketing personas you’ve developed. But in terms of driving meaningful, personalized interactions with users, personification falls down.

Here are a few critical issues with commonly used personification tools:

User Session Data

Information about a user’s interactions with an application is stored temporarily on the application’s server, not the browser.

EXAMPLE: During this session, I see that you’ve visited a piece of content that falls in a specific category. For the rest of your session, I can serve up other content tagged with the same category (often in Featured, Related, or You May Also Like sections).

PROBLEM 1: As soon as the browser session is closed, the user data is lost.

PROBLEM 2: The moment you switch from one device (e.g. mobile) to another (e.g. tablet) you lose all session data.

Contextual Data

Marketing automation or location intelligence software can use AI to gather environmental data about a user to deliver customized content or services.

EXAMPLE: I see that you’re in Los Angeles, California. Knowing your local weather, time zone, and other regional attributes, I can tailor the content you see to be more specific to your area.

PROBLEM: I have to ask you first if I can track your location, and you might say no.

First Party Cookie Data

By storing information about a user’s behavior directly on a domain, site owners can collect analytics data and remember language settings, among other functions.

EXAMPLE: Last time you visited my website, you commented on a certain piece of content. I may even have asked, “Do you want to see more of this type of content?” Now that you’re back, I can serve up newly published content of the same type. I can even feature it right on the homepage.

PROBLEM 1: I need to ask you if I can use cookies with you, and you can say no.

PROBLEM 2: If you clear the cookies in your browser, I’ll lose that valuable data.

PROBLEM 3: Another family member is using the same application on the same device, and now I’m getting mixed signals. This is completely messing with my AI.

Bottom line: personification is not really personalization. Even worse, you may lose your data and have to start from square one. To deliver true personalization, you need first-party data from authenticated users. Instead of guessing who your customer is, get to know who they really are.

Next-Level Personalization

True personalization is difficult to achieve outside of a digital platform, where people register as users (versus just casually visiting a website). Once someone becomes an authenticated user, it’s easier to learn a number of things about them.

83% of consumers are willing to share their data to enable personalized experiences. Platform users in particular are more open to providing personal information, because they’re specifically looking for a customized experience. With that first-party data, you can track preferences and interactions to improve the user experience. And you’re not going to lose the historical data when a user closes a session or clears their cookies.

Here are some key benefits:

• I actually know who you are, and over time I can continue to learn more about you and your interests. Plus, I’ll only lose that data if you quit my tool, service, or platform.
• Your data follows you across any devices where you use my application (mobile, tablet, desktop, etc.).
• I can start a two-way conversation with you, so you can tell me how you want to personalize your experience and what kind of content you want to see.
• I can reach out to you with personalized suggestions, driving more engagement and giving you a reason to return more often.
• While you can always say no to first-party cookies if you have privacy concerns, by signing up for my platform, you’re indicating a level of trust and consent.

Looking for Middle Ground?

In the end, you’ll deliver the best personalization (and earn the most engagement) by building an interactive platform and leveraging first-party data. But what if you have a decent website, and you’re not ready to shift to a platform?

You could approach it as a testing ground for personalization instead. By creating a series of micro-interactions using personification tools, you can test whether your users actually want a personalized experience, and if so, what they want to personalize.

Let’s say you’re a news outlet. You could just let people come and read your content online. At the next level, you can try to guess who they are through personification (via cookie requests, location prompts, etc.). If users are interacting with your prompts, it’s likely they’re interested in having a personalized experience.

Finally, you could build a platform for registered users and offer true personalization. You’ll not only deliver a better user experience, you’ll increase engagement and return visits — not to mention sales and other revenue.

At whatever level you can, go the extra mile and give your users what they want. We’re happy to help! Contact us today to learn more.

Not long ago, company intranets were little more than a repository for shared files, general announcements, and the all-important list of holiday office closures. Today, the humble intranet has evolved as a way to enhance internal communication and employee engagement and to help workers do their jobs.

While organizations tend to have more content- and feature-rich intranets these days, many are missing one crucial element: a mobile-optimized version. As a result, they can exclude a large proportion of workers—including the 80% of people who make up today’s Deskless Workforce.

Top “deskless” industries include education, healthcare, retail, hospitality, and transportation, employing many of the frontline workers we all depend on.

One of our own clients, a large hospital system, told us that 70% of their workforce doesn’t sit at a desk, nor do they use a computer every day. And if 70% of their employees can’t easily access the company intranet, they’re not provided equitable access to the same resources as everyone else.

Why Mobile Matters Today

In addition to the challenges of communicating with deskless workers, the rise of remote work and the growing number of Millennials in the workforce are helping to drive an increased demand for mobile-optimized or employee-app versions of intranets.

Consider this: the average American spends more than 5 hours a day on their phone (and it’s almost always within reach). In addition, nearly half of smartphone users access the internet primarily on their phones versus a desktop computer, laptop, or tablet. Those numbers are even higher for Millennials, who currently make up 35% of the US workforce.

Mobile communication plays an essential role in our personal lives. To serve employees, company intranets must offer the same ease-of-use, convenience, and capability to our work lives. The intranet must go beyond the desktop box to where workers are.

The Benefits of an Inclusive Intranet

In addition to facilitating access, mobile technology offers a number of unique benefits that can significantly improve employee engagement and productivity and help reduce frustration.

Here are some of the key benefits of a mobile-optimized intranet:

Real-Time Push Notifications

Imagine there’s an emergency situation in your facility, or an important update that staff need to receive immediately. You can push the information straight to their phone, enabling real-time communication across your workforce. Unlike emails, most push notifications get read within the first 3 minutes after they’re received.

Broader Access for BYOD

As more and more organizations support remote work and flexible schedules—while fewer and fewer provide company smartphones—the “Bring Your Own Device” trend has become more prevalent. Many of today’s employees are using personal devices to access work-related resources and systems. And, as we noted earlier, most of the time that means they’re using a smartphone.

Freedom from Workstations

In some organizations, employees are still sharing desktop workstations that we might charitably describe as “clunky.” It’s inefficient and inconvenient, especially when multiple people have to go out of their way to get to a workspace. A mobile-optimized intranet gives everyone fast and easy access to the same resources, wherever they are.

Two-Way Communication

Intranets have traditionally been top-down communication platforms, focusing primarily on the needs of employers, not employees. Today, companies looking to increase engagement have shifted to a new mindset: communication tools are no longer for talking to employees, but talking with them.

Mobile-optimized platforms and mobile apps help facilitate two-way conversations, especially with features like built-in chatting or social forums where employees can like and comment on posts. This allows companies to have more personalized conversations with employees in addition to collecting valuable, on-the-spot feedback from the front lines.

Remote Doesn’t Feel So Remote

Without regular in-person interaction, remote workers often feel isolated and less engaged. By offering more of an app-like experience with ongoing communication, an intranet can help recreate an environment that fosters idea sharing and boosts morale. It also means that employees who work at home, or don’t have access to a computer, won’t feel uninformed and isolated from the rest of the team.

Better User Experience

If you’re looking to use your intranet as a tool for engagement, you’ll get the best results from an employee app. An app lets you take advantage of mobile-native tools, like location detection and offline access, which let you both customize content and make it more readily available. The improved user experience, speed, and features are the reasons why most people prefer apps to websites.

An Intranet for Everyone

Like many organizations, the purpose of your intranet might be to create a more engaged workforce or improve employee productivity. But if most of your workers either can’t or don’t access the content, you’re not going to achieve your goals.

As cultures, companies, and industries move towards creating more inclusiveness and equity, organizations across the world are looking for ways to meet the needs of their employees. One way to address your team’s needs and expectations is to start by ensuring your internal resources are truly benefiting everyone who relies on them.

In 2023, Oomph’s design for the Lifespan Intranet was selected by the Nielsen Norman Group as one of the Ten Best Intranets globally.

Why are microservices growing in popularity for enterprise-level platforms? For many organizations, a microservice architecture provides a faster and more flexible way to leverage technology to meet evolving business needs. For some leaders, microservices better reflect how they want to structure their teams and processes.

But are microservices the best fit for you?

We’re hearing this question more and more from platform owners across multiple industries as software monoliths become increasingly impractical in today’s fast-paced competitive landscape. However, while microservices offer the agility and flexibility that many organizations are looking for, they’re not right for everyone.

In this article, we’ll cover key factors in deciding whether microservices architecture is the right choice for your platform.

What’s the Difference Between Microservices and Monoliths?

Microservices architecture emerged roughly a decade ago to address the primary limitations of monolithic applications: scale, flexibility, and speed.

Microservices are small, separately deployable, software units that together form a single, larger application. Specific functions are carried out by individual services. For example, if your platform allows users to log in to an account, search for products, and pay online, those functions could be delivered as separate microservices and served up through one user interface (UI).

In monolithic architecture, all of the functions and UI are interconnected in a single, self-contained application. All code is traditionally written in one language and housed in a single codebase, and all functions rely on shared data libraries.

Essentially, with most off-the-shelf monoliths, you get what you get. It may do everything, but not be particularly great at anything. With microservices, by contrast, you can build or cherry-pick optimal applications from the best a given industry has to offer.

Because of their modular nature, microservices make it easier to deploy new functions, scale individual services, and isolate and fix problems. On the other hand, with less complexity and fewer moving parts, monoliths can be cheaper and easier to develop and manage.

So which one is better? As with most things technological, it depends on many factors. Let’s take a look at the benefits and drawbacks of microservices.

Advantages of Microservices Architecture

Companies that embrace microservices see it as a cleaner, faster, and more efficient approach to meeting business needs, such as managing a growing user base, expanding feature sets, and deploying solutions quickly. In fact, there are a number of ways in which microservices beat out monoliths for speed, scale, and agility.

Shorter time to market

Large monolithic applications can take a long time to develop and deploy, anywhere from months to years. That could leave you lagging behind your competitors’ product releases or struggling to respond quickly to user feedback.

By leveraging third-party microservices rather than building your own applications from scratch, you can drastically reduce time to market. And, because the services are compartmentalized, they can be built and deployed independently by smaller, dedicated teams working simultaneously. You also have greater flexibility in finding the right tools for the job: you can choose the best of breed for each service, regardless of technology stack.

Lastly, microservices facilitate the minimum viable product approach. Instead of deploying everything on your wishlist at once, you can roll out core services first and then release subsequent services later.

Faster feature releases

Any changes or updates to monoliths require redeploying the entire application. The bigger a monolith gets, the more time and effort is required for things like updates and new releases.

By contrast, because microservices are independently managed, dedicated teams can iterate at their own pace without disrupting others or taking down the entire system. This means you can deploy new features rapidly and continuously, with little to no risk of impacting other areas of the platform.

This added agility also lets you prioritize and manage feature requests from a business perspective, not a technology perspective. Technology shouldn’t prevent you from making changes that increase user engagement or drive revenue—it should enable those changes.

Affordable scalability

If you need to scale just one service in a monolithic architecture, you’ll have to scale and redeploy the entire application. This can get expensive, and you may not be able to scale in time to satisfy rising demand.

Microservices architecture offers not only greater speed and flexibility, but also potential savings in hosting costs, because you can independently scale any individual service that’s under load. You can also configure a single service to add capability automatically until load need is met, and then scale back to normal capacity.

More support for growth

With microservices architecture, you’re not limited to a UI that’s tethered to your back end. For growing organizations that are continually thinking ahead, this is one of the greatest benefits of microservices architecture.

In the past, websites and mobile apps had completely separate codebases, and launching a mobile app meant developing a whole new application. Today, you just need to develop a mobile UI and connect it to the same service as your website UI. Make updates to the service, and it works across everything.

You have complete control over the UI — what it looks like, how it functions for the customer, etc… You can also test and deploy upgrades without disrupting other services. And, as new forms of data access and usage emerge, you have readily available services that you can use for whatever application suits your needs. Digital signage, voice commands for Alexa… and whatever comes next.

Optimal programming options

Since monolithic applications are tightly coupled and developed with a single stack, all components typically share one programming language and framework. This means any future changes or additions are limited to the choices you make early on, which could cause delays or quality issues in future releases.

Because microservices are loosely coupled and independently deployed, it’s easier to manage diverse datasets and processing requirements. Developers can choose whatever language and storage solution is best suited for each service, without having to coordinate major development efforts with other teams.

Greater resilience

For complex platforms, fault tolerance and isolation are crucial advantages of microservices architecture. There’s less risk of system failure, and it’s easier and faster to fix problems.

In monolithic applications, even just one bug affecting one tiny part of a single feature can cause problems in an unrelated area—or crash the entire application. Any time you make a change to a monolithic application, it introduces risk. With microservices, if one service fails, it’s unlikely to bring others down with it. You’ll have reduced functionality in a specific capacity, not the whole system.

Microservices also make it easier to locate and isolate issues, because you can limit the search to a single software module. Whereas in monoliths, given the possible chain of faults, it’s hard to isolate the root cause of problems or predict the outcome of any changes to the codebase.

Monoliths thus make it difficult and time-consuming to recover from failures, especially since, once an issue has been isolated and resolved, you still have to rebuild and redeploy the entire application. Since microservices allow developers to fix problems or roll back buggy updates in just one service, you’ll see a shorter time to resolution.

Faster onboarding

With smaller, independent code bases, microservices make it faster and easier to onboard new team members. Unlike with monoliths, new developers don’t have to understand how every service works or all the interdependencies at play in the system.

This means you won’t have to scour the internet looking for candidates who can code in the only language you’re using, or spend time training them in all the details of your codebase. Chances are, you’ll find new hires more easily and put them to work faster.

Easier updates

As consumer expectations for digital experiences evolve over time, applications need to be updated or upgraded to meet them. Large monolithic applications are generally difficult, and expensive, to upgrade from one version to the next.

Because third-party app owners build and pay for their own updates, with microservices there’s no need to maintain or enhance every tool in your system. For instance, you get to let Stripe perfect its payment processing service while you leverage the new features. You don’t have to pay for future improvements, and you don’t need anyone on staff to be an expert in payment processing and security.

Disadvantages of Microservices Architecture

Do microservices win in every circumstance? Absolutely not. Monoliths can be a more cost-effective, less complicated, and less risky solution for many applications. Below are a few potential downsides of microservices.

Extra complexity

With more moving parts than monolithic applications, microservices may require additional effort, planning, and automation to ensure smooth deployment. Individual services must cooperate to create a working application, but the inherent separation between teams could make it difficult to create a cohesive end product.

Development teams may have to handle multiple programming languages and frameworks. And, with each service having its own database and data storage system, data consistency could be a challenge.

Also, when you choose to leverage numerous 3rd party services, this creates more network connections as well as more opportunities for latency and connectivity issues in your architecture.

Difficulty in monitoring

Given the complexity of microservices architecture and the interdependencies that may exist among applications, it’s more challenging to test and monitor the entire system. Each microservice requires individualized testing and monitoring.

You could build automated testing scripts to ensure individual applications are always up and running, but this adds time and complexity to system maintenance.

Added external risks

There are always risks when using third-party applications, in terms of both performance and security. The more microservices you employ, the more possible points of failure exist that you don’t directly control.

In addition, with multiple independent containers, you’re exposing more of your system to potential attackers. Those distributed services need to talk to one another, and a high number of inter-service network communications can create opportunities for outside entities to access your system.

On an upside, the containerized nature of microservices architecture prevents security threats in one service from compromising other system components. As we noted in the advantages section above, it’s also easier to track down the root cause of a security issue.

Potential culture changes

Microservices architecture usually works best in organizations that employ a DevOps-first approach, where independent clusters of development and operations teams work together across the lifecycle of an individual service. This structure can make teams more productive and agile in bringing solutions to market. But, at an organizational level, it requires a broader skill set for developing, deploying, and monitoring each individual application.

A DevOps-first culture also means decentralizing decision-making power, shifting it from project teams to a shared responsibility among teams and DevOps engineers. The goal is to ensure that a given microservice meets a solution’s technical requirements and can be supported in the architecture in terms of security, stability, auditing, etc…

3 Paths Toward Microservices Transformation

In general, there are three different approaches to developing a microservices architecture:

1. Deconstruct a monolith

This kind of approach is most common for large enterprise applications, and it can be a massive undertaking. Take Airbnb, for instance: several years ago, the company migrated from a monolith architecture to a service-oriented architecture incorporating microservices. Features such as search, reservations, messaging, and checkout were broken down into one or more individual services, enabling each service to be built, deployed, and scaled independently.

In most cases, it’s not just the monolith that becomes decentralized. Organizations will often break up their development group, creating smaller, independent teams that are responsible for developing, testing, and deploying individual applications.

2. Leverage PBCs

Packaged Business Capabilities, or PBCs, are essentially autonomous collections of microservices that deliver a specific business capability. This approach is often used to create best-of-breed solutions, where many services are third-party tools that talk to each other via APIs.

PBCs can stand alone or serve as the building blocks of larger app suites. Keep in mind, adding multiple microservices or packaged services can drive up costs as the complexity of integration increases.

3. Combine both types

Small monoliths can be a cost-effective solution for simple applications with limited feature sets. If that applies to your business, you may want to build a custom app with a monolithic architecture.

However, there are likely some services, such as payment processing, that you don’t want to have to build yourself. In that case, it often makes sense to build a monolith and incorporate a microservice for any features that would be too costly or complex to tackle in-house.

A Few Words of Caution

Even though they’re called “microservices”, be careful not to get too small. If you break services down into many tiny applications, you may end up creating an overly complex application with excessive overhead. Lots of micro-micro services can easily become too much to maintain over time, with too many teams and people managing different pieces of an application.

Given the added complexity and potential costs of microservices, for smaller platforms with only one UI it may be best to start with a monolithic application and slowly add microservices as you need them. Start at a high level and zoom in over time, looking for specific functions you can optimize to make you stand out.

Lastly, choose your third party services with care. It’s not just about the features; you also need to consider what the costs might look like if you need to scale a particular service.

Final Thoughts: Micro or Mono?

Still trying to decide which architecture is right for your platform? Here are some of the most common scenarios we encounter with clients:

1. If time to market is the most important consideration, then leveraging 3rd party microservices is usually the fastest way to build out a platform or deliver new features.
2. If some aspect of what you’re doing is custom, then consider starting with a monolith and either building custom services or using 3rd parties for areas that will help suit a particular need.
3. If you don’t have a ton of money, and you need to get something up quick and dirty, then consider starting with a monolith and splitting it up later.

Here at Oomph, we understand that enterprise-level software is an enormous investment and a fundamental part of your business. Your choice of architecture can impact everything from overhead to operations. That’s why we take the time to understand your business goals, today and down the road, to help you choose the best fit for your needs.

We’d love to hear more about your vision for a digital platform. Contact us today to talk about how we can help.