WHAT’S HAPPENING

The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions
How can we design interactions that encourage specific behaviors?
A while back, LinkedIn experimented with a feature: a little meter above the users’ information, showing their profile’s “percentage completed.” Suddenly, more users filled out their profiles. The feature didn’t have a clever interface, a sophisticated information architecture, or show any technical prowess. It just leveraged basic human psychology.

As designers, we work hard to provide powerful features in our applications, but if users don’t take advantage, it’s all waste. We have to extend our designer’s toolkit, leveraging the latest thinking from behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric.

Stephen will guide you through specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications, especially during the post-signup period, when it’s so easy to lose people. He’ll demonstrate how to engage your users through a process of playful discovery, which is vital whether you make consumer applications or design for the corporate environment.

RSVP on Facebook

WHEN
Wednesday, April 28th 2010
7-7:30p Socializing, food & drink
7:30-8:30p Presentation and questions
8:30-9p Further discussion, socializing. And more beer.

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About the Presenter:

Stephen P. Anderson is an independent consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He spends an unhealthy amount of time thinking about user experience design and intrapreneurial teams—topics he loves to speak about.

Prior to venturing out on his own, Stephen spent more than a decade growing and leading teams of information architects, interaction designers and UI developers in the creation of all types of interactive experiences, bringing value to clients such as Nokia, Frito-Lay, Sabre Travel Network, and Chesapeake Energy as well as many smaller technology startups.

In addition to consulting, Stephen is working on Mental Notes, a tool to help businesses apply principles from psychology to design better experiences.

As time permits, Stephen enjoys sharing his thoughts at poetpainter.com

To help alleviate this, I have been pondering methods to help engage the everyday business employee in all the things that we find wonderful, amazing or problematic in our “world”. As designers, developers, IAs and PMs, we all see things we think are beneficial to our industry, and to our business. But how do we go about sharing those concepts with the masses, all with varying degrees of knowledge?

I have been running a tool ala del.icio.us, where a user can “tag” stories of interest or relevance from a handy Firefox toolbar icon. These “tagged” entries are compiled into RSS for internal consumption by anyone who wants to subscribe. It started out with some fanfare, but has slowed, with just a couple of people now adding entries here and there. I’m considering an all-out internal marketing blitz to promote this simple tool, but am looking for additional engagement ideas.

Anyone out here have interesting engagement “strategery”?

We all rely on shortcuts to simplify our lives and that’s why some unscrupulous marketers try to make their junk mail look like legitimate bills. They know a certain percentage of us will simply pay them without thinking. So I was a little upset to see the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) resorting to this tactic when I received a bill from them today. “Statement Enclosed” the envelope says.

My first thought is either my wife signed us up again (we were last members a few years ago) or they’re resorting to slimy marketing tricks.

I open the envelope and enclosed is a “Membership Acceptance” statement. Great – they accepted my membership. Except I didn’t apply. But I better hurry and send my payment because it’s due June 14, 2007. Yeah, right.

I don’t think I’ll be sending them anything anytime soon.

“To put it simply, technology has changed the way we market. Customers gather information from multiple channels and expect it to be customized. This makes it critical for you to be able to answer these questions: Who are your customers? How do they make purchase decisions?

Once you’re armed with accurate customer personas and a map of customer purchase processes, you can strategically deliver the right information at the right time using the right channel.”

Registration begins at 7:30 am
Presentation is at 8 am
Networking is at 9:15 am

The cost is $20 for Members/$40 for non-Members.

Since specializing in interactive content a few years ago, I’ve grown a new editor in my brain (boy, it’s getting crowded in there). This one pokes me with her red pencil as I write. She squeaks, “No one will read that! Make that sentence shorter. You’re boring people. Oh no–they’re reaching for the back button! Hurry, give them the info they need quick or they’ll leave this site forever!” She’s just trying to help, I know. And it’s important to be clear and concise. But how simple is too simple?

Sometimes, in an effort to slim down the copy to its very bones, originality and humor—important tools for connecting with people—are stripped away too. My goal as a writer is to get out of the user’s way—this is especially true for sites with a utility bent. What’s often left is soulless, albeit user-friendly text. If people don’t really read the copy, it’s okay—they’re not missing much. But if they do? Some might notice it lacks that certain spark.

But there’s always hope. Maybe users will evolve to withstand the eye strain of online reading. Or coffee will become passé, so caffeine-induced skimming will become a problem of the past. Happily, even if these things don’t happen, there are corners of the web where text can stretch out its long limbs. Yes, there are safe houses for lengthy prose, places where it can hide out and not be beaten to a bloody (but concise!) pulp. Newspaper and magazine sites. Blogs. Informational sites for products and services. Even the resources section on task-oriented, no-nonsense sites. All of these have something in common: they’re places users expect to read something longer or less direct by web standards. Which is why the wordier stuff is tolerated.

That’s all for now. That sharp pencil point is jabbing my ribs again.

In his most recent post, Scott talks about his experience with a workshop at the eTech conference called “Creating Passionate Users,” given by Kathy Sierra. This workshop, he says, is very hard to summarize. But some of the salient points he picks out have broadened my perspective of user experience.

For example, Sierra talked about the idea that “users want to kick ass” at something. They want to feel like they are continually learning and gaining expertise. This is (part of) what creates passionate users.

This reminds me of the conversation I had with Karl Fast last Saturday at the IA/UX Meetup. He was talking about how his research right now is around how the actual interactions people have with systems can affect their cognition and learning of the knowledge domain. To me, designing a user experience that ellicits passion seems like a *very* effective way of improving the stickiness of learning. When people are excited about things, they think about them and keep them fresh in their memory.

I’m not sure what actual bearing this will have on the kind of work that I typically do, but this will definitely be floating around my mind for quite a while. I imagine that it may inspire an added BANG! factor somewhere down the line for some otherwise uninspiring campaign site… We’ll see!

(I nearly forgot to mention… “Creating Passionate Users” will be a book sometime in 2006… look for it!)

In addition, our first stab at doing this last year led us to at least attempt to define some personas and we found that it just didn’t work. Too many folks fell outside of our common personas and people were simply getting frustrated with having to define who they were before they could get to the content.

Long story short, with the new site, we decided that more links was better than not enough and decided to go with a rather long, but organized, navigation bar for the site. Of course, this created some backlash mainly from internal people. And, even to me, it seemed a bit counter intuitive. We’ve always been taught the truism that we should never give people more than 7 options at once and it’s better to funnel them through smaller sets of options rather than give them too many at once.

At that time, I came across a recommendation online for the report Designing for the Scent of Information from Jared Spool’s UIE. If you work on sites with a large amount of information, then this is a must-read, IMHO (and, at $31, quite affordable).

The primary thesis of the report is that people will stick with a site as long as they feel that they are getting closer and closer to their goal of finding the information they want. As long as the scent of the trail is there, they won’t give up. The key is to make sure that the scent remains. A common way to break that scent is to stop giving them the options they are looking for.

Some highlights of the report that I find go against what we web developers have long just assumed were the right thing to do include:

• ‘Above the fold’ is obsolete. In their study, they found that people are more than willing to scroll to find the information they want. This goes against the marketing departments favorite mantra “EVERYTHING must be above the fold!”
• Shorter links aren’t necessarily better. The study indicated that link lengths of 7-12 words are most likely to take people where they want to go.
• Site structure isn’t important to the end user…they just care that they find what they are looking for (based on that UIE suggests that the home page should always be the LAST page designed on the site)

There’s much more to the report than just that, though, so definitely grab a copy and give it a read.

As for Digibuy, that is the vendor that will actually handle the purchase of the PDF report for you. The reason I called them out separately is that they do a great thing for the customer: They send a reminder email that I had purchased this particular report, using a particular credit card. Why is that useful? Well, they explain it in the email:

Our customers have found this notice useful in confirming otherwise unknown credit card charges.

It’s a simple, but brilliant bit of customer service. Indeed, my wife did call me to ask me what this odd charge was on the bill. More than once I’ve been stumped with that type of question. ;o)

I’m a freelance interactive copywriter that makes her living working on all manner of projects, “leaping” in at all possible points in the process. I enter during initial concepting phases (ideal!), chaotic middle points and even make cameos in the polishing stages. Each gig is different, the project team is often made up of strangers, everyone has a different working style, and the jargon I need to work into the copy is often new. Also, I’m not always sure where the bathroom is. Or the coffee machine. And by the time I get up to speed on all these things, the website is ready to launch and I’m on to the next assignment. It’s enough to make you mutter Sam’s sheepish opening catch phrase below your breath: “Oh boy.”

Yep. Just like the early 90s TV hero I come in as an outsider, and have to improvise my way into the world of the project. But like Sam, I’ve gotten good at jumping into the middle of things. Relying on my web know-how and way with words, I get my bearings quickly and dive into the work. Okay, so I’m not exactly like Dr. Beckett. I don’t save marriages or lives or prevent murders before I leap out in a laser show of glory. But I provide solid content strategies, smart and scannable copy, attention-grabbing headlines and meaningful links. And that ain’t bad.

Just one question: Where the hell is Al with his Ziggy-powered calculator when you need him?

Outside of it confirming we read upper-left-to-lower-right and the first “natural” search result is the hottest, here are a couple other interesting finds from the image

• The “fold” cuts right through the 5th search result.
• The last 2 sponsored links in the right-hand column are completely ignored
• Activity on the “natural”-side seems more title focused, activity on the paid-side seems more description and source-link focused.

Here’s the explanation from the site:

“Q: What does it do?
A: The idea is simple: tell us where you are and we’ll tell you who and what is around you. We’ll ping your friends with your whereabouts, let you know when friends-of-friends are within 10 blocks, allow you to broadcast content to anyone within 10 blocks of you or blast messages to your groups of friends.

Q: Give me an example.
A: Okay, so you’re having drinks at Luna Lounge. Send us a text message telling us where you are and we’ll send out a text message telling all your friends where you are AND send you back a message letting you know if any friends-of-friends are within 10 blocks. If you have a camera phone, we’ll even send you their picture. ”

So, if you are interested in taking social networking to the next level. Head over to dodgeball.