Mayhem & Chaos: The Blog

First things first - if you’re sitting in the sessions and you’re wondering what’s next and you’re breaking your neck looking at your badge - well - pull out the back sheet and insert it upside down. C’mon, we’re at a usability conference - let’s start with the small stuff :). Though we went to all the sessions, I’m just bloggin’ about the ones that stood out for me.

The Dawning of the Age of Experience - Jared Spool

“If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world…” Read more of Jared’s bio at Webmaster Jam Session | Visit Jared’s site.

Jared talked about some really good stuff. When it comes to designing and developing, I usually have more of an S.E.O. focus and I think about usability here and there. I don’t know about any other people, but I still can’t stop signing “Age of Aquarius” when I think about Jared’s topic, sorry, being an ex-karaoke DJ, I have the most random songs going through my head.

Two of the topic points that Jared hit on that really captured my attention were: Successful Experience Design is INVISIBLE and Successful Experience Design is Learned, Yet not introspective. He mentioned a lot of great services and why they are successful. Since I’m an avid Netflix user, and he brought that one up, I’ll elaborate what he talked about. Basically, he went through Blockbuster’s new online ordering and why it wasn’t doing as well. Simply put, Netflix was first and they do it better, which I can attest to. But why does Netflix have 75% market share? They have a a lot of features and were the first to start using AJAX in their interface, amongst other great things. I know I associate Blockbuster/Hollywood Video with late fees, headaches and missed movies since you only get to keep them for 5 days. With Netflix, as you all know, you get your movie and return it whenever you’re ready. Jared compared it to Christmas when you get a new movie in. I can definitely agree with that every time my wife and I check the mail and a new season of Scrubs is in that red envelope.

Jared was quite amusing, witty and gave a really good presentation!

Measure Twice, Code Once - Rob Jones

“Rob received a BS in Computer Science, but was always more interested in graphics so he combined the two by working in Visual Effects for film. This lead to working with some the most creative software firms in the world, including Wavefront, SGI, MetaTools (the guys who created Kai’s Power Tools) and Square LA. It was at these companies that he learned that software could either be fun and enjoyable or extremely frustrating to use, and decided that his future would be designing interfaces.” Read more of Rob’s bio at Webmaster Jam Session | View Rob’s site

This was by far one of the more interesting sessions I’ve been to today. I say this as I’m in Molly’s session, which is fun. Rob talked about the subject I’m really into right now, analytics and obtaining conversions. Rob mentioned Occam Razor’s Blog, which I’ll have to check out, but I want to talk about analytics.

Luckily with what I’ve been learning with Aaron at work about analytics, I had some knowledge of what Rob was talking about. Unfortunately, I don’t get the opportunity to work in analytics and tracking all the time, so I have to save that for my personal projects, so it’s a learning processes. Setting A Goal was the most important thing I took away from the session. You have to first have a goal in mind before you start analyzing what you have. Tools like Google Analytics is a great way to see what your users are doing. A/B testing (small variations of your content) is another good tool. Google’s Website Optimizer, which we use at work is a great tool for this type of testing. The thing to remember with A/B testing is that you need to minimize the number of variations so as not to “trip” over all the changes you have made.

Surveys, user testing and analyzing the competition are some other good ways of getting quality traffic to your site. Here are some resources that Rob gave out: FireClick | Compete

User Segmentation: Grouping users with similar needs and behaviors. Obviously users are different, but how do you group them. Rob said using analytics and surveys are two great ways of grouping your users and how to design to meet the segment needs. You also want to be able to get rid of the users segments that are not doing you any good. Book Resource: The Paradox of Choice