Posts Tagged ‘design’

Beautiful Icons

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Beautiful and handcrafted icons for web and print projects

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Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

Written by admin. Posted in A, Financial Terms Dictionary

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

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What Is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities and guarantees that they have equal opportunity to participate in mainstream American life. Passed in 1990, this federal law made it illegal to discriminate against a disabled person in terms of employment opportunities, access to transportation, public accommodations, communications, and government activities.

The ADA prohibits private employers, state and local governments, employment agencies, and labor unions from discriminating against those who have disabilities. Under the ADA, employers are also required to make reasonable accommodations for an employee with a disability to perform their job function.

Key Takeaways

  • The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990 to prevent workplace and hiring discrimination against people with disabilities.
  • The ADA applies to all private businesses with 15 or more employees.
  • It also covers government employers, employment agencies, and labor unions.
  • The ADA also had the effect of increasing accessibility and mobility for disabled people by mandating automatic doorways, ramps, and elevators to accommodate wheelchairs in public places and businesses.

Understanding the Americans with Disabilities Act

To be covered by the ADA, a person must have a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. Three major sections comprise the primary protections introduced by the ADA.

Title I of the law prohibits discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities during job application procedures, hiring, firing, the pursuit of career advancement, compensation, job training, and other aspects of employment. It holds authority over employers who have 15 or more employees.

Title II applies to state and local government entities. This part of the law further extends the protection from discrimination to qualified individuals with disabilities. It requires that these individuals have reasonable access to services, programs, and activities provided by the government.

Title III prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities regarding access to activities at public venues. This includes businesses that are generally open to the public, such as restaurants, schools, day care facilities, movie theaters, recreation facilities, and doctors’ offices. The law also requires newly constructed, rebuilt, or refurbished places of public accommodation to comply with ADA standards. In addition, Title III applies to commercial facilities that include privately owned, nonresidential facilities such as factories, warehouses, or office buildings.

Different government agencies play a role in enforcing the ADA. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforces Title I. The Department of Labor enforces state and local government services under Title II and public accommodations under Title III.

The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 allowed for a broader legal definition of “disability.” It made it easier for people seeking protection under the ADA to establish that they have a disability. Before the amendment, people with disabilities including cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and learning disabilities could be excluded from ADA coverage. 

How the Americans with Disabilities Act Increased Accessibility 

The ADA established standards for accessible design for public accommodations that include creating automatic doorways, ramps, and elevators to accommodate wheelchairs. Water fountains must be made available at heights that individuals with disabilities can reach.

Some examples of accommodations in the workplace include supplying a hearing-impaired applicant with a sign language interpreter during a job interview, modifying a work schedule to meet the needs of a person who needs treatment, or restructuring an existing facility to make it readily accessible to people with disabilities. An employer is not required by the ADA to make reasonable accommodations if doing so presents an undue hardship for the business and requires significant expenses compared with the size of the company.

Title IV of the ADA requires telephone companies to provide telephone relay services, or similar devices, for the hearing- and speech-impaired.

Although there is no regulation requiring ADA compliance by websites and online platforms, accessibility for internet users has become an issue of increasing importance. Best practices are increasingly prescribed to promote website accessibility.

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Free Social Icons

Written by admin. Posted in Icons, Web Design, WordPress

Free Social Icons Set

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The 80-20 Rule (aka Pareto Principle): What It Is, How It Works

Written by admin. Posted in #, Financial Terms Dictionary

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What Is the 80-20 Rule?

The 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is a familiar saying that asserts that 80% of outcomes (or outputs) result from 20% of all causes (or inputs) for any given event.

In business, a goal of the 80-20 rule is to identify inputs that are potentially the most productive and make them the priority. For instance, once managers identify factors that are critical to their company’s success, they should give those factors the most focus.

Although the 80-20 rule is frequently used in business and economics, you can apply the concept to any field. Wealth distribution, personal finance, spending habits, and even infidelity in personal relationships can all be the subject of the 80-20 rule.

Key Takeaways

  • The 80-20 rule maintains that 80% of outcomes comes from 20% of causes.
  • The 80-20 rule prioritizes the 20% of factors that will produce the best results.
  • A principle of the 80-20 rule is to identify an entity’s best assets and use them efficiently to create maximum value.
  • This rule is a precept, not a hard-and-fast mathematical law.
  • People sometimes mistakenly conclude that if 20% of factors should get priority, then the other 80% can be ignored.

The Pareto Principle (80-20 Rule)

How Does the 80-20 Rule Work?

You may think of the 80-20 rule as simple cause and effect: 80% of outcomes (outputs) come from 20% of causes (inputs). The rule is often used to point out that 80% of a company’s revenue is generated by 20% of its customers.

Viewed in this way, it might be advantageous for a company to focus on the 20% of clients that are responsible for 80% of revenues and market specifically to them. By doing so, the company may retain those clients, and acquire new clients with similar characteristics. However, there’s a more fundamental meaning to the 80-20 rule.

Core Principle

At its core, the 80-20 rule is about identifying an entity’s best assets and using them efficiently to create maximum value. For example, a student should try to identify which parts of a textbook will create the most benefit for an upcoming exam and focus on those first. This does not imply, however, that the student should ignore the other parts of the textbook.

Misinterpretations

People may not realize that the 80-20 rule is a precept, not a hard-and-fast mathematical law. Furthermore, it is isn’t necessary that the percentages equal 100%. Inputs and outputs simply represent different units. The percentages of these units don’t have to add up to 100%. It’s the concept behind the rule that matters.

There’s another way in which the 80-20 rule is misinterpreted. Namely, that if 20% of inputs are most important, then the other 80% must not be important. This is a logical fallacy. The 80% can be important, even if the decision is made to prioritize the 20%.

Business managers from all industries use the 80-20 rule to help narrow their focus and identify those issues that cause the most problems in their departments and organizations.

80-20 Rule Background

The 80-20 rule is also known as the Pareto principle and is applied in Pareto analysis. It was first used in macroeconomics to describe the distribution of wealth in Italy in the early 20th century. It was introduced in 1906 by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who is best known for the concepts of Pareto efficiency.

Pareto noticed that 20% of the pea pods in his garden were responsible for 80% of the peas. Pareto expanded this principle to macroeconomics by showing that 80% of the wealth in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.

In the 1940s, Dr. Joseph Juran, a prominent figure in the field of operations management, applied the 80-20 rule to quality control for business production.

He demonstrated that 80% of product defects were caused by 20% of the problems in production methods. By focusing on and reducing the 20% of production problems, a business could increase the overall quality of its products. Juran referred to this phenomenon as “the vital few and the trivial many.”

Benefits of the 80-20 Rule

Although there is little scientific analysis that either proves or disproves the 80-20 rule’s validity, there is much anecdotal evidence that supports the rule as being essentially valid, if not numerically accurate.

Performance results of salespeople in a wide range of businesses have demonstrated success by incorporating the 80-20 rule. In addition, external consultants who use Six Sigma and other management strategies have incorporated the 80-20 principle in their practices with good results.

Example of the 80-20 Rule

A Harvard graduate student, Carla, was working on an assignment for her digital communications class. The project was to create a blog and monitor its success during the course of a semester.

Carla designed, created, and launched the site. Midway through the term, the professor conducted an evaluation of the blogs. Carla’s blog, though it had achieved some visibility, generated the least amount of traffic compared with her classmates’ blogs.

Define the Problem

Carla happened upon an article about the 80-20 rule. It said that you can use this concept in any field. So, Carla began to think about how she might apply the 80-20 rule to her blog project. She thought, “I used a great deal of my time, technical ability, and writing expertise to build this blog. Yet, for all of this expended energy, I am getting very little traffic to the site.”

She now understood that even if a piece of content is spectacular, it is worth virtually nothing if no one reads it. Carla deduced that perhaps her marketing of the blog was a greater problem than the blog itself.

Apply the 80-20 Rule

To apply the 80-20 rule, Carla decided to assign her 80% to all that went into creating the blog, including its content. Her 20% would be represented by a selection of the blog’s visitors.

Using web analytics, Carla focused closely on the blog’s traffic. She asked herself:

  • Which sources comprise the top 20% of traffic to my blog?
  • Who are the top 20% of my audience that I wish to reach?
  • What are the characteristics of this audience as a group?
  • Can I afford to invest more money and effort into satisfying my top 20% readers?
  • In terms of content, which blog posts constitute the top 20% of my best-performing topics?
  • Can I improve upon those topics, and get even more traction from my content than I’m getting now?

Carla analyzed the answers to these questions, and edited her blog accordingly:

  1. She adjusted the blog’s design and persona to align with her top 20% target audience (a strategy common in micromarketing).
  2. She rewrote some content to meet her target reader’s needs more fully.

Significantly, although her analysis did confirm that the blog’s biggest problem was its marketing, Carla did not ignore its content. She remembered the common fallacy cited in the article—if 20% of inputs are most important, then the other 80% must be unimportant—and did not want to make that mistake. She knew it was necessary to address aspects of the content, as well.

Results

By applying the 80-20 rule to her blog project, Carla came to understand her audience better and therefore targeted her top 20% of readers more purposefully. She reworked the blog’s structure and content based on what she learned, and traffic to her site rose by more than 220%.

What’s the 80-20 Rule?

The 80-20 rule is a principle that states 80% of all outcomes are derived from 20% of causes. It’s used to determine the factors (typically, in a business situation) that are most responsible for success and then focus on them to improve results. The rule can be applied to circumstances beyond the realm of business, too.

What Does the 80-20 Rule Mean?

At its heart, the 80-20 rule simply underscores the importance of exerting your energy on those aspects of your business—or life, sports activity, musical performance, blog, etc.—that get you the best results. However, it does not mean people should then ignore the areas that are less successful. It’s about prioritizing focus and tasks, and then solving problems that reveal themselves due to that focus.

How Do I Use the 80-20 Rule to Invest?

When building a portfolio, you could consider investing in 20% of the stocks in the S&P 500 that have contributed 80% of the market’s returns. Or you might create an 80-20 allocation: 80% of investments could be lower risk index funds while 20% might could be growth funds. Of course, past performance doesn’t necessarily correlate with future results. So, be sure to monitor your portfolio’s performance to see how well the results match your intent and your goals.

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