Will Hertling's Summary of WebVisions 2010

Full notes from my buddy Will Hertling, Web 2.0 Support Strategist for HP. That guy never ceases to amaze.

I wanted to share my notes from attending Web Visions this year, a web design conference in Portland.

I put a summary with links to notes from all the sessions here: http://www.williamhertling.com/2010/05/web-visions-2010-summary-wv2010.html

I always wanted to draw attention specifically to Designing Social Experiences, a topic that will be relevant to ePrintCenter: http://www.williamhertling.com/2010/05/erin-malone-design-social-experiences.html

The UX Driven Startup was also a great session with some very specific, concrete tools for creating, communicating, and validating user experiences: http://www.williamhertling.com/2010/05/ux-driven-startup-notes-from-alexa.html

Finally, the Expectation Gap, part of the keynote address by Luke Williams, was particularly inspiring about how to create innovations by turning customer expectations on their head: http://www.williamhertling.com/2010/05/luke-williams-keynote-address-at-web.html

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Revealing Design Treasures From The Amazon

My main takeaways from Jared Spool's talk on Amazon.com:

• Ratio of reviewers to purchasers = 1 in 1300.
  
• Ie. To generate 20 reviews, you need 26,000 purchasers.
• 1 in 1300. Sounds similar to @Hertling's 0.1% number for contributers to consumers on Wikipedia. Or was that 0.01%?

Nobody likes flip-the-switch website redesigns! Amazon changes things incrementally. It takes 12 weeks to fully deploy a change. Lots of little tweaks and experiments with A/B testing on a small sample size on the live site first.. 

He presented in Portland last week, but here’s an earlier rev of the same presentation, complete with audio.

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What if a major corporation were to design the stop sign…

Listen first, talk later

Tweet from @iizLiz

true -> RT @marketingveep: If you want customers to see you as relevant, you must first be silent. Listening reveals what matters.

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Your own personal printing press... at Walmart

HP Helps Wal-Mart Transform From Photos To Publishing - Global CIO Blog - InformationWeek
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/05/hp_helps_walmar.html;jsessionid=LPJQGJEELNRDJQE1GHOSKHWATMY32JVN

Hewlett-Packard is helping Wal-Mart expand into the publishing business by sweeping aside the old photo-printing model and letting customers select and print everything from greeting cards to branded images from concerts, TV shows, and movies. 

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Information Foraging: The Scent of Information

Web design as a fox hunt: Make your content look like a nutritious meal and signal that it's an easy catch

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030630.html

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Information Foraging: Scent of Information

This is some older work from Jacob Nielson:  http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030630.html

Diet Selection: What to Eat

A fox lives in a forest with two kinds of rabbits: big ones and small ones. Which should it eat? The answer is not always "the big rabbits."

Whether to eat big or small depends on how easy a rabbit is to catch. If big rabbits are very difficult to catch, the fox is better off letting them go and concentrating exclusively on hunting and eating small ones. If the fox sees a big rabbit, it should let it pass: the probability of a catch is too low to justify the energy consumed by the hunt.

The big difference between websites and rabbits is that websites want to be caught. So how can you design a site to make your content attractive to ravenous beasts?

The two main strategies are to make your content look like a nutritious meal and signal that it's an easy catch. These strategies must be used in combination: users will leave if the content is good but hard to find, or if it's easy to find but offers only empty calories.

This dual strategy is the reason I recommend that you showcase sample content on the homepage (appear nutritious) and prominently display navigation and search features (demonstrate that users can easily find what they're looking for). Diet selection also supports the traditional advice against splash screens and vacuous content. These elements convey to users that they're in for a tedious ordeal that serves up only scrawny rodents as rewards.

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"90-9-1" Rule for User Participation

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

Summary: 
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don't participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.

In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. This phenomenon of participation inequality was first studied in depth by Will Hill in the early '90s, when he worked down the hall from me at Bell Communications Research (see references below).

When you plot the amount of activity for each user, the result is a Zipf curve, which shows as a straight line in a log-log diagram.

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute).
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don't have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they're commenting on occurs.

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Mobile First!

Jason Grigsby (@grigs):
5/21/10 9:55 AM
Amazing presentation from @lukewdesign on what Mobile First means http://bit.ly/bZWUPx (Large PDF) #wv10
http://twitter.com/grigs/status/14440290421

via Twittelator Pad

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Google's 3 mobile behaviors

Jason Grigsby (@grigs):
5/21/10 9:53 AM
Google: 3 Mobile Behaviors - Repetitive now. Bored now. Urgent now. http://bit.ly/auGu8g #wv10
http://twitter.com/grigs/status/14440187690

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@Grigs: Mobile UNIQUE!

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Pixton® - Create web comics online

http://pixton.com/
Interesting web app for storyboarding.

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Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login

Amazing!

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_loginpage17.php

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. You can however click here and become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, to receive our updates and learn more about the Internet. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type "facebook.com" into your browser address bar or enter "facebook" into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.

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Getting People to Sign Up for Your Site

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Kevin Cheng - See What I Mean Book Site

Rosenfeld Media - See What I Mean Book Site
http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/comics/

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Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008: Clay Shirky

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What is Google Wave?

Great storytelling... Sense of humor... Do it in a day!

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Should designer learn to program?

Well, here's one point of view:
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/03/10/designers-are-not-programmers/

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Sketchboards: Good UX faster, better

We do this already, we just have to do this more. How easily we forget!

http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000863.php

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Designing Social Interfaces diagram

Derek Keevil (@hatsharpener) 5/19/10 10:56 AM Here's the social ecosystem diagram that they're using in the Designing Social Interfaces workshop #wv2010 http://ow.ly/1NdVv

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Ross Mayfield - power law of participation

hatsharpener (@hatsharpener) 5/19/10 10:38 AM Here's the missing slide from the social design workshop at #wv2010: Ross Mayfield - power law of participation http://ow.ly/1Ndmm

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he Usage Lifecycle: Stages of Social Adoption

http://bokardo.com/archives/designing-for-the-social-web-the-usage-lifecycle/

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GameGame: Learn Game Design through playing a game

http://gamegame.blogs.com/gamegame/2007/05/gamegame_worksh.html

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Unveiling Social Mania: The Game at Idea 09

http://www.emdezine.com/deziningInteractions/2009/09/27/unveiling-social-mani...

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SmartFM Case Study

http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/category/smartfm/

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Community Management and Social CRM: LiNC 2010

http://blog.insideview.com/2010/05/16/on-lithium/

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How to Motivate People: Skip the Bonus and Give Them a Real Project

http://www.fastcompany.com/1646337/science-shows-that-bigger-bonuses-create-w...

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Worth thinking through how & when forcing customers to register

william hertling (@hertling) 5/14/10 3:58 PM I love this story of how making a customer register to make a purchase cost $300M in lost sales - http://bit.ly/amHCqQ

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Free Design Resources

50 Free Handwritten Fonts for Web Designers and Logo Artists

http://www.instantshift.com/2009/06/08/50-free-handwritten-fonts-for-web-designers-and-logo-artists/

100+ Exceptionally Useful Free Handwritten Fonts For Designers

http://visionwidget.com/resources/fonts/95-free-handwritten-fonts.html

18 Free GUI PSD Common Elements for Designers

http://visionwidget.com/toolz/4-design/488-free-gui-psd-elements.html

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