Content Fairy – Guy Redwood's Blog

A few weekends ago I attended the second ThinkVisibility Conference, organised by Dom at Build Events and sponsored by Al Carlton at Conference Calendar. I spoke at the first conference in March 2009, so it was nice to attend without the pressure of being on stage soon. I’m not a huge conference follower, but ThinkVisibility is a unique format that ticks enough boxes for me to attend. It’s hosted on a weekend, so it’s pretty much frequented by those that have a deep interest in the area – no corporate day trippers. Once again, Dom managed to pull together a collection of speakers that, once into the afternoon streams, made it difficult to choose from – all good speakers, with different things to say. The main differentiator that ThinkVisibility has over other conferences is the attitude of attendees and their desire to share more than they normally would. Some speakers embraced this unwritten concept more than others.

There were some big changes when comparing this ThinkVisibility to the first one. The new venue was a huge improvement; it reflected the high quality of talks been given and the layout encouraged some good informal networking. The PA system worked flawlessly and having three theatres in the afternoon was a stroke of genius.

Friday afternoon
I attended the complimentary talk on Friday given by Tim Nash on behavioural targeting. Once attendees had turned up, Tim delivered a buoyant introduction to user segmentation based on their behaviour. It was interesting to watch how the room got to grips with the concept and then Tim showed us some examples of how people are using this on sites through a feature of CSS. In a nutshell, there’s some code that uses the colour of visited links to understand if a user has visited a site before. From this, you can infer many things, like if a visitor has a PayPal account or guess their gender. I scored a 53% chance of being male based on my history – but I’m fairly careful with the browser history on a work pc. There was a quick discussion about whether the colour of buttons has an impact on the effectiveness of a site. Some people had tested different colours and felt that some colours performed better than others. I feel it’s a lot more complex than single colours outperforming others, with contrast and context being key considerations. There’s a growing amount of info available on persuasion architecture, and I’m lucky enough to be working at the cutting edge with our behavioural research at SimpleUsability. It was a good start to the conference.

Friday night
I had the pleasure of sitting with Julian Shambles from the telegraph and Al Carlton of Conference Calendar. Julian kept us entertained with some informal banter about user generated content on the telegraph website. We adjourned upstairs to the Skylounge at City Inn for a few beers where I chatted with a few new and familiar faces. Highlight of the evening was chatting about the gold recycling industry.

Saturday
I’d never heard of Joost de Valk – so I didn’t know what to expect. His talk was fab. He rattled through his views and understandings on some pretty heavy subjects like page caching and content delivery networks. His style was great. It was like listening to somebody from Nasa just chatting generally about the issues we all face when building rockets and flying to the moon, in a way that made you realise we are all building rockets. Really useful stuff delivered in a very humble manner. Possibly the highlight of my day.

Next up was Julian from the Telegraph, who gave a more formal overview of how the telegraph is growing, playing catch up to the more established online players. Julian offered us all an open invitation to pop in next time we’re down in London, which is pretty cool.

Judith Lewis then gave a talk on Maximising Universal Search. Another speaker I had no real former knowledge of, apart from her pre-conference tweets about not wanting to share slides. I was expecting some real gems of knowledge to be shared, as previous speakers like Dave Naylor had done. This was not the case and Judith delivered a very good SEO training presentation which was well received by the floor – but was not really why I attend ThinkVisibility. Judith also presented a few slides with the infamous (and flawed) eye tracking F-pattern on it. I hate the f-pattern and smiled as Fiona was next on, ‘de-bunking the f-pattern’.

Over lunch there was a candid ‘ask the panel’ session which was really entertaining.

Lunch was followed by my colleague, Fiona talking about the behavioural research we carry out at SimpleUsability. This was my biggest dilemma of the day – I also wanted to watch Elaine and Dave from All Kids in another theatre, but Fiona won my eyes and ears. As ever, Fiona confidently presented to a busy room of people, sharing her enthusiasm for eye tracking. Fiona shared some footage from the research we carry out, giving the audience access to some major insights about how the F-pattern doesn’t really exist and the truth about how people really engage with websites.

I then went to watch Chris Clarkson lead us through his wild journey as a successful affiliate. Chris’s talk, in my eyes, was pretty much what ThinkVisbility is about for me. He shared a lot of experiences, some of them quite sobering, in a casually confident manner. I learnt some really cool stuff.

The penultimate talk was from Karyn Fleeting on corporate blogging. Her talk was good and my second Prezi presentation of the day. She was a little uncomfortable with the video camera recording but kept the pace up and shared many insights. It was refreshing to hear somebody in Karyn’s space actually understanding the medium of blog.

Last talk of the day was from Artur Ortega about how accessibility has driven innovation in everyday items we take for granted. Artur’s a great presenter and the topic was interesting. I was hoping that Artur was going to demonstrate some of the tech he uses, as at previous events, some of the audience had queried the business case for accessible code and I’ve always found that watching somebody use assistive technology makes it more real to the doubters.

At the end of the conference, we lead a human train back across Leeds to the City Inn. After completing an hour of work with Fiona in the reception, we had a few drinks with conference attendees. Whilst I could have drunk all night, I had to leave early. Sunday morning saw me heading down south to pick up a new husky puppy to add to our gang.

A big thank you to Dom and the team and the sponsors for another ThinkVisbility. Credit goes to sk8geek for some great photos. 

I just wish the Eye Tracking conferences we attend were that insightful.

To say I’m exhausted, is an understatement. We spent most of this week exhibiting at Internet World 2009, held in Earls Court 2. Three of us manned the stand and were kept busy for much of the time. This was our third show, so we knew the ins and outs of internet world show life.
We had a great time and have already signed up a bigger stand at Internet World 2010.
We took the opportunity to trial some new messaging about our offering, and it seemed to work. The big suprise was the orange dog we brought along from the office. Our big plastic dog – Magis Puppy Adult – was a great conversation starter – as well as a handy seat. We also received alot of praise for the 2 meter high eye tracking plots we hung on a curtain rail so that we could pull them out to show the detail we observe with our testing.
The bad news is that 4 days out the office means that this bank holiday weekend will be more of a working catchup weekup weekend.

I’m finally back from co-organising the famous husky race in Aviemore. This year we had a waiting list for entrants and have many exciting plans for next year. Press day was fun and it’s nice to see so much footage on a news report. It was also a pleasure to share some of our annual pilgrimage with The Hodge, rumour has it he will return next year.

Stv article – watch the movie and see us in action.

I woke this morning to a text message from a dear friend.

Have a fantastic 2009 darling and go nowhere other than where your dreams take you. You are special.

Indeed.

Taken from a kawasaki tweet link to an article in Psychology Today:

“People carry around a heavy burden of not feeling authentic,” he says, “because they have failed marriages and their work life hasn’t gone the way it should, and they’ve disappointed everybody, including themselves. When people think of these as just failures, as opposed to learning experiences, they don’t have to feel the weight of their lives or the choices they’ve made.”

In short, there’s no such thing as failure, only feedback.

Make 2009 your year of being real, being authentic.

Grok linked to a 15 year old cartoon from my favourite stable – Calvin & Hobbes

Which then reminded me of Tom’s enlightening post about the usa car manufacturers handouts

All rather uncomfortably funny.

Fun and serious review of how business is structured in reality. As a usability company, we deal in the reality of expectations – we don’t aim to change the world, just oil the wheels and maybe point our users in the best possible direction.

Sigurd’s explaination of business frameworks.

All emails sent from my iPhone get a signature attached that says ’sent from my 3g iPhone’. This is just a slightly modified default signature which I’ve never changed. I was asked about this recently and thought I’d share it here.

The signature serves a few purposes. Recipients need to know the email came from the iPhone because:
Emails are shorter and more focused due to the lack of proper keyboard.
Emails will have typos in them for the same reason
Emails may also have strange words in them due to the auto spell checking.

It’s my way of saying ‘here’s my quick response, reader be aware’

I’ve been invited to speak at the new Think Visibility conference in Leeds, organised by Dom Hodgson. This conference pulls together a range of respected speakers focusing on online visibility and conversion. If you are involved in etail, this should be a no brainer decision, you’d normally pay big money to see just one of two of these speakers, but Dom, in his usual way, has managed to bring it all under one roof for a nominal fee of £30.
My talk will be centred around customer strategy and how you need to mirror their behaviour to engage. I will have a few interesting props and some eye tracking footage to demonstrate just how brutal users can be.
Think Visibility, Saturday 7th of March 2009 – you’ve got no excuses.

Taken from Sally McKenzie – as I added her to my twitter feed.

….companies and clients, large and small who have made the successful transition to marketing accountability, they have some important things in common:

They view marketing as a strategic function vs. a discreet set of tasks
They identify success metrics up front before they “test” anything. After all, what are you testing if you don’t know what you’re measuring?

They align the organization around common metrics and communicate progress regularly. Marketing accountability requires that you work across the entire organization: finance, sales, operations, customer service, IT, etc. in order to be successful. Example: you can buy keywords and put up web pages all day long, but if the person answering the phone or processing orders isn’t aware or on board, your ROI will plummet.

They take the long view, starting at a level realistic for their company’s size and resources and build from there. They watch metrics to get early benchmarks and then seek ongoing improvements vs. overnight fireworks. They stick with it vs. hopping across trial and error tactics. They understand that integration of customer data and automation of measurement processes will be a lengthy but worthwhile.

They focus on progress, not perfection. Getting all of the numbers and data sources to line up, getting every program to execute perfectly, it just doesn’t happen But that’s not a reason to scrap your quest to accountable marketing. In fact, it’s the reason to keep going, keep pushing, keep moving forward. Evolution, like momentum is a hard thing to break once it’s started.

full article

Great article about the importance of influential content.
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000357.php
1. Talk like a person.
2. Establish credibility.
3. Use the right tone for the brand or situation.
4. Be courteous in your timing and placement of content.
5. Remind customers of differentiators and benefits.
6. Appeal to both the left and the right brain—the rational and the emotional.
7. Tell stories.
8. Consider using metaphors.
9. Avoid cheap tricks.
10. Don’t forget to use images, video, speech, and audio.

Once you’ve done all this, test the effectiveness of your copy through eye tracking.

This week, we had a retailer of bathroom suites in for a day of eye tracking. The testing covered a range of customer journeys and a range of bathroom websites. Whilst I can’t disclose all the good stuff we discovered there is a key finding that I’ll share, as we’ve seen it many times before, in other B2C testing and one that may help a few online retailers out there.

As a retailer, you want to display your products in the best possible way, helping your customer choose the most suitable product. Logic tells you that the best way to do this it to have very clear photography of the actual products, helping the user see the differences between them.

Eye tracking showed us that the users do make initial decisions using the photography and then supporting information like price. We all know that good photography is the cornerstone of a successful online shop. What we saw again in this testing, is that users prefered to chose products that were displayed in room scenes that they liked, over products that were displayed individually. In essence, the users were buying a ‘look’ and not the product, even though the retailer is only supplying the key items displayed, not the total look.

What does this mean to a retailer?
If your product creates a ‘look’, I would recommend conducting some A/B testing to compare the effectiveness of scene photography and component photography. I would also make sure that you have a range of different scenes, so that your products look distinctly different. Displaying different products in the same room scene will not work. You need different products in different room scenes. The down side to this is that if the customer doesn’t like your room scene, they won’t buy the product.

How did we see this?
Eye tracking allows us to see through the users’ eyes and observe their decision process.

mini projectors are becoming more popular and this demo maybe closer to mainstream than you’d think. with a new generation gps device – you could mark up the world and subscribe to your prefered publisher of world notes/graffiti.

December sees the second girl geek dinner in Leeds. As someone schooled in a range of inner-city schools, some of them quite hard, I’m not a fan of exclusion. In it’s extreme, it can be fatal.

Creating an event that’s in a universal domain, and then telling people they’re not eligible to attend, because of their sex, is counter productive.

Do women in technology need special treatment?

Which then leads onto the flipside, what would a boy geek dinner look like?

To be honest I don’t care, gender shouldn’t exclude.

If you want to understand gender – go speak to Rikki.

Whenever our usability business engages with an online retailer who’s got a good proposition, I’m always a little envious of the position they’re in. Online retail is really exciting, the rewards are well earned for those that get it right and the detail people need to do on the customer journeys is big. For brief moments, I start to day dream and think of what I could do with their propositions… working 365 days a year, fulltime on a good retail site would be so much fun. Infact, as much fun as running an eye tracking company.

I have a few ideas on ways to help a few lucky retailers in an unconventional manner and will hopefully blog about it soon.

Leeds media website on the iPhone. Is that the best that Leeds has to offer? I’m guessing it also fails on the accessiblity front.

Blogging from the iPhone would be much better with a bluetooth keyboard. Shame apple have nobbled bluetooth so much.

Experts are pragmatists, they re-set or re-frame the problem to make it solvable. Novices are realists, they take the problem as a given and get stuck.

taken from ‘noise between stations‘ – an interesting blog just added to my rss feeds.
So, maybe the stars of tomorrow are easy to spot. Enlightened novices use experts for support and guidance – the others, out of ignorance just get stuck in, passionately getting stuck.

Please don’t ask me which camp I’ve put you in :-)

Photographic evidence of me helping out on the panel at Enterprise Island in Leeds.

It was a fun day, giving me the opportunity to advise local budding entrepreneurs and meet some new faces (to me) from the leeds business community. In some ways the format was similar to Dragon’s Den – but we were there to spark up a conversation to offer encouragement and advice.

A fabulous day, making a real difference to some very nice people, in a very nice pub. Shame I was driving and a real shame Michael was away – otherwise things may have gone on a little later.

All I’m going to say is…. this is fabulous… please nobody shout at me.

http://goodexperience.com/2008/05/the-top-8-mistakes-in.php