MinneWebCon 2009

MinneWebCon was full of amazing talks and inspiring discussion on various web topics. Here are my notes from the day:

The Intention Economy
Doc Searls

• "I'm a born procrastinator."
• Check out Mona Shaw, Comcast customer who trashes office because of poor customer service.
• Wife asked long ago, "Why can't my shopping cart move from one site to another?" This continues to be a problem more than 10 years later.
• Ridiculous terms of service never change and are never read.
• Loyalty cards fill your wallet and keychain. Everyone has them. Why should you have to be a member?
• Trader Joe's - no coupons, no loyalty cards, but good food. Good experience.
• Managing coupons and loyalty programs is a lot of overhead.
• "Your own personal barcode."
• These aren't relationships. They're data in someone else's database.
• Help the customer. Guide them to the products they want efficiently.
• Stay anonymous. Log in with phone number. No name. No address.
• Facebook is AOL 2.0. It's temporary. It's an experiment.

UX for Community Building
Jason Sack

• Jason was inspired by Doc Searls' talk this morning.
• Wants to talk about the big picture today.
• Experience design is an emerging discipline that's hard to define.
• Look to medieval cathedrals as an example of participatory design and "experience design".
• Immersion, illusion, exclusivity, educational, inspirational, interaction
• Hybrid Design Experience - zipcar, Kiva, One Laptop Per Child
• Interaction drives community experience.
• Think globally, act locally.
• Challenge old ways of thinking.

Standardizing Web User Interfaces
Zach Johnson

• Web UIs aren't standard and don't meet user expectations.
• Need to standardize functionality.
• Display of error messages is inconsistent.
• Inconsistent UI is hard for users to figure out.
• Accessibility: must have labels (tags). "What am I signing up for?"
• It's too expensive to compete without standards.
• Developers need guidance on best practices.
• Always provide permalinks to content.

User Experience
Santiago Fernandez-Gimenez & Julia Schrenkler

• Workshop on usability and user experience.
• Audience shares what works for them.
• PR people know components of relationships - mutual understanding, trust, committment.
• Get stakeholders to be part of the UX process, watching and observing.
• Find an employee who's unfamiliar for easy, quick testing.
• When stakeholders see problems, solutions often pop into their heads immediately.
• Let participants write notes on screenshots of the system they evaluated.
• Better to hear complaints than to hear silence. Silence means they don't care.
• Use card sorting for site organization. The user might know a better term for something.
• Repeat testers get more opinionated as they are more familiar with the testing process.
• Try being a user so you learn what it's like. Will make you a better moderator.
• Give goals instead of tasks.
• "Yahoo's number one search term is Google."

Web Culture & Privacy
Bruce Schneier

• English town blocked Google's streetview van for privacy concerns.
• Greatest threat to privac is that there is no greatest threat.
• Threat is combination of sources of information.
• Easypass transaction records show up in court.
• Twitter vs Phone - records have value.

Fact or Fancy? How to Make Fact-Driven Decisions for Your Website
Southerton, Bungum, Kupritz

• How can we help users make good choices?
• If you don't understand the target, you will always splash.
• Always ask why they're making the design effort.
• Users are people. "I like to call them people. I know it's shocking."
• It's cheaper to find problems before the solution is made.
• Your competitors learn from your mistakes.
• 80% of maintenance is spent on unmet user needs.
• Common to usability test vendor choices before purchasing a package.
• Who uses your site?
• People don't complain that content is too easy to read.
• Don't assume. It'll get you into trouble.
• Make good business decisions.
• Follow standards.
• Don't let egos get in the way.