Jennifer Conley

Keynote: Blake Mycoskie

1. Who is TOM? There is no Tom. If we sell a pair of shoes today, we give a pair of shoes tomorrow. It’s an idea for a better tomorrow.
2. What is next for TOMS? Never answered but has known the answer since 2007. The next one for one product will be opened on June 7th. No longer a shoe company, it’s a One for One company. It will be our first step in meeting the rest of those needs around the world.

The Thank You Economy

Gary Vaynerchuk

So few startups talk about the end user. 2 questions Gary asks when he meets a startup entrepreneur:

Do you really have a grasp for the problem you’re looking to solve?

Do you care about the end user?

How about we do something that matters to the user instead of pushing more coupons?

Wine Library has a Thank You department.

We are living in the beginning of the humanization of business. (“it’s about to get really weird in here.)

10 years ago, the pet dog was an outside animal. Today, the dog is inside, in the bedroom, in the bed and he’s wearing better clothes than you do. Pets and animals are about to get humanized.

Everyone in media (social media hurts so much) are just pushing. What happens when we push? We ruin it.

We fucked up email. We hate getting email.

The reason we love our parents is because they love you first.

Everyone in social media marketing today acts like a 19-year old dude. They try to close too fast.

There is no such thing as a social media campaign. A social media campaign is a one-night stand.

The Old Spice campaign was the greatest thing that happened to @adage. Old Spice rocked the house - they had context and built off equity to build noise and attention. But here’s where they fucked up  - they didn’t talk to a single person. They pushed out commercials and didn’t give a shit about you. It was all push and no feel. They did not care about the end user - they built up all this equity.

When someone says something awesome about you and you retweet it, you're bragging, asshole.

Content calendars suck. How do you map out the next 30 days of content? It’s like going to a cocktail party with a script.

It’s small town rules - your great grandparents are more prepared than you are. All of you that worry about metrics and numbers and ROI will die. It’s incredible that we have to justify the ROI in social media.

People are going to start battling on the forefront. Context is ready. We are sharing things in our daily lives that we wouldn’t have shared 10 years ago. (Yummers!) Marketing is real. But companies are spamming the hell out of their networks.

I think we are living in the next 2-3 years that social media's going to get beat up a little; in the 2000s there were a lot of people who said the internet was a fad.

Social internet isn’t a fad because it’s human. Caring is scalable. Human elements matters.

From a business and human stand point, caring matters, and there’s real ROI.

There are two reasons why we spend money on things that’s not the best price: Convenience and Relationships.

Do not be on the wrong side of history. Your decisions will be how you are seen in the long term. Go on record.

Execute against your DNA. Lebron didn’t try to become a Professor.

Its not how many followers you have, its about how much your followers care about you.

5 Steps to Bulletproof UX Strategy

Robert Hoekman, Miskeeto LLC

“Without UX strategy, then everything is just a fun guess!”

1. Acquisition
2. Conversion
3. Engagement
4. Satisfaction

The moment you realize you have to step back is the moment you have gotten to the really important part of the design strategy process.

#2 - Define the vision. This will change everything. Most companies never get here. It’s where you clarify why it is what you’re doing and why it matters - what change you’re trying to manifest.

Purpose is not derived from products. Products are developed as a result of the purpose. The clearer the purpose, the better the products. @simonsinek.

Like any startup, we’ve struggled with a thousand and one small and large issues along the way. It can feel like “death by paper cuts” at times. Having a higher purpose keeps the whole team focused on what matters without sacrificing adaptability. While intelligent design may have no role in biology, it is invaluable to creating a startup that can lives up to your dreams. - Thor Muller

http://24waystostart.com/2010/the-vision-thing/

Now create a vision onesheet. A vision onesheet is your user experience strategy. Strategy onesheets get read all the time becuase it’s all bullet points. It raises the odds that people are actually going to read it and get why they’re doing this.

Download the template at rhjr.net/s/onesheet

Design criteria are specs and requirements to hit while designing. Must read if you’re into UX Strategy is Creating Great Design Principles and list of Published Design Principles by Jared Spool.

“You can influence an experience, but you can’t design one. I can't control whether a person is in a bad mood that day”

Once you have defined the vision, show it to people. Put it on the wall for everyone to see. This is the higher purpose - this is what you come to work for.

#1 - Audit. Take inventory of the website. What are the primary, secondary tasks? Be ruthless - what are all the problems.

Read: World’s Easiest Way to Critique a Design. What is the one thing you want people to do on this page?

To summarize, start from the beginning. Audit, Define, Plan, Implement, Measure. Don’t do it backwards. Do it in the right order and these steps will work. If you start at step #5,  you will spend a lot of time getting to step #2.

If you’re a startup company and you don’t have a UX resource, you’re doing something wrong. Start with the vision.

Buy the book Designing the Obvious - http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Obvious-Common-Approach-Application/dp/032145345X

Learnable.com - User Experience Tools, Tricks and Techniques
https://learnable.com/courses/user-experience-tools-tricks-techniques-183

Conserve Code: Storyboard Experiences with Customers First

Rachel Evans, Principle Research Scientist, Chief Innovation Catalyst at Intuit

Joseph O’Sullivan, Lead Design Innovation at Intuit

• Deep Customer Empathy - know your customer better than they know themselves.
• Go Broad to Go Narrow - if you need one great idea you need a whole set of great ideas.
• Rapid Experimentation with Customers

Storyboarding first originated -

1930’s - Hells Angels by Howard Hughes.

1933 - Disney started storyboarding the animations to understand the flow and rearrange scenes.

Customers are more likely to give honest feedback if storyboards look quickly drawn rather than highly polished. Use messy designs and show them to your customers in the early stages of the design process, get the feedback & then refine.

Storyboarding...

It’s a Mirror - You’re telling the customer’s story.

Pitty Begets Honesty - Get the customer to focus in the sense of what is being protrayed.

Narcissus Antidote - It’'s easier to throw away a storyboard rather than the code of a prototype for a better idea.

• Problem - do we get the problem is this an important enough problem to solve.
• Solution - does this solution solve the problem completely.
• Benefit - what will be good about your idea from the customer’s perspective. Will it delight them.

• What’s the problem you’re working on?  
• Who is your customer? - Be specific. Don’t be everything to no one.
• What’s the problem from the customer’s POV? I'm trying to  ____________  but _______ ________. The first part of the formula is the customer's goal and the second part is their problem/sticking point.
• What’s your fantastic solution you have dreamed up here? Capture those salient, triggering moments that you really want to understand and get feedback from the customer on. Pick out 3 most important solutions and capture that in your script.
• What’s the benefit? (hint: it’s not the feature list.) What would a customer say is great about your solution? It typically would not include the language or terms you would use or say to your boss. If customers say they would never go back to the old solution, you have a killer idea on your hands.
• Learning - what do you want to learn from the problem, solution and benefit. Your goal is to garner as much new feedback as possible.

Common problem - you shove too many problems in one storyboard. At intuit, they do a ton of storyboards to understand the nuance of each problem. It’s actually more efficient to do a lot of storyboards up front.

Christopher Poole

Founder4chan/Canvas

Christopher "moot" Poole is the founder of 4chan.org, a simple image-based bulletin board, which has grown from a niche site targeting anime fans to one of the most influential communities on the 'Net. With over 12 million unique visitors per month, many popular viral videos, Internet phenomena, and memes get their start on 4chan. In 2010 Poole was a featured speaker at the TED Conference, and he has been profiled by TIME, CNN, The Washington Post, and Technology Review. Recently he started a new project called Canvas, which is working on new and better ways for people to hang out and collaborate online. In addition to 4chan and Canvas, Chris advises Lerer Ventures, a seed stage venture capital fund, and hackNY, a non-profit dedicated to strengthening the New York student hacker scene. He is also a member of the Free Art and Technology Lab.

4chan is the dark part of the internet. Internet memes are born here. 15,000 are browsing just the index page of random at all moments of the day.

There’s no registration. It’s completely anonymous - no barriers. There’s no archive - constant waterfall of content falling off the website. Bad content on the board will disappear in minutes.

The community is constantly changing, there’s different people on there every day.

In order to start a topic, you have to provide an image. Topics range from origami to pornography.

Poole asked what can we do better on 4chan? The message board has not come anywhere in the last 10+ years. The form and aesthetics have not changed.

4chan is a bare bones basic website. You can post an image and insert text. People see the image and content, manipulate in, re-upload it - the process is what’s most fascinating.

No identity on 4chan - the anonymity allows to people to try and fail and be creative. Anonmity is authenticity - you share in an unvarnished and unfiltered way. In content creation, you might create something that you might not otherwise if you don’t have an identity.

“The cost of failure is pretty high [on a site] when you're contributing as yourself, identified by your real name."

Favorite moot game - the community refrigerator magnet game. It’s always being washed away with new stuff.

New product called Canvas. It’s taking all the things moot learned at 4chan and trying to build this really great site where people share, collaborate and hang out... still anonymously. It’s a first pass at weeding out trolls. It’s only 6-weeks old but people are already creating incredible things:

Took Canvas a long time to get to 1200 users. It wasn’t like a hockey stock. They want to establish a core culture and grow slowly and nurture this product until it can be open to the public. The issue is not scaling. It's building a community worth scaling.

Joshua Porter, VP at UXPerformable

Metrics-Driven Design

@bokardo

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Imagine that your design is a mountain. Your small mountain is your existing design - it’s on the side of the mountain. Take an engineering driven approach and you can push the design up to the top of your small mountain. This is your local maxima - you can’t go any further because there’s nothing else to test. Your goal is on top of the other larger mountain. You’re on the wrong mountain.

Optimization asks: What works best in the current model?

Design innovation asks: What is the best possible model?

By definition: Metrics are simply numbers that measure the effectiveness of your business.

1. Metrics reduce arguments based on opinion. (They don’t remove them... they reduce them.)
2. Metrics give you answers about what really works. (They can also lead you down a rabbit hole.)
3. Metrics show you were you’re strong as a designer. (Also shows where you’re weak as a designer.)
4. Metrics allow you to test anything you want. (Metrics empower you to try whatever you want to try. You can test the effectiveness before selling it.)
5. Clients love metrics. (If you can go into a pitch and show them metrics that this worked better than this, they’ll love it.)

Let’s talk about metrics:

1. Acquisition metrics
   1. CPA - Cost per acquisition
   2. How much did it cost to acquire that customer?
   3. If your CPA is higher than your LTV (Life Time Value) then you’re in trouble.

Look at your most active users and reverse engineer their experience.

Design changes to Facebook’s deactivation page accounted for 1 million members not leaving the service.

Principles of Design Metrics:

1. Optimise in small steps
2. Innovate w/ daring leaps
3. No design survives contact with user.

A culture of testing

Netflix tests everything. They're very proud that they A/B test interactions, offerings, pricing, everything. It's almost enough to get you to believe that rigorous testing is the key to success.

Except they didn't test the model of renting DVDs by mail for a monthly fee.

And they didn't test the model of having an innovative corporate culture.

And they didn't test the idea of betting the company on a switch to online delivery.

The three biggest assets of the company weren't tested, because they couldn't be.

Sure, go ahead and test what's testable. But the real victories come when you have the guts to launch the untestable.

M Jackson Wilkinson

User Experience Lead, Posterous

bac’n - it’s the spam you sort of want to get. it’s the one you’ve signed up for and now they’re sending you emails. you want them but maybe not right now.

How have we gotten here?

It started with shipment notices. Sometimes you don’t even read the message. You just see shipped and say, “cool.”

Then it moved to direct messages and facebook messages.

1. Notify the user
2. Read the subject line
3. Open the email
4. Find the notification email
5. Click a link in the email
6. Login to the website
7. Confirm private info

The success rate of these emails start to grow.

People start to visit your website.

So you start sending more.

And then the engagement starts to fall.

Email Silence Tips:

1. Don’t forget the important stuff. Facebook sends notifications when your friend comments on a photo but doesn’t tell you which photo.
2. Don’t beat around the bush. Posterous (old) emails had four different links in activation email. People abandoned the emails and didn’t click. Posterous (new) emails have one action - one button and even an arrow pointing to it!
3. Nail your metadata.
   1. App or company name in the From line
   2. Keep the From line to 20-25 characters
   3. Specific subject lines
4. Effective messages are designed messages.
5. Careful with the promos.

John McRee, Lead User Experience Architect

Your Mom Has an iPad: Designing for Boomers

Effective UI

@johnmcree

• 47% of internet users ages 5-54 using social networks
• 26% of internet users ages 65+ using social networks

Design for goals, behaviors, aptitude, and attitude, not generation.

• Like to learn new technologies and share their knowledge - who doesn’t?
  • Get passed the suck threshold.
  • Overlay the interface with instructions.
  • Point towards being obvious.

• Boomers want technology to be safer.
  • Feedback - use loading icons, avoiding the windows hourglass
  • Re-traceable steps - Use Pagination & Breadcrumbs
  • Strong visual design - where’s the logo? Can I trust this website? Does it look like a credible trustworthy website?

• Boomers want technology to be easier to use.
  • Consistent navigation behavior - use one not 3

• Boomers see technology as a tool.
  • Don’t just add features to tools to make your product more compelling.

• Expect technology to adapt to them
  • Augmented reality has to be useful

Tony Schwartz

The 90 Minute Solution: Live Like a Sprinter

The Energy Project  

Author: Be Excellent at Anything

The reality about technology - we have spent most of our lives trying to think about, develop, create, talk about ways of better mastering the external world that we live in. We’ve haven’t been focusing on investing our energy in managing our inner world. Why does that matter? That is where our capacity resides. Capacity resides in us.

Time is an external resource and time is finite.

Energy is an internal resource and can be expanded and renewed. Energy, in physics, is the capacity to do work.

Human beings need four sources of energy.

1. Physical Energy (Quantity)
   1. Fitness
   2. Nutrition
   3. Glucose
   4. Sleep
   5. Rest
2. Emotional (Quality)
3. Mental (Focus) - our attention is under siege.
4. The Human Spirit (Purpose)

Truth: We must renew our energy.

Ultradian Rythym:

The ultradian rhythm are recurrent periods or cycles repeated throughout a 24-hours day. In contract, infraian ryththms, have periods longer than a day. The descriptive term is used in sleep research in reference to the 90-120 minute cycling of the sleep stages during sleep.  

Wikipedia

How well are you managing your energy?

Push to limits for 90 minutes and then take a break. Recover energy by taking 20-30 minutes breaks. Take a nap! In hour 10, 12, 14, who is likely to have more energy and make lesser mistakes?

Sleep is critical. We undervalue sleep - one hour less of sleep will add one hour of productivity to your day. Reality is even small amounts of sleep deprivation have a profound impact. How much sleep do we need? 95% of all human beings require at least 7-8 hours of sleep in order to be fully rested.

About 80% of the room raised there hand when asked how many people have slept less than 7 hours of sleep in the last week for 3 or more days.

About 30% of the room raised there hand when asked who has slept less than 5 hours for 3 or more consecutive days in the last week.

We are doing more and more - we are sucking in more and more information. Doing more and more is getting us less and less. (Hmmmm... I would disagree with this.)

Herbert Simon on the attention economy:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it"

Wikipedia

David Meyer

We are running a marathon and there is no end. Life is a sprint. There is a finish line, an end point, and boundaries.

Do this: Intense uninterrupted focus and then deep recovery.