World Usability Day with NEOUPA

NEOUPA

On November 10, 2011 I, Emily Winters, attended the Northeast Ohio Usability Professional’s Association’s (NEOUPA) World Usability Day Conference.  It was an interesting event held at Dave and Buster’s in Westlake, Ohio.  I regret to say that I didn’t play any games while I was there, but I did learn a lot and met some very intriguing people. The following are my notes from the day and the pointers that I picked up from each speaker.

What Makes Them Click?

The keynote speaker at the conference was Susan Weinschenk.  Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology and has been working in the usability profession for over 30 years.  She presented, “What Makes Them Click?” a workshop all about helping you make changes to a site that will get clients to use it.  The key things from her talk were the three sections of the brain and the list of things that you must go through, and include within a site, to see if you are providing customers with user-centered design:

• 3 brains
  • Mid – where we deal with social interaction, memories and emotions
  • Old- being afraid to make the wrong decision, instinctive
  • New- where rational and logical thought happens

Making people click involves these:

• Choices
• Social Validation
• Reciprocity and Concession
• Scarcity and fear of loss
• Food, Sex, danger
• Pictures and Stories
• Similarity, Attractiveness, and Association
• Commitment and Consistency
• Social

My favorite of these topics was the idea of concession, which is asking for more then what you want from the beginning.  The example that she used was asking random people for a one-time 2 hour commitment vs. asking for one hour a week for a year.  The people will often say no to the yearly commitment, but if then asked about the one-time 2 hour commitment they feel indebted to you to say yes because they have already rejected your idea once.  This principle only works if the requests aren’t too outlandish.  The tricky part of concession is that you are manipulating the outcome in your favor.  Is that an ethical thing to do in business?  Susan did not have an answer for that, nor do I, but it is something to think about.

During Susan’s workshop she mentioned several books that she recommended we all read. In no particular order I will share that list with you:

- The Psychology of Influence  by Robert B. Cialdini

- Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy D. Wilson

- Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change by Timothy D. Wilson

There were a few books that she suggested we look at to find out more about her presentation topic.  Those included:

- Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? by Susan Weinschenk

- 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk

- The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar

- How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

The “Ability” to Achieve Social Media Success

Presented by Kurt Krejny, Director of Online Marketing, Fathom Online Marketing. You can find him on Twitter at: @KurtKrejny

Kurt talked about how to design sites with cross channels in mind as well as incorporating Facebook and Twitter into your webpage.  He pointed out that there are a number of abilities that you need to be successful in this.

The four main points were:

• Use-Ability: Must make things easy for the user
• Like-Ability: Must design so that people will “like” it.
  Do not be afraid to ask your users what they want!
  Good example of this is the Facebook page for Zappos.com
• Share-Ability: Can or will people re-post your information?  What do you want to be shared?
• Find-Ability: Can people find you? Are you branding your pages?  Have you filled out your information completely on Facebook and Twitter?

The Relationship of User Experience and Search Engine Experience in Website Redesign

Presented by Laura Cameron, Senior Search Strategist, Metrics Marketing Group

In her presentation the main thing that I got out of it was thinking about search engines as users.  She went over the fact that if you want your website to perform well you must take into account the needs of the search engine as well as your human users.  The two users think very differently, but if you incorporate the needs of both, the website will have a greater chance of really succeeding.

• Key takeaways
  • search engines are users
  • inform the user experience
  • collaboration of SEO and usability improves category names, content migration/development and conversion
  • Google: Webmaster Central Blog- good basics

eWord-of-Mouth  Web Design for Maximum Virality

Presented by Mike Wise, Founder of WebWisedom, LLC

The main thing that Mike wanted us to take away from his presentation is that eWord-of-Mouth is a powerful tool to have on your side.   It comes from bloggers, people posting on Twitter, e-networks, raving fans, and viral videos/presentations.  Many of the people using social networking sites are between the ages of 35-44 years of age with the second largest group being 45-54 years of age.  The target audience is not teenagers but more mature adults.

Data: The Building Blocks of Good E-mail

Presented by Chris Serger, eMarketing Director at C. TRAC and Ashley Szeremet, Step 2

I happened to have the good fortune of sitting next to Chris Serger at the conference.  He was a very engaging speaker and a nice person to share conversation with.  His presentation was the first of two on e-mail marketing.  The points that I took away from his talk were that you must gear your e-mails to the audience.  He created a “good” and “bad” list of things to collect and to not collect when you are getting people’s information that I would like to share:

During the presentation, Ashley Szeremet explained that you should always update your information so that you can stay current with what you are sending out.  Gear your mailings towards the information that you have- ex. gender specific and age appropriate.

Don’t Make Your Subscribers Think: How to Optomize Your E-mail Usability

Presented by Tricia McCune, Director of E-mail Marketing Strategy, Fathom  Find her on Twitter: @CLEMeetup

While her presentation was directly after the only other E-mail marketing presentation, she still managed to keep the topic new and different from what had just been introduced.  Her key points were:

• send e-mails out from the most recognizable name in the company (not from the mascot or an employee)
• keep track of when you send out the e-mails to get the best response.
• Sending them out on the weekends will be a bad idea for businesses only open during the week
• Best times to send out e-mails are Monday or Tuesday at 9:00am
• Shorter headline type subject lines are best
• E-mail design and any offers must be reflected on the landing page.

Information as Opportunity

Presented by Karl Fast, Professor at Kent State University E-mail him at Kfast@kent.edu or on his personal page http://about.me/karlfast

His presentation was very interesting.  I think he was trying to get us to consider the ways in which people use their bodies to figure out problems and how this will affect the way we design for the user.  Rather than trying to explain his ideas in depth I will direct you to this website: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

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