The July session was such a rousing success full of conversation and discussion that we thought we’d do it again. It’s the perfect activity for summer, not too much deep thinking and a casual time.

Let’s get together and pick over some UX bones of contention! Do you have a UX topic about which you feel passionately contrary? Are people you work with doing some really stupid things that could be done in better ways? Do have better ways to do these things? Do you rant about about methods or deliverables or mindsets that frustrate you? Well, you aren’t alone….

Let’s start with some of the UX Myths from UX Myths.com

Myth #10: If your design is good, small details don’t matter
Myth #9: Design has to be original
Myth #8: Stock photos improve the users’ experience
Myth #7: Graphics will make a page element more visible
Myth #6: Accessible sites are ugly
Myth #5: Accessibility is expensive and difficult
Myth #4: Design is about making a website look good
Myth #3: People don’t scroll
Myth #2: All pages should be accessible in 3 clicks
Myth #1: People read on the web

And if none of these get your goat, bring a topic or rant of your own! PLEASE feel free to add comments to this post on the topic YOU want to discuss!

DATE & TIME
Monday, August 9
6pm – 8pm

LOCATION
Red Stag Supperclub
509 First Ave. NE, Minneapolis
612.767.7766

Your Twin Cities UX Meetup organizers:
Bill Dorman
Christine Anameier
Garrick Van Buren
Jennifer Bohmbach
Stephanie Hammes-Betti

Let’s get together and pick over some UX bones of contention! Do you have a UX topic about which you feel passionately contrary? Are people you work with doing some really stupid things that could be done in better ways? Do have better ways to do these things? Do you rant about about methods or deliverables or mindsets that frustrate you? Well, you aren’t alone….

Here are some of the topics we’ll consider:

• Site Maps – Do We Still Them?
• What’s the difference between data and content?
• Does Jakob Nielson still matter?
• Intuitable or Intuitive?
• Why the Fascination with Faceted Navigation?

And if none of these get your goat, bring a topic or rant of your own!

DATE & TIME
Monday, July 12
6pm – 8pm

LOCATION
Red Stag Supperclub
509 First Ave. NE, Minneapolis
612.767.7766

Your Twin Cities UX Meetup organizers:
Bill Dorman
Christine Anameier
Garrick Van Buren
Jennifer Bohmbach
Stephanie Hammes-Betti

Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for User Experience Design and Documentation.

DATE
June 14, 2010 (2nd Monday of the month)

TIME
6-9pm

LOCATION
Wilde Roast Cafe parlor room
518 Hennepin Ave. E. • Minneapolis, MN 55414
612.331.4544

Garrick Van Buren be discussing how Cucumbers are the future of interaction design artifacts, prototyping, and User Experience design.

DATE & TIME
May 10, 2010 (2nd Monday of the month)

LOCATION
Wilde Roast Cafe parlor room
518 Hennepin Ave. E. • Minneapolis, MN 55414
612.331.4544

My notes for the conversation

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.

– — – — –
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

Registration is $30 that includes the afternoon of co-working @ CoCo, or $15 just for Chank’s session.

To register and for more information – visit CoCoMSP.com

I established a leadership consulting firm in 2002 to provide executive coaching services and leadership development courses to leaders in organizations of all sizes and types. I launched a new website in December 2009 and experimented with some advertising to drive traffic to the site. Here’s what I have learned.

Analytics
Watching where people go on your website is critical to adjust your content to match their interest. My first website was more of an electronic brochure. It was fine for people I had met in person but was not sufficient to make a first impression on its own. When I launched the new website last December the design was much better thanks to a friend of mine who is a graphic designer. The web designer who implemented the site added analytics so I could see the traffic patterns. It was amazing to see where people went on the site and it caused me to add some content. One of the most popular areas turned out to be information about my past clients so I added a client list and some client success stores to go with the testimonials I had there. These are some of the most trafficked areas on the site now.

Advertising
I initially experimented with LinkedIn Ads which worked very well. I had noticed that I was getting a lot more traffic to my LinkedIn profile than my website so I decided to try a line ad with LinkedIn to drive people to my website. It started driving traffic to my website the first day I ran the ad. The system was very easy to use and LinkedIn has a lot of profile information for their members so I could really pick and choose who you I wanted to view the ad.

I also tried Google Adwords and Facebook Ads and ultimately found Facebook ads to be the most cost effective of the three. It’s not as targeted as LinkedIn but makes up for that by being a lot less expensive. Google Adwords is a little complicated. There are two different systems. There’s the Keyword system that puts ads in Google searches that match the keywords you list for the ads. I didn’t get many clicks that way. Then there’s their Network system that places ads on appropriate websites. That’s where I got most of my clicks which were very cheap. Unfortunately not many showed up in my analytics so I suspect that some of the sites were charging for clicks that weren’t happening.

I initially paid for impressions but found paying for clicks to be a much easier way to impact the volume of visitors to my website. Most of these internet advertising programs use a bidding system to determine what ads run. I paid for impressions at first but found very quickly that I worried a lot less about the cost if I just paid per click. Watching your impressions, click through rates and cost per click can become a bit of an obsession. Paying per click eliminated all that and allowed me to impact the volume of visitors much more easily. Since I was initially in a hurry to get views to one of my programs I put in a high bid to get more clicks. The bid was more competitive with other bids so it ran more and got more clicks. The program I’m currently advertising is less time dependent so I’m bidding lower because I’m more interested in cost effectiveness. I’m getting a lower volume of clicks but at a lower average cost per click.

Website Lessons
I found that my content was not very effective at getting people to stay on my site. The ads I run land on specific pages of my website that describe the programs I’m advertising. I noticed that a lot of the visitors were bouncing, looking at just that page and then leaving the website without looking at other pages. When I looked at the pages where I was sending them I realized that there were no pictures and no links to other areas of my website, other than the standard menu. It was nothing but a text description of the program. A rookie mistake I suspect. I added pictures of the instructors for our class with links to their bios. I started to get more people to stay on the website and view other pages. I also noticed that the visitors coming from Facebook didn’t bounce as much as the ones from LinkedIn or Google. When I tracked the cost for each system I calculated the cost per no bounce visitors as my final determination of effectiveness. This is where Facebook came out way ahead. Here are the links to the landing pages for my ads.

http://www.caravela.us/pages/programs/course_effectlead.html
http://www.caravela.us/pages/programs/exec_coaching.html

The final lesson I learned is that I need a way to collect visitor data. Although I’ve had about 250 people visit my website through the ads I’ve run – I don’t know who any of them are. Our sales cycle is very long so I need a way to capture people’s contact information and stay in touch with them over time.

Good luck. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or if you have any suggestions on how to do all this better. I think we’re all still trying to figure all this out.

First, we’ll discuss the Interaction10 conference. Some TC UXers who went will offer their take on the big ideas that came out of it and how they can apply those ideas to their work. If you want to get a sense of what went on behind the #ixd10 hashtag, now’s your chance!

Then, after we talk, stay and play Social Mania, the new game from Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone, the authors of Designing Social Interactions. We have an early beta version in our possession—you can’t even buy this yet. Play with us, and you get to join a product team and design social products. You know you want to.

This special two-part UX meetup will run from 6 to 9 PM. Feel free to drop in for the parts you’re most interested in.

DATE & TIME
March 8, 2010 (2nd Monday of the month)
6-7:30 PM – Interaction10 talk
7:30-9 PM – Social Mania

LOCATION
Wilde Roast Cafe parlor room
518 Hennepin Ave. E. • Minneapolis, MN 55414
612.331.4544

UPDATE – Monday 3/8 – looks like we’ll need to postpone the Social Mania game, but the Interaction10 discussion is still on. See you there!

Here’s some key bullet points from their job description.

• Design and produce Internet/web, landing pages, HTML emails and Flash projects
• Presents wireframes, design concepts and rationale to management for all interactive projects
• Works with creative and eMarketing team from initial concept to final deployment
• Work with outside vendors on producing creative/interactive projects or digital assets

• Highly proficient in Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, HTML, XHTML, Action Scripting and other Web applications dealing with coding (Mac/PC)
• Proficient in InDesign and other print applications?Highly proficient in web development (Flash, CSS, JavaScript, XHTML)
• Highly proficient in Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and other types of interactive applications
• Excellent knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite and Visio like products
• Knowledge and experience in print applications’

More info in the full job description

We’ll be discussing a The Web Content Strategist’s Bible: The Complete Guide To A New And Lucrative Career For Writers Of All Kinds. The author, Richard Sheffield, will join via video-conference.

When reading the book, please write down your answers to these topics/questions and bring them with you — they will drive our discussion (yes, you can still join us if you haven’t read the book):

What did you like about the book?

What did you dislike or perhaps not understand?

Will this book influence how you work or think about work?

DATE & TIME
Monday, February 8
6pm – 8 p.m.

LOCATION
Wilde Roast Cafe
518 Hennepin Ave. E. • Minneapolis, MN 55414
612.331.4544