April 2022 Summaries

Agile ecommerce is a reality today, offering flexibility and adaptability in a rapidly changing world, allowing businesses to test concepts, iterate quickly, and deliver new use cases easily. This approach has become more accepted due to the willingness to experiment, learn from failure, and adapt, which is now encouraged by modern tools that enable rapid testing and iteration. Legacy systems are often cited as the main challenge for customers, with inflexibility, suboptimal end-user experiences, and technical constraints being major issues. The role of headless technology in accelerating and freeing frontend development is also highlighted. When it comes to building a personalized experience, content platforms like Contentful can help by integrating with personalization vendors and allowing non-technical users to create and tag content for use in these technologies. Ultimately, the future of agile ecommerce will likely involve sandbox-style experimentation, flexible systems that can adapt to new channels and innovations, and a focus on utility and value delivered to users.

We are excited to announce the release of tables for Rich Text fields in Contentful, a content platform that powers many digital experiences and important information exchanges. The new feature aims to continuously improve the customer experience by providing useful information and communicating it clearly, allowing users to create and manage tables with ease, including adding rows and columns, copying and pasting from other tools, adding header rows, formatting text, adding hyperlinks, and embedding entries. This update addresses accessibility concerns by making tables more user-friendly for content creators, developers, and editors, and provides a dedicated Contentful Learning Center module for those who plan to use tables extensively in their content. The feature is now enabled by default for new Rich Text content types, and users can navigate to the properties of the Rich Text field to enable tables. With this release, Contentful aims to streamline information presentation and make it easier to break up long-winded text, while also expanding client libraries for tables to support them across key frontend languages.

The concept of systems thinking is rooted in the idea that complex phenomena are products of the interactions between their parts, and it encourages approaching systems as complex organisms where individual elements within are part of the whole. This perspective expands problem-solving to holistic overviews of entire ecosystems and supports disciplines such as digital experiences by recognizing interconnections and understanding feedback. Systems thinking has been instrumental in reevaluating traditional approaches to digital products and experiences, particularly with the emergence of design systems which codify and scale decision-making to promote good design and content. It is also closely related to other concepts like structured content and the iceberg model, which can help identify and address issues within a system by looking at its underlying structure and mental level assumptions. By adopting a systems thinking approach, individuals can foster collaboration, innovation, and scalability in their work, and it has been applied successfully in various fields including design, engineering, and content creation.

The world is rapidly changing, and companies need various channels to advertise their new ideas, products, and niches. To handle this, a single source of truth for all outreach is needed, which Contentful can provide. However, websites have struggled to keep up with the pace of the world they operate in, especially when it comes to production speed. Companies rely on professional digital agencies to craft custom-built websites that can engage customers long-term. When hiring an agency, teams face numerous choices, including whether to use a content management system (CMS) or a static-site generator for their web development project. A headless CMS like Contentful can provide an easy editing interface for content that can be easily consumed by static-site generators, offering the best of both worlds. The team at Jung von Matt TECH has developed the Web Enterprise Kit (WEKit), which combines Contentful and Hugo to simplify the process of setting up a project and implementing unique features. WEKit offers built-in support for Storybook, Netlify, and provides a solid foundation for developers to build upon, ensuring a fast and user-friendly experience for customers.

Ecommerce has evolved into a vibrant, omnichannel experience that delights customers and builds brand loyalty. Retailers are pushing the bar higher by experimenting with emerging technologies like mobile devices, AR/VR, voice-controlled devices, and AI-enhanced chatbots. To stay competitive, retailers must deliver a consistent brand experience across channels and devices, using a unified content hub to ensure accuracy and consistency in their digital portfolio. Understanding customer and market trends is also crucial before experimenting with new trends and technologies.

As a designer at Contentful, the author aimed to bring more personality and life into the product experience by championing "delight", a concept that refers to features that exceed customer expectations and create positive emotions. The Kano model explains how delight impacts products, with basic features being expected by customers and delightful features standing out as nice surprises. To apply this concept, the author created a delight scale to guide designers in incorporating delight into their solutions, including microinteractions, error messages, success messages, empty states, general loading states, and special loading states. Contentful uses delight to apologize for negative experiences, amplify positive ones, or distract from waiting, and has developed a new loading state that reflects the brand personality and provides feedback on page loading times. The author emphasizes the importance of minimizing cognitive load, using anticipatory design, simplified copy, meaningful imagery, and making good decisions easy to create delightful user experiences.

At Contentful, they've launched a new Developer Learning Path to help developers get started quickly with their content platform. The path is designed to be accessible and hands-on, giving developers the basics they need to start building their first Contentful app straight away. It includes two courses: Intro to Contentful for Developers, which covers the basics of developing with Contentful, and a second course that shifts gears and starts managing projects with code. The path uses a project-based approach with short lessons, interactive modules, videos, and knowledge checks, making it easy for developers to learn by doing. Anyone with a Contentful account can sign up for the Developer Learning Path, which is perfect for developers who want to get up to speed with Contentful quickly and jump-start their first project. The path also includes additional resources and support from the developer community and extensive documentation.

Your website visitors expect a precise and fast search experience to find relevant content, as anything less can lead to frustrated users and lost conversions. Visitors who utilize the site's search are 1.8 times more likely to convert, while up to 30% of revenue comes from onsite search. To continuously fine-tune the user search experience, it's essential to know what you're looking for and have easy access to relevant search analytics. The top website search KPIs include click-through rate (CTR), no result searches, searches per session, average click position, and most clicked items. Improving these metrics can lead to a better search experience, increased conversions, and revenue growth. By understanding your website's search performance and making incremental improvements, you can deliver a more effective search experience for all users.

Published on April 5, 2022, the Jamstack has evolved beyond its initial meaning of JavaScript, APIs, and pre-rendered Markup, focusing on building for the web without server-side rendering. The approach now allows for defining URLs that should be pre-rendered in the build process and generating the rest lazily when requested. Netlify's On-demand Builders are serverless functions used to generate web content as needed, automatically cached on Netlify's Edge CDN. This technology enables the creation of a site with an unlimited number of pages depending on URL parameters, such as Goofy Postcard, which uses Contentful as its platform powering the unlimited numbers of generated and cached HTML pages. The project demonstrates how to set up a site that renders content on the fly for faster builds using Jamstack principles and Netlify's On-demand Builders.