New Insights from Our Team
Articles about our people, expertise, research and best practices, including insights from ten years of simplifying complexity and building digital products that improve people’s lives.
by Vivian Jiang | Feb 12, 2020 | User Experience Design
Design systems have emerged as a popular tool for organizations in recent years because of their ability to support business goals and communicate brand values by providing a unified and consistent design language to work with. With this integrated set of tools and...
by Vivian Jiang | Feb 5, 2020 | User Experience Design
About three years ago, the SymSoft Design team started to design our products and client solutions in an increasingly systematic fashion, looking at the whole map of the interface, rather than individual pages or components. We didn’t know back then that this would...
by Susmitha Gutha | Jan 17, 2020 | Sitecore
When we were migrating from Sitecore 8.2 to 9.1.1 we found the following exception in our AppInsights Logs. Also, non-admin users were reporting that they would receive a fatal error that looks like the following: We weren’t sure what was happening but in the...
by Pravin Suryavanshi | Jan 8, 2020 | Sitecore
This blog demonstrates how to add or update Sitecore contact using FXM JavaScript API. Federated Experience Manager (FXM) application allows you to add Sitecore content on external non-Sitecore websites and track visitor interactions, generate analytics information as...
by Terence Jones | Jan 2, 2020 | Sitecore
Summary I am using Sitecore for a Multisite that is already hosting two publicly available sites. We wanted to create a new intranet site using the same instance of Sitecore. Since this is an internal site one of the requirements was to secure all content using Azure...
by Marko Dugonjic | Dec 31, 2019 | Accessibility, User Experience Design
We are proud to announce our design team’s collaboration with the CalPERS’s User Experience team to deliver the myCalPERS website redesign. Contributions include building a pattern library and creating a style guide on top of the existing brand guidelines, as well as...
by Pushkal Shetty | Dec 30, 2019 | Sitecore
We recently had to upgrade one of our client’s Sitecore website from version 8.2 to 9.1. During the upgrade we noticed that a POST request that was being used for one of the search components stopped working. The following error was being written to the Sitecore logs:...
by Marko Dugonjic | Apr 1, 2019 | Sitecore, User Experience Design
Google-like search experience is so ubiquitous nowadays, that as end users we hardly ever notice it. It allows us to misspell words, expand our exploration beyond the initial scope, or simply provide answers to specific questions. Yet, those familiar with the Tesler’s...
by Pushkal Shetty | Jan 22, 2019 | Sitecore
I have found during my experience with Sitecore that it can take a long time to load when the system first initializes (Happens after publishing code or changing a configuration). This becomes frustrating for developers who are creating the website as for testing they...
by Maricarmen E. Teran Vela | Sep 17, 2018 | User Experience Design
The terms usability and user experience (UX) appeared in the early 90’s and since then you can hear more and more people talking about them or referring to them as a “must have” in the design of a software solution. And they cannot be more right. It is a common...
by Bhavik Patel | Sep 10, 2018 | Sitecore
We recently performed an upgrade from Sitecore 8.2 to 9.0.1 and at first, all was working smoothly. We installed everything in a modified XP3 configuration. After a small incident where SQL Server was down for some time, we noticed that analytics aggregation stopped...
by Pushkal Shetty | Aug 24, 2018 | Sitecore
Recently during one of our projects there was a need to perform a search on a content item based on a “Keywords” field. This field was of type single line text and it had contained a list of keywords separated by commas. The keywords could be a single word or a...
by Rohit Surve | Aug 21, 2018 | Sitecore
Sitecore A/B and Multivariate testing can help content authors improve their web content by performing a statistical analysis based on the data captured by Sitecore Analytics. Results obtained from Content testing can help better organize web content as well as...
by Pravin Suryavanshi | Aug 17, 2018 | Sitecore
This article describes how to enable Item level language fallback for your item or template in Sitecore XP 8.1 or later versions. Item level language fallback feature enables an ’empty’ item version in a given language to completely fall back to another...
by Bhavik Patel | Aug 15, 2018 | Sitecore
We recently performed a successful upgrade and migration from Sitecore 8 to 9. It went quite well, but wasn’t without challenges. Some examples of those challenges were the migration of custom dynamic placeholders (which now come out-of-the-box with Sitecore 9),...
by Bhavik Patel | Jul 31, 2018 | Sitecore
Okay, so I’ll just start off with the disclaimer: None of what is mentioned in this blog post is officially supported by Sitecore. Sitecore has official upgrade documentation that you should follow if you’re looking to go the supported path. With that over, I should...
by Bhavik Patel | Jun 24, 2018 | Sitecore
After a recent deployment of Sitecore 8.2 for one of our customers, we noticed that the “Reach” statistic when you open the “Personalized Experience” dialog in the Experience Editor was showing some numbers that were rather odd. According to Sitecore documentation,...
by Abdul Farooqui | Jun 5, 2018 | Sitecore, User Experience Design
It’s no secret that a large percentage of digital transformations fall short of expectations or outright fail. Many blog posts have been written about why companies struggle with digital transformation. Website redesign projects are a form of digital...
by Bhavik Patel | Mar 10, 2018 | Sitecore
Sitecore 9 comes with nifty new configurations for federated authentication using a variety of identity providers, including SAML providers. If you’re stuck on Sitecore 8 for a little while, though, SAML authentication is still a custom implementation. With the right...
by Abdul Farooqui | Mar 5, 2018 | User Experience Design
We’ve all seen rants from wounded designers complaining about the fate of their concepts at the hands of unappreciative clients—“They wouldn’t know good design if it hit them in the face” or “Another bad client ruining my design”. The feedback is in, and someone is...
by Marko Dugonjic | Feb 22, 2018 | User Experience Design
As we previously established, including customers really is a key component of user-centered design that leads to better performing websites. However, randomly testing interfaces with no prior planning is likely to result in disappointing outcomes. Hence, why it’s...
by Marko Dugonjic | Feb 12, 2018 | User Experience Design
Many current design research methods can help teams and organizations to successfully validate interaction, the usability of an user interface and the findability of content. While some research methods are quite exact and quantifiable, others can be less refined....
by Marko Dugonjic | Feb 2, 2018 | User Experience Design
It’s no secret that the high performing website redesigns come with a lot of moving parts. More so in the enterprise-level projects with a range of content interdependencies and numerous subject matter experts. Multiply this with diverse audiences that modern...
by Marko Dugonjic | Jan 31, 2018 | Accessibility
Designing and developing governmental websites means keeping one eye on accessibility at all times. We’d argue that this should be the case on any type of project, because accessibility compliance is not just another regulation we ought to meet, but a true need for...
by Bhavik Patel | Nov 29, 2017 | Sitecore
We use Rendering Parameters a whole lot in our implementations, because we like to follow the idea of separation of content and presentation. Basically, content is content, and visual options for displaying that content shouldn’t be kept with the content (i.e. fields...
by Bhavik Patel | Sep 20, 2017 | Sitecore
After content migration for a recent project, we noticed that certain components were throwing errors on the page once content was migrated. Note that we were using GatherContent, a really nice tool to prepare content for migration while implementation of the Sitecore...
by Bhavik Patel | Jun 20, 2017 | Sitecore
As many of you know, Sitecore’s Content Search API does a great job of hiding the complexities of Lucene, thus providing a quick way for implementers to provide search functionality to their end users when building Sitecore websites. Wrapping search in this way also...
by Bhavik Patel | May 3, 2017 | Sitecore
This blog post is a little bit high-level, but provides some ideas for capturing context data when filling out Web Forms for Marketers (WFFM) forms. When I say context data, I mean certain things related to the user’s current context on the website (like the User ID,...
by Abdul Farooqui | Feb 16, 2017 | Culture
Summary: In a busy web development office, it’s important to have a consistent communication flow to foster collaboration in the workplace. Having a connected team Here at Symsoft, we have weekly team discussions to talk about what kind of work we’re doing, and swap...
by Bhavik Patel | Feb 9, 2017 | Sitecore
With Sitecore’s Search API, boosting by date range may seem like a simple a straightforward thing to do. Well, it is if you choose the right (or, rather, suggested) way to do it. Let’s start with the way in which it will not work: dateBoostPredicate =...
by Bhavik Patel | Dec 28, 2016 | Sitecore
I’m sure that many of you have worked with Experience Editor and have used Sitecore’s built-in functionality to spawn a “Field Editor” modal window in order to allow users to edit more complex fields (such as Multilist or Treelist fields). This is a simple and...
by Bhavik Patel | Dec 27, 2016 | Sitecore
As I was working on a project recently, I realized that when using GlassMapper in events that are triggered remotely (in my case, the publish:end:remote event), I was getting a fairly odd error that looked like this: Failed to map to property '' on type '' It was also...
by Abdul Farooqui | Dec 1, 2016 | User Experience Design
“Keeping the “technical hat” on for too long makes you forget how other folks (especially non-technical) people see things. The design sprint helped me to step back and look at building functionality from a business (non-technical) point of view.” – Bhavik Patel,...
by Bhavik Patel | Sep 1, 2016 | Sitecore
UPDATE: As of July 2016, Amazon RDS fully supports backup and restoration of MS SQL Server backup files. See https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rds-for-sql-server-support-for-native-backuprestore-to-amazon-s3/ for more information about that. Considering this,...
by Bhavik Patel | Apr 8, 2016 | Sitecore
How do you turn off analytics in Sitecore 8.1? I’ve been asked this question many times now, so I’ll write a quick post about it. In previous versions of Sitecore 8 (prior to 8.1), this setting was in Sitecore.Analytics.config and was called “Analytics.Enabled”. In...
by Bhavik Patel | Mar 25, 2016 | Sitecore
Sitecore’s Links database is actually a very useful tool when you are dealing with a lot of data and have to come up with creative ways to get information from Sitecore quickly. In one of our recent encounters, we had to present a list of items that were related to...
by Xing Liu | Feb 19, 2016 | Sitecore
In our previous Sitecore application, we sometimes need to have a custom computed index field based on the business requirements. For example, we might need an extra field for faceting purpose of certain data template. In order to have a custom index field, you need...
by Bhavik Patel | Nov 23, 2015 | Sitecore
If you’re an avid Sitecore developer, you’ll quickly realize that the initial load times for Sitecore 8 are a bit longer than in previous versions of Sitecore. This is primarily due to a new addition to Sitecore’s “initialize” pipeline, namely “PrecompileSpeakViews”....
by Bhavik Patel | Nov 16, 2015 | Sitecore
In versions of Sitecore prior to 7.5, many of us have used parameters in Sitecore’s controls (i.e. sc:image) to alter the size of an image. All works well if you use this strategy for image resizing. However, in some cases, we request the URL to a media item...
by Xing Liu | Nov 13, 2015 | Sitecore
This blog post will describe the steps on how to create controller rendering in Sitecore MVC. One of the benefits of using controller rendering is to set aside the complex logic in the MVC controller. First, you need to create a definition item in the Sitecore tree....
by Bhavik Patel | Sep 15, 2015 | Sitecore
While performing a large Sitecore upgrade, we ran across an issue during the step that required us to rebuild the search indexes. It seemed that after a few minutes of working as it should, the index rebuilding process would stop abruptly. Initially, we didn’t even...
by Bhavik Patel | Sep 8, 2015 | Sitecore
For those of you who have been using our SymCal Event Calendar Module for Sitecore 6 and 7, we have recently uploaded a new version of the module that supports Sitecore 8. We also understand that Sitecore’s support for both ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC developers means...
by Bhavik Patel | Aug 7, 2015 | Sitecore
If you’re using Sitecore 7.2 (or 7.5), you’ll notice that the traditional interface for browsing through media items has been improved. What was once the traditional SHEER version of the media browse/upload user interface has now become a more attractive SPEAK version...
by Bhavik Patel | Jul 3, 2015 | Sitecore
When you install a default Sitecore 7 instance, you will notice that there is a “Sample Workflow” already configured for you. The final step of this workflow has an “Auto Publish” action, which automatically publishes an item once it reaches the final step of...
by Bhavik Patel | May 11, 2015 | Sitecore
One of the most important aspects of maintaining a WYSIWYG editing experience is to make sure that the CSS that is used for your website is the same CSS that is used for your rich text editor. In Sitecore, this is pretty easy to accomplish through configuration....
by Xing Liu | Feb 3, 2015 | Sitecore
In Sitecore, since it handles the media items through media url, there are query string parameters to control the media item’s properties. Below are some of them for images: w: Width in pixels h: Height in pixels mw: Maximum width in pixels mh: Maximum height in...
by Xing Liu | Jan 5, 2015 | Sitecore
We all know that placeholders are an integral part of Sitecore, allowing us to add various components on a page that we have developed. You can even nest placeholders, so that a component placed in one placeholder can offer another placeholder that can house even more...
by Bhavik Patel | Dec 23, 2014 | Sitecore
It is often an expensive task to manually publish both code and content for a Sitecore site manually to an integration environment. Usually, a person is assigned to be a “build master”, responsible for checking out and compiling code, making sure that everything works...
by Bhavik Patel | Nov 28, 2014 | Sitecore
One very useful Glass Mapper method is called GlassCast. This method is essentially used to convert a regular Sitecore.Data.Items.Item into an Glass Mapper object that you have created. It’s really handy when you have issued queries in your code for certain...
by Xing Liu | Nov 21, 2014 | Sitecore
In the Form Designer property panel, there is an option “CSS Class ” for you to choose which css class to apply. Shown as the screenshot below: You can add additional custom class names to this dropdown list by adding Extended List Item to the following path:...
