Insights
Change Can Spark Great Design: We Just Made the Biggest Change Ever
There’s a principle in design thinking called reframing. The idea is that by recontextualizing problems we can arrive at more innovative solutions. In other words, sometimes we’re coming up with solutions to the wrong questions. If we take a step back and consider what’s really going on in a given situation, we can often uncover

In Era of Artificial Intelligence, Empathic Design Matters More Than Ever
With the rapid expansion of new technologies like AI, we can see in human beings a fascinating desire for technology to do human things. We’ve moved far beyond assembly line robots putting rivets into car panels or picking items off a shelf. Where machines once took over rote and physically demanding tasks, we now have

5 Healthcare Digital Design Best Practices for Seniors and Caregivers
At ExpandTheRoom, we’ve partnered with many organizations in the healthcare space, and we’ve done a lot of research specifically on healthcare for older adults and their caregivers. We’ve worked with VNS Health, a home and community care organization based in New York, for nearly a decade. We’ve also worked with Commonwealth Care Alliance, a mission-driven

ETR and Infinum Sponsor the Billion Oyster Party in New York City
The Billion Oyster Project’s annual event, which took place during New York Climate Week, was the perfect occasion to celebrate our recent union with Infinum while promoting sustainability as our shared value. ExpandTheRoom has been involved with the Billion Oyster Project since its earliest days, and it’s been thrilling to see their ever-growing impact as

First Impressions Matter if You Want to Make a Website Credible
Humans make incredibly fast decisions. Research has shown that it takes roughly 50 milliseconds (about 0.05 seconds) for people to form their opinion of your website. And, of course, technology is making it increasingly easier for humans to act on these opinions. Just click, tap, swipe, or blurt out “Alexa, off!” and it can quickly

Why Surprise & Delight in Design Matter More Than Ever
Twenty years ago, when ETR was getting started, putting together a beautiful website that functioned seamlessly was far from a given. You could do fewer things with code or design programs. Creating animations was complex work, and they were a bandwidth hog. Good hosting wasn’t always easy to find. Consumers had weak internet connections that

Why Stakeholder Interviews Are a Critical Part of UX Research
At more established or traditional companies, websites are typically the marketing department’s responsibility. But that doesn’t mean the marketing team alone has all the knowledge needed to create and maintain effective websites. While marketing leaders will likely continue to have primary ownership over company websites, it is a mistake to think that the marketing team

How to Improve the Success Rate of Your Website Content Migration
If your company has a website, there will come a time when you’ll want to redesign or replatform. It’s not a matter of if this will happen, but when. Because in digital nothing stays the same for long. When that happens, you’ll be faced with a content migration: the transfer of your assets (copy, images,

5 Ways We’re Using Artificial Intelligence as a Web Design Agency Right Now
We are testing the many tools powered by A.I. that have arrived recently in order to see how they could help improve our processes.

Making More of Your Data: From Storytelling to Future-Prepping
Every company has core services and offerings that are just a bit outside of their wheelhouse. Smart companies have a strong network of experts that they can bring in when the need demands it. The Catalyst Partners, with whom we work on larger-scale data projects, is one of these exceptional partners. In this piece, Catalyst’s

The Importance of Blue-Sky Ideas on Any Budget
In ETR’s Purpose-Driven Design we have a principle we often use to refer to our consistent track-record of launching great products on-time and on budget. That principle is Innovation = Aspiration/Feasibility. What this principle means is that brand innovation based solely on creating trend-setting, cutting-edge, or industry-disrupting design is risky if the budget, resources, or

20 Years of ETR: A Conversation With Founders James Cole and Todd Doyle
It’s not easy running a successful business. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in five businesses fail in their first year. About 35 percent of them make it to 10 years, and just over 20 percent make it to a 20th anniversary. It’s not hard to see why. There’s competition. Lots of it.

Why Use TailwindCSS?
Tailwind bills itself as “a utility-first framework packed with classes … that can be composed to build any design, directly in your markup.” Great, but what does that mean? It means Tailwind is not another UI kit like Bootstrap or Material UI, and that means your Tailwind site won’t look like every other Tailwind site…
