The Official Fluid Blog

Synergy, forethought, planning, and commitment are commonplace words thrown around in the sales cycle for agencies pitching products and services the world over, industry-wide. Fortunately, these buzz words are not isolated to direct revenue-generating activities.

Team building can be traced back to the late 1920s when researchers conducted studies and observed worker productivity in a mid-West industrial facility outside Chicago called Hawthorne Works. Behaviorists studied groups of industrial workers in various conditions and determined that the most compelling evidence was observed in the building of a sense of group identity, a feeling of social support and cohesion that came with increased worker interaction. The study also demonstrated that workers had a tendency to perform at higher productivity at work-related tasks, most notably after performing non-work-related tasks.  Shortly thereafter, the onset of company sponsored team building activities was born.

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I spent some time evaluating search boxes and their functionality, trying to come up with a list of best practices in use by Internet Retailer’s (IR) Hot 100 e-commerce websites to determine how these successful sites stand up to my challenge. Having never truly pondered the best practices that one might employ for the familiar white space found on most sites, I came up with a list of criteria and used this list as a framework to quantify IR Hot 100 sites on their best behaviour. Values were assigned to each feature to determine total values overall, where a site could score up to 21 points.

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