Paul Sturgess
Kyan on tour at d.Construct
This year’s d.Construct ‘Designing The Social Web’ took place last week in Brighton and a few of the Kyan crew went along.
Overall the conference was inspiring and the talks were varied and interesting.
Highlights for me included…
Steven Johnson‘s ’Urban Web’ talk about the importance of local knowledge and how his company outside.in aggregates news based on location. Simply tell it where you are and it tells you what’s happening around you.
Joshua Porter’s talk on cognitive bias was interesting and raised the importance you should place when writing website copy and how it can effect your users.
He showed examples of interface design techniques, mostly from Freshbooks. One of them pointing out how they had carefully selected 3 users to ‘represent’ the typical user and how this influences people to try the service because of the bandwagon effect and ingroup bias.
He also said that he had worked with a large US retailer and they had seen a sales increase of 20% by removing the requirement to register before you buy. Unfortunately he wasn’t at liberty to name names.
The retailer also offered an incentive for registering, but instead of talking about the incentive, they talked about what the user lost by not registering – the reason being that users are typically loss averse. For example if you have a 50% chance of loosing or gaining £100, most people would choose not to take the chance.
Daniel Burka spoke about his role as creative director at Digg and the challenges he had faced.His best point for me was the importance he placed on observing how users use your site and to react to that. Through this they were able to deliver a comments system that really met their user’s needs. Rather than trying to predict all the problems at the beginning; be prepared to adapt and change your site as your users dictate.
All in all it was an enjoyable trip down to Brighton and we even managed to get one of the giant Sumo bean bags that were on offer. What a result!
Tags: dconstruct, brighton, conference
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