You may have heard the old adage, “A website is never done.” Even the best digital platforms go through multiple rounds of changes, updates, and a complete overhaul now and then. Because even if your platform is already good, there’s always something you can do to improve the user experience and better support your business goals.

The key is figuring out which changes truly result in improvements, and which are a waste of your money and time.

Why You Need A/B Testing

Here are a few use cases where A/B testing can deliver crucial info:

Whatever the business case, you must understand how users interact with your platform and how its features impact their experience, in order to make informed decisions about platform design and content.

Too often, companies evaluate changes with internal stakeholders instead of real users. In the end, you may go through a lot of development work without knowing if the changes you’re making will result in something impactful. Instead, with less time and fewer resources, __you can use A/B testing with your actual audience to find out definitively what’s effective and what’s not. __

How A/B Testing Helps Your Platform

In addition to helping maximize the effectiveness and minimize the resources invested in platform redesign, A/B testing provides invaluable short- and long-term benefits:

Increase Conversions

Probably the number-one goal for most redesign efforts, increasing conversion rate is one of the most robust uses of A/B testing. Rather than guessing at what makes users complete a registration form or take a desired action, you get hard data to confirm whether a change truly produces a lift in conversions.

Improve User Engagement & Retention

Bounce rate is often a key indicator of user experience and can have a significant impact on your conversion goals. Testing multiple elements of a particular page can help you find visitor pain points and improve their overall experience, ultimately getting them to spend more time on your site.

Learn About Your Audience

By progressively testing which elements your users gravitate to (or from), you can learn a little more about your audience at each step, and then use that data to inform future design and content.

Road-Test New Features

Before you introduce a new feature, launching it as an A/B test can show how your audience is likely to react. You’ll get hard and fast data in a real-world environment with less risk.

Personalize User Experiences

You can use A/B testing as a way to identify steps toward platform personalization, to understand which forms of personalization could potentially increase user engagement.

What Should You Test?

A/B testing can be used for everything from full page designs to single content elements. Even small and simple changes can significantly impact the user experience and, consequently, your engagement and conversion rates.

When Humana A/B tested a website banner, the version with pared-down copy and a different photo increased click-throughs by 433 percent! In a second test, changing the call-to-action (CTA) copy increased click-throughs by a further 192 percent, showing that even subtle word changes can boost engagement.

How do you figure out what to test? Examining quantitative or qualitative data will help you identify potential pain points and give you a basis for experimentation. Maybe your homepage has an unusually high bounce rate, or users are providing negative feedback on your sign up process. Once you’ve identified an issue, form a hypothesis to test: define a problem, propose a solution, and identify metrics for success or failure.

Whatever you include in your testing plan, focus on things that are most likely to impact the metric you’re trying to improve. For instance, if you want to increase conversion rate, you might test the design or placement of a CTA.

Here are some commonly tested elements:

One caution: if you’re testing multiple elements simultaneously, make sure they’re distinct enough that they don’t affect each other and impact the results of each test. Your results should be related only to the options you’re presenting, so there’s a clear understanding of what exactly is influencing your audience.

One Last Word of Advice

In the end, one form of testing alone is never a panacea for improving your platform. While A/B testing provides valuable data, it has limitations, too. Most importantly, unlike qualitative analysis, it doesn’t explain the why behind your measured results. Also, the data produced is only relevant to the specific area you’re testing, versus open-ended user testing that could surface other challenges hindering your platform’s performance.

That’s why qualitative feedback is still vitally important for your site — it surfaces things you can’t learn from numbers alone (like a user not finding you trustworthy or credible). A/B testing can give you relatively quick and easy ways to improve your user experience, but it doesn’t give you every answer you need.

Your business never stands still, and your audience is always evolving and changing. We’re here to help you keep looking forward. Contact us today to talk about optimizing your platform experience.

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:

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:

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.

While the terminology was first spotlighted by IBM back in 2014, the concept of a composable business has recently gained much traction, thanks in large part to the global pandemic. Today, organizations are combining more agile business models with flexible digital architecture, to adapt to the ever-evolving needs of their company and their customers.

Here’s a high-level look at building a composable business.

What is a Composable Business?

The term “composable” encompasses a mindset, technology, and processes that enable organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs.

A composable business is like a collection of interchangeable building blocks (think: Lego) that can be added, rearranged, and jettisoned as needed. Compare that with an inflexible, monolithic organization that’s slow and difficult to evolve (think: cinderblock). By assembling and reassembling various elements, composable businesses can respond quickly to market shifts.

Gartner offers four principles of composable business:

These four principles shape the business architecture and technology that support composability. From structural capabilities to digital applications, composable businesses rely on tools for today and tomorrow.

So, how do you get there?

Start With a Composable Mindset…

A composable mindset involves thinking about what could happen in the future, predicting what your business may need, and designing a flexible architecture to meet those needs. Essentially, it’s about embracing a modular philosophy and preparing for multiple possible futures.

Where do you begin? Research by Gartner suggests the first step in transitioning to a composable enterprise is to define a longer-term vision of composability for your business. Ask forward-thinking questions, such as:

These kinds of questions provide insights into the market forces that will impact your business, helping you prepare for multiple futures. But you also need to adopt a modular philosophy, thinking about all the assets in your organization — every bit of data, every process, every application — as the building blocks of your composable business.

…Then Leverage Composable Technology

A long-term vision helps create purpose and structure for a composable business. Technology is the tools that bring it to life. Composable technology begets sustainable business architectures, ready to address the challenges of the future, not the past.

For many organizations, the shift to composability means evolving from an inflexible, monolithic digital architecture to a modular application portfolio. The portfolio is made up of packaged business capabilities, or PBCs, which form the foundation of composable technology.

The ABCs of PBCs

PBCs are software components that provide specific business capabilities. Although similar in some respects to microservices, PBCs address more than technological needs. While a specific application may leverage a microservice to provide a feature, when that feature represents a business capability beyond just the application at hand, it is a PBC.

Because PBCs can be curated, assembled, and reassembled as needed, you can adapt your technology practically at the pace of business change. You can also experiment with different services, shed things that aren’t working, and plug in new options without disrupting your entire ecosystem.

When building an application portfolio with PBCs, the key is to identify the capabilities your business needs to be flexible and resilient. What are the foundational elements of your long-term vision? Your target architecture should drive the business outcomes that support your strategic goals.

Build or Buy?

PBCs can either be developed internally or sourced from third parties. Vendors may include traditional packaged-software vendors and nontraditional parties, such as global service integrators or financial services companies.

When deciding whether to build or buy a PBC, consider whether your target capability is unique to your business. For example, a CMS is something many businesses need, and thus it’s a readily available PBC that can be more cost-effective to buy. But if, through vendor selection, you find that your particular needs are unique, you may want to invest in building your own.

Real-World Example

While building a new member retention platform for a large health insurer, we discovered a need to quickly look up member status during the onboarding process. Because the company had a unique way of identifying members, it required building custom software.

Although initially conceived in the context of the platform being created, a composable mindset led to the development of a standalone, API-first service — a true PBC providing member lookup capability to applications across the organization, and waiting to serve the applications of the future.

A Final Word

Disruption is here to stay. While you can’t predict every major shift, innovation, or crisis that will impact your organization, you can (almost) future-proof your business with a composabile approach.

Start with the mindset, lay out a roadmap, and then design a step-by-step program for digital transformation. The beauty of an API-led approach is that you can slowly but surely transform your technology, piece by piece.

If you’re interested in exploring a shift to composability, we’d love to help. Contact us today to talk about your options.

Second chances are expensive. Why? Because it takes five positive experiences to counterbalance the effects of a negative one. If someone’s first experience with your platform is disappointing, you have a long way to go to win back their confidence — if they even complete your sign-up form.

More than 67% of site visitors will completely abandon a sign-up process if they encounter any complications. If you’re lucky, maybe 20% of them will follow up with your company in some way. Whether you’re trying to get people to sign up for your mobile app, e-commerce platform, or company intranet, you must make the process as seamless as possible.

Here are six tips to reduce sign-up friction for your platform.

1. Use a Single Sign On Service

This is crucial for larger platforms that are part of a vast ecosystem with multiple logins, like a complex hospital platform providing access to multiple systems. On the other hand, for a basic paywall, you may want to manage user info yourself. The key is to think strategically about what your systems may look like down the road and how unwieldy your sign-up process may become.

Here are a few things to consider:

Pros

Cons

In the end, the advantages of SSO significantly outweigh the downsides. But you’ll likely need expert guidance when planning and implementing SSO to ensure you reap the benefits while minimizing the risks.

2. Keep It Short

More than a quarter of users who abandon online forms do so because they’re too long. To maximize the number of sign-ups, minimize the steps involved.

How do you decide which fields to keep? Try asking, “If I didn’t have this piece of information, would I still be able to provide a good customer experience?” If it’s something you don’t really need to know, then don’t ask.

Here are two more ways to shorten form length:

3. Use a Single Column Layout

In general, your form should adhere to this core UX principle:

Make the user experience smoother, faster, and better; not messier, slower, and worse.

The simpler the flow of your form, the faster and easier it feels to fill out. Here are a few tips:

4. Play Nice with Autofill

Nothing makes our sanguine CEO spout expletives faster than a platform that doesn’t allow browser-suggested passwords. While many of those suggested passwords are long strings of characters saved securely to the browser, the letter/number/special character combination may not meet your platform’s arbitrary standards.

In addition, some accessibility checkers will flag fields where autofill is turned off, indicating a possible issue for people with disabilities.

Here are a few more ways to make the experience smoother:

And, don’t forget to test the autofill function on both a desktop and phone — the experience can be very different between the two.

5. Allow Guest Checkout for eCommerce

To put it bluntly, don’t get in the way of someone spending money on your site. Instead, make it easy to open an account just by creating a password. Or, create a new user account automatically with the info you have, then send users an email with instructions on how to finalize the sign-up process.

What we’ve seen work well: after a successful shopping experience, follow up with an email to the customer that sells the benefits of having an account and asks if they would like to activate theirs.

6. Don’t Use a CAPTCHA

That’s right, we said it. It’s time to get rid of CAPTCHA on your sign-up form. Here are three good reasons why:

Instead, confirm any new account the tried-and-true way: with an email to the registered address. And consider if there are ways to clean up your security features on the back end, instead of presenting barriers to customers upon sign-up.

Don’t put the onus on the people who are trying to give you money. Put it on your systems instead.

You Only Get a First Impression Once

As the gateway to onboarding users, the sign-up process is the most crucial piece of your user experience to get right. Whether your goal is to acquire and retain customers, or to engage and inform employees, your success depends on getting your target audience past the initial sign-up hurdle. If their first task is difficult, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the experience.

Don’t let your sales and marketing be better than your user onboarding. Once someone has decided your platform offers what they need, you’re more than halfway to converting them into a user. Just make sure your sign-up process lives up to your marketing promises.

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.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. It’s true for your business, and it’s true for your digital platform. Yet we’ve seen organizations from startups to enterprises neglect to incorporate measurement into their platform strategy.

Data shows you what is and isn’t working in your platform. And, unlike most websites, platforms provide detailed information about known users across specific touchpoints — accurate, first-party data that doesn’t rely on cookies or fuzzy analytics. Actionable insights await; you just have to know what you’re measuring for.

Here’s how to take a strategic approach to measuring platform performance.

Start From the Top

Measuring the success of your platform involves the same general principles used in strategic planning. Start from the top and work your way down:

Once you define your platform’s core purpose, you can identify which metrics to track. Just make sure that if you move the needle on those metrics, you’re truly moving the needle for your business.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you run a healthcare system whose primary goal is to save lives. To meet that goal, your employees need speedy access to your procedures for patient care. So, you build an intranet platform in order to provide the fastest possible access to that critical information. Your core purpose is to make sure this information is as easy to find as possible, so employees have critical information at critical moments.

What Should You Measure?

You’ve identified your platform’s core purpose. Next question is, what is the core interaction your platform relies on to achieve that purpose? What’s the single most important thing you need users to do? That action determines how you define an “active” platform user, and it’s the key driver for what you should measure.

Just like with social media, where the term “monthly active users” is widely used but has many different meanings, business platforms often have unique definitions of an active user. A company intranet focused on employee engagement might define an active user as someone who posts content a certain number of times per month. A business platform offering exclusive deals to attract new customers might define an active user as a customer who redeems at least one deal per year.

Whatever your platform’s purpose is, you need to be tracking metrics related to your definition of an active user, in order to optimize the core interaction that drives your business goals.

Examples of Useful Metrics

Before we dive into the list, there’s a caveat: Just because you can measure a ton of metrics doesn’t mean you should. Too much data can be distracting, and paying attention to too many metrics can create confusion and cause analysis paralysis. The goal of measurement isn’t to manage a dashboard; it’s to make decisions and take actions that drive positive business outcomes.

Choose a primary goal, define a core objective and active user, and aim for up to five core metrics to measure success. Here are some examples:

Growth

If your business goals depend on having a large number of platform users, you might use one of the following growth measures:

Reach

This is useful for platforms where you’re looking to engage a certain proportion of a population, such as your employees or your customer base. You might track:

Engagement

Engagement covers a lot of ground, and it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Focus on the metrics that tell you how people are responding to your efforts to engage them at various touchpoints. Here are some examples:

Begin at the Beginning

It’s a mistake to think about measurement only after you’ve built your platform. Remember, platform measurement isn’t as easy as dropping in base Google Analytics code. Platform metrics are deep and nuanced, so you need to think strategically from the start. Plan the key metrics up front, and incorporate measurement into your platform roadmap from the beginning.

Your game plan, in a nutshell:

  1. Decide what to measure
  2. Implement tracking capabilities
  3. Measure platform performance
  4. Analyze the results and find actionable insights
  5. Make decisions: what’s working, and what needs to change?

Establishing measurement practices early on enables you to continually track, analyze, and optimize performance over the life of your platform. Already launched? Fear not. It’s never too late to implement measurement techniques to optimize platform performance.

If you’re thinking about how to be more strategic with platform measurement, we’d love to help. Feel free to reach out with any questions you have.

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.

THE BRIEF

Wingspans’ primary audience is digital natives — young, tech-savvy users who expect fast, frictionless interactions and relevant content. Fail to deliver, and they’ll abandon you in a heartbeat.

The new platform needed to provide a scalable, flexible foundation for a range of content and tools being developed by the Wingspans team. We had to turn a collection of disparate pieces — story content, user data, school information, and more — into a cohesive digital framework that could grow and evolve. Above all, Wingspans needed a design-first approach, wrapping the educational aspects in an intuitive, engaging digital experience.

THE APPROACH

While storytelling formed the heart of the Wingspans platform, the site’s interactive features would be crucial for getting students to explore and engage with the content. Building on Lindsay’s familiarity with the educational market, we mapped out the content architecture, workflows, and functions for a host of interactive features to keep students engaged.

For the tech stack, we turned to a mix of microservices to provide a stable, flexible, and scalable architecture with lightning-fast performance. These included a Gatsby front end, Firebase database, AWS cloud storage, Algolia site search, Cosmic JS content management system, and more. We also worked to ensure the technology reflected Lindsay’s empathy-driven approach. For instance, we customized Algolia to deliver search results specifically tailored to a student’s profile and interests—in other words, an encyclopedia that understood its users and presented its information in a distinctly human way.

THE RESULTS

The platform’s most impactful feature is how easily students can find and bookmark career stories that resonate with who they are. With over 700 stories and 40 mini-documentaries available, each with an associated set of lessons, the site’s personalized search function and ultrafast content delivery are key. On the backend, the customized CMS and robust content architecture make it easy for the Wingspans team to align content with users’ profiles and browsing activity.

Bringing it all together, the Career Builder feature lets students select stories and content to create a customized career roadmap that they can share with parents, teachers, and counselors. A core element of the platform’s personalized user experience, the Career Builder brings Wingspans’ central premise to life: If you can see it, you can be it.

Oomph really fulfilled their commitment to building an immersive and radically personal platform that brought my vision to life.

— Lindsay Kuhn, Wingspans Founder and CEO

It would be an understatement and incredibly obvious to state that a lot has changed in the past 6 months — for our client teams and our own. Our clients saw their needs radically shift from long-term, strategically-planned projects to communication efforts and new tools that needed to go live as quickly as possible.

For some projects, the first deliverable was rather bare-bones. It was more important to deliver something small but useful and then iterate from there. Perfection would have to wait.

Virtual replacements for in-person experiences

Virtual campus visits

This spring was tough for colleges and universities. All of a sudden, those currently enrolled had to go home and those in the middle of choosing their school had to postpone their travel plans. Schools had to quickly spin up a way for these young folks and their parents to get virtual tours and as much of that in-person experience as possible.

Through a quick collaborative process, our team and Web Services at Saint Anselm College brainstormed ideas that were both quick to implement and had high value. We then built a version of these ideas in 2 weeks to deliver a new Campus Tour site for the Admissions Department. It was a stand-alone, static HTML/CSS/JS site with no CMS — but it was quick to implement and easy for our developer to make content updates. Parents and prospective students had the access they needed for virtual campus visits.

Virtual student art exhibitions

For art students, senior year exhibitions are the culmination of all their hard and an opportunity to celebrate together with teachers, peers, and family. This year, that could not happen.

To give students an opportunity to showcase their portfolio, an online exhibition experience needed to be created. To do this, the Rhode Island School of Design was able to build upon a project Oomph had created for the RISD Museum late last year. Again, through some quick brainstorming sessions, our team was able to plan additions to the existing platform that could make it the perfect tool to support graduate and undergraduate student exhibitions. These additions were made in a 6-week turnaround, including the time it took for Museum staff to assist department heads and students in creating 270+ graduate and 450+ undergraduate exhibitions.

On launch day, the departments hosted virtual opening parties and the hosting environment from our hosting partner Acquia handled the load with ease — thousands of attendees from 60 countries. In some ways, the opening events were more widespread, reaching families, friends, and strangers that may not have been able to travel to an event even before the pandemic hit.

Virtual open enrollment

In the healthcare space, this fall presented a challenge for a leading national health insurer who needed to inform its Medicare customers about their plan updates and options. The high risk group of people 65 years and older are eligible for Medicare, so in-person services that had been available in previous years could not be used. Not only would their new-found Facetime skills be used to keep in touch with friends and family, they would now help them sign up for Medicare as well.

The client team and Oomph began to map out how to support this population with a redesign of online tools and user journeys. Our team had to quickly gain an understanding of their multichannel efforts to drive traffic via email, radio, TV, and transportation advertising, as well as direct mail and email to existing customers.

We prototyped an experience quickly, iterated on it, had many parts of their organization weigh in on the proposed solution, and assisted in the build process. In just 8 weeks from discovery to launch, we had a functioning experience guiding customers through affirming their current plan, making changes according to their needs, scheduling video calls with support and sales staff, and attending virtual town hall events to get a better understanding of which plan is right for them. The tool launched October 1, so results are preliminary, but early engagement, retention, and sales volume metrics are very positive.

Ready for the unknown, ready for the unexpected

This pandemic has separated the flexible and adaptable organizations from the rigid and the slow to change. Those that have the vision to release an imperfect but working product to the world while constantly iterating and improving are the ones that will continue to succeed. We have worked diligently to support these organizations — we share in their goals. we care about the communities they serve, and we want them to succeed. We are proud to support our family of lifetime clients.

THE BRIEF

The RISD Museum publishes a document for every exhibition in the museum. Most of them are scholarly essays about the historical context around a body of work. Some of them are interviews with the artist or a peek into the process behind the art. Until very recently, they have not had a web component.

The time, energy, and investment in creating a print publication was becoming unsustainable. The limitations of the printed page in a media-driven culture are a large drawback as well. For the last printed exhibition publication, the Museum created a one-off web experience — but that was not scalable.

The Museum was ready for a modern publishing platform that could be a visually-driven experience, not one that would require coding knowledge. They needed an authoring tool that emphasized time-based media — audio and video — to immediately set it apart from printed publications of their past. They needed a visual framework that could scale and produce a publication with 4 objects or one with 400.

A sample of printed publications that were used for inspiration for variation and approach.

THE APPROACH

A Flexible Design System

Ziggurat was born of two parents — Oomph provided the design system architecture and the programmatic visual options while RISD provided creative inspiration. Each team influenced the other to make a very flexible system that would allow any story to work within its boundaries. Multimedia was part of the core experience — sound and video are integral to expressing some of these stories.

The process of talking, architecting, designing, then building, then using the tool, then tweaking the tool pushed and pulled both teams into interesting places. As architects, we started to get very excited by what we saw their team doing with the tool. The original design ideas that provided the inspiration got so much better once they became animated and interactive.

Design/content options include:

  • Multiple responsive column patterns inside row containers
  • Additionally, text fields have the ability to display as multiple columns
  • “Hero” rows where an image is the primary design driver, and text/headline is secondary. Video heroes are possible
  • Up to 10-colors to be used as row backgrounds or text colors
  • Choose typefaces from Google Fonts for injection publication-wide or override on a page-by-page basis
  • Rich text options for heading, pull-quotes, and text colors
  • Video, audio, image, and gallery support inside any size container
  • Video and audio player controls in a light or dark theme
  • Autoplaying videos (where browsers allow) while muted
  • Images optionally have the ability to Zoom in place (hover or touch the image to see the image scale by 200%) or open more

There are 8 chapters total in RAID the Icebox Now and four supporting pages. For those that know library systems and scholarly publications, notice the Citations and credits for each chapter. A few liberally use the footnote system. Each page in this publication is rich with content, both written and visual.

RAPID RESPONSE

An Unexpected Solution to a New Problem

The story does not end with the first successful online museum publication. In March of 2020, COVID-19 gripped the nation and colleges cut their semesters short or moved classes online. Students who would normally have an in-person end-of-year exhibition in the museum no longer had the opportunity.

Spurred on by the Museum, the university invested in upgrades to the Publication platform that could support 300+ new authors in the system (students) and specialized permissions to limit access only to their own content. A few new features were fast-tracked and an innovative ability for some authors to add custom javascript to Department landing pages opened the platform up for experimentation. The result was two online exhibitions that went into effect 6 weeks after the concepts were approved — one for 270+ graduate students and one for 450+ undergraduates.