The farther away one gets from the end of a conference, the less likely one is to write about it. I’m no exception, which is a shame because there was a ton of great thinking and practical advice that came out of the energizing An Event Apart 2010 in Boston.
So, on the tiny off-chance that I can’t write in-depth, lucid details about everything that inspired me, I wanted to at least capture the broad themes I heard last week.
Without further ado, here they are:
Your designs should embrace the diversity of browsing experiences offered by different devices
It is no longer necessary—or even possible—to make the browsing experience the same across all browsers. Like HDTV, the device determines the experience you get; the experience is not (and should not be!) the same for every device. Design and testing processes should change to reflect this reality.
CSS3 media queries are an easy, stylesheet-based way to adapt our designs to devices with variable widths.
Mobile is moving to the center of the web design practice
Change is coming: designing for mobile browsers will represent a significantly larger chunk of your design focus and energy in the next 5 years, due to the incredible proliferation of smartphones.
Consider designing the mobile experience before the desktop experience, it allows you to focus on users’ primary needs.
Designing mobile experiences means embracing—and designing for—flexibility.
Make stronger connections with your users with compelling, relevant content served quickly and consistently across channels.
Create emotional connections: use surprising and delightful interactions, when they support the message. Use these interactions to evoke humanizing responses (like humor and empathy) from your users.
There’s still no substitute for good planning, informed design, and responsiveness, both in project management and product design
Plan for change at all points of the project, from scoping the project down to the individual design decisions.
Avoid adhering to hard and fast rules if you have the opportunity to investigate, research, and make an informed decision. But don’t ignore your gut.
The more techniques you learn, the more flexible your processes can become.
The qualities that contributed to the success of the web as a platform are the qualities that make us successful as web developers: rough consensus, working code developed quickly, velocity, and responsiveness.
For more details from the individual talks, Luke Wroblewski’s conference notes are that rare combination of concise and thorough. I’ve linked to them liberally above; here’s the full list: Luke’s An Event Apart notes.
For the first time ever, the amount of data – text, e-mails, videos, music and other services – has surpassed the amount of voice data. “Originally, talking was the only cellphone application. But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks,” says Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel. In the past year the number of text messages sent has increased nearly 50% per user and the average local call length has dropped to 1.81 min, compared to 2.27 in 2008 (via nytimes.com).
So, what has caused this change? In my opinion, there are a couple of reasons that have led to this change:
1) Accessibility. Everyone is now online all the time. By tweeting, texting, or e-mailing you can talk to multiple people at a time, thus saving you – and the people you’re communicating with – time.
2) Intrusiveness. Calling someone seems much more intrusive then sending an e-mail or a tweet. It allows people to respond when it is convenient for them, and does not impose of anyone’s schedule.
2) Devices. It can take 2 to 3 steps to make a phone call on a cell phone these days. Smart phones with qwerty pads and touch-screens make it much easier (and more preferable) to send an email or text.
So next time you reach in your pocket to grab your phone stop and take a minute to think: what are you using your phone for?
Who would have thought that going to the NSTA Conference in Philly last week would have been so much fun? Don’t get me wrong, hanging with teachers can pretty much guarantee good times, but, sloths, penguins, millipedes, stick bugs, black widows, tarantulas, etc…Not to mention the ability to build myself out of Lego’s?…I was blown away.
I went to the conference to hang with National Geographic, one of the many well respected brands on our client roster. They had a booth at the conference and we saw it as a great opportunity to represent our work, as Nat Geo was showing screen shots of the education site that we are on the brink of launching for them. It was also a great opportunity to see what’s going on out there in the education industry and meet some key influencers in the community. I was overwhelmed by the technology and pure fun that was circulating the Pennsylvania Convention Center. I met passionate educators from Lego, The Discovery Channel, The American Museum of Natural History, Texas Instruments, Subaru, and yes even Toyota. The conference was filled with industry leaders who were amazingly perky despite the long day and lack of chairs.
The Sea World exhibit was by far the highlight of my day however. They had a live sloth named Harry….of course…who was the most active sloth I have ever seen. Granted the only other sloth I have seen was high up in a tree in Costa Rica..covered in moss…and didn’t move…I guess it could have been a stick…but regardless, Harry was not a stick…he was active, had horrible teeth, long nails and was about 20 years old. Long story short I have an awesome job and get to play with Sloths!
Me: “We did some research that indicates that the registration may have run out. Your organization registered and managed the domain name, so I can’t help with this since we have no involvement in managing the domain name.”
Client: “[very angry] I am reading your email in disbelief. You are the webmaster – how can there be an aspect of our website that you have no control over?”
Why is that client from hell? Because they don’t understand the relationship between domain name registration and site functionality? Because they called the webmaster when there was a problem with the website?
Sites like these, while good for the occasional laugh, only contribute to web professionals’ image as aloof, arrogant, know-it-alls. If clients don’t know how this stuff works, it’s not their fault.
On a positive note, Michael Beirut’s talk about great clients is inspiring, and highly recommended:
Who would have ever thought that after a few attempts at making your own home/office brew that we could sit down with our team, identify a client that we would LOVE to work with and then WIN them? Brooklyn Brewery, with its headquarters in Williamsburg Brooklyn, has just signed Blenderbox to be their 2010 Digital Agency of Record. Brooklyn Brewery was started in 1987 By Steve Hindy and distributes a number of their signature brews in 14 countries and growing. Blenderbox welcomes the opportunity to work with such a well known and respected brand. With it’s identity instilled by Milton Glaser, best know for his I Love New York campaign, Brooklyn Brewery will be a great brand to add to the Blenderbox client Roster. We look forward to some inspiring brainstorming sessions catalyzed by a Brooklyn Lager or Cookie Jar Porter!
We are in the professional services industry and our bottom line is directly tied to accurately estimating and tracking the hours of work that our resources spend on a project. I’m sure I’m not alone in struggling with the perennial problem of getting our team to “enter their time.” We use a home-grown system called “Homefry” which is integrated with Quickbooks and helps us track everyone’s time against particular job codes.
Everyone has different habits for keeping track of their time—some people jot down their time on a notebook and enter it all in at the end of the day or end of the week. Others use virtual post-its on their desktop, and others use their outlook calendar. Most people, do not enter time as they go, and as a result most people are always behind and trying to catch up on their time entry. This makes accurately reporting on budget vs. actual for various projects very difficult.
A few years ago I heard of an agency that made people sing “I’m a little teapot” whenever someone showed up late for a meeting. In that vein, I decided it was time to implement an incentive, something from the negative reinforcement camp (I don’t think a reward for most up-to-date time would work).
Introducing the Public Shame 2000. We purchased this device from Karaoke.com a few weeks ago, and the mere threat of having to perform karaoke (sober) in front of the entire office during our Tuesday morning staff meetings has been enough to nip this problem in the bud once and for all. I’m pleased to report that everyone’s time has been consistently up-to-date since the day we introduced this machine.
We have yet to turn on this machine, however, I’m sure that day will come at the next after hours office party.
Earlier this week, Blenderbox CEO and Co-Founder Jason Jeffries presented at the Brooklyn Business Summit on the importance of good customer relations.
Created by the Brooklyn Business Center, the Brooklyn Business Summit is dedicated to providing a “progressive venue and agenda for small business owners and entrepreneurs looking to become small business owners”. After building three successful businesses, Jason has gained extensive insight into creating and maintaining quality relationships with his clients and customers, insight that he shared with 50 small business owners at Wednesday’s Customer Satisfaction & Retention workshop.
Cutting through the traditional Customer Relation jargon, Jason mapped out a simple and effective guide to securing customer satisfaction using a modified version of the “Blenderbox method” — Listen, Think, Create, Deliver. By listening to your customer’s needs and desires, making your service memorable, and maintaining a personal involvement in your company’s client relationships, you can positively shape the perception of your company and generate quality business leads.
The message is simple, should business owners wish to embrace it: listening to what your clients have to say about your methods and addressing these critiques in your process is always the most effective way to keep your clients happy and your business booming.
While the next Brooklyn Business Summit has yet to be scheduled, video of Jason’s presentation will be available on their site soon, so keep checking back for more details.
Giles Bowkett’s presentation from the RubyFringe conference has been getting a lot of attention lately, with good reason. InfoQ calls it a “highly politicized call to action in a career-defining presentation that is raucously hilarious yet unnerving in its practicality”. The initial demo of Archaeopteryx, in which Giles DJs using nothing but TextMate and Ruby is interesting, but the real action starts when he gets into a discussion of the empowerment of being on the fringe.
I came across a great metaphor describing why multivariate testing of ad campaign landing pages (with a tool such as Google Website Optimizer) makes for a much more effective use of the money in an advertising budget.
The traditional way to do this is as follows:
Agree campaign budget
Build and sign off creatives (PPC ads, key words/phrases, landing page, offer details)
Take a sack of money
Move to top of building
Shake money out of sack
Sit back and hope
The better way to do this:
Agree budget
Brainstorm all the things we’d like to test (buttons, text, call to action msgs etc.)
Take 5% of budget and finalise *multiples* of these elements to test
Spend the 5% sending traffic to a multi-variate test
Find the ideal creative (based on conversion data)
Jason Jeffries, Blenderbox CEO, was a featured panelist discussing web marketing and social media for a Small Business Networking Event sponsored by the Alliance for Downtown New York.
The Panel was moderated by Peter Shankman, and also featured Robert Hordt, Managing Editor of Crain’s New York Business and Charlotte Eichna, Executive Editor of Our Town and West Side Spirit, part of Manhattan Media.
