UX London Redux

On Wednesday night I met up with the great and the good of London IA for a redux version of the much lauded UX London conference that took place back in June. The event was a loose recreation of stand out seminars and conferences from the original, presented by people who had attended and watched by those who (like me) hadn’t been able to make it first time round.

Christian Petzny on Dan Saffer. When brainstorming, “Reduce the problem down to a haiku or bento poem.”

Tom Coombs on Donna Spencer and Jared Spool. Musings on  optical illusions, and the importance of clarity of language in navigations.

James Box on Wireframing 2.0. Electronic wireframes - quick and easy to create, and perfect for clients and developers. Good thing tictoc already use them!

Frances and Jane from IG Index rounded off the night with a heated game of D-UX-tionary. Playing boys against girls our team scratched our barnets over terms like ‘mash up’, ‘personalisation’ and ‘open source’. The boys had to draw “radio buttons”. Clearly, the match was fixed.

Apart from this ego busting defeat it was a fantastic night. As a newbie everyone made me very welcome, so big thanks to all the organisers and speakers.

By Jo Kerr
Published: 14 August 2009
2 Comments

Report from OFFF 2009

Sitting in an airless, dark hangar with 3,000+ other people, in microwave-like heat, listening to some “show OFFFers”, I was trying to decide whether I should stay here and die or go out to the beach and have a swim...

After being at FITC in Amsterdam last year (a much smaller conference compared to OFFF), and at OFFF this year I have been keeping a record of all the weak/strong aspects of every presentation I have seen (mostly development/programming-related), which I have decided to turn into a short guideline about how to make a good presentation.

Rule One: Intro

The first 5-10 minutes is always the crucial part of the speech – I’d compare it to the very first 10 seconds of contact between two people – if your attitude is good and words interesting enough, people will stay and listen, otherwise they’ll leave shortly, interrupting everyone. How to engage the audience then?

Stand up

Some presenters were sitting, some were standing. Stand up – you’ll definitely make more impact on the audience and strengthen your body language, communicating much more.

Do not talk too much (crap) about yourself

Keep your intro bit as short as possible, do not go into unnecessary details. Some presenters talk a lot about their private stuff or get into their private issues. The audience is not a support group thus it’s better to introduce yourself briefly without getting into personal trips. People really don’t care how cool you’re telling them you are, they will see it themselves.

Speak clearly, slowly and loud enough

It's a good idea to ask the audience if they can hear you well, sometimes the room acoustics may be difficult and you may lose some listeners. It’s best to ask people that can’t hear you to raise their hands and then ask the soundman to adjust the volume.

Rule Two: Have a concept and be prepared

Some speakers started off beautifully but once they got deeper, they got into too many details and then somehow got stuck – and then nothing else happened till the end. People don't really want to see/hear about the same stuff for hours, so try to change the subject from time to time, make it diverse, interesting and engaging. The audience can clearly tell if the speaker has thought his stuff through.

Ask yourself what might be interesting to other people and if/how they can benefit from it

Try to show something more than people can see on your website, show some unedited footage/mock-ups, sketches, "the making of" films etc.

Try to make your entire presentation tell a story, have the beginning and a definite end (i.e. surprise with a sudden ending). If you see you’re running out of time, skip some less important parts in the middle but keep the end bit.

Also try not to repeat yourself too much, saying the same phrase 2-3 times is usually enough.

Deal calmly with technical issues

If it comes to the worst (i.e. you've lost all your data/your hard drive got eaten) – improvise, but never make a fundamental mistake by making excuses (unless you make a joke out of it).

Rule Three: Entertain

Stefan Sagmeister came up onto the stage dressed in a rather funny woman’s polka dot costume. I’ve been seeing Brandon Hall wearing some kind of a chef’s suit. Whatever the outfit was, it always piqued my curiosity. What’s that all about? Entertainment.

By putting on something special you are showing you’ve made an effort to wear something other than a t-shirt. That pays back in the extra attention you receive. Beware though, it’s easy to exaggerate and be too fancy, stylish hats and glasses will make a celebrity out of you. So uncool!

Ka-boom!

Try to surprise audience by showing some shocking/unexpected/impactful imagery (even ones that are in contrast with what you're talking about). Generate a wide spectrum of emotions, from laughter to concern.

It’s important to avoid over-excitement – if you get overwhelmed, you’re likely to lose your clarity.

Interact

Get responses from the audience, ask them to raise their hands etc. Form questions in a way that will give you an immediate estimate on something important, but avoid obvious questions – otherwise people won’t interact.

Reward

You can bring some prizes to give away at the end, throw t-shirts or something else, people will adore you and you'll keep them sitting till the end.

Rule Four: Impress, motivate and educate

You’re talking to hundreds, be responsible and make people amazed. Get them to strive to go further every day.

Gijs Gieskes was showing his amazing DIY instruments, unfortunately some of them didn’t work, so he went online to show the videos of them. That didn’t work either as the network lag was too long for the videos to buffer in a reasonable time. So don’t rely on the internet connection as it may be flaky and you won’t be able to play your Youtube videos, try to have all your files available locally.

Use full screen mode when possible, it’s nicer to view a video without unnecessary context. For the same reason try not to use fancy backgrounds for your slides, it's distracting and takes the focus away from what you're saying.

You can write your own software to handle your presentation, it’s very well received by the audience as it proves that you’re really prepared.

When things go wrong, let it go. If your code still doesn’t compile after the third attempt and neither you nor the audience can fix it, leave it. It’s better to say sorry (weakness is a strength) than desperately trying to attack the frozen beef with the plastic knife.

Make full use of your operating system or application by using keyboard shortcuts, auto completion (coders) and other techniques. There are two main benefits of this approach: firstly, you do things faster, so the audience doesn’t need to roll their eyes when you type SuchACoolFunctionNameWhichIsOnlySeventyFiveCharactersLong; and secondly, you teach people how to do repetitive things more efficiently.

If you show source code, always use monospaced font, dark background and white text usually works better than the opposite, especially in hard lighting conditions. Delete all commented code that you won't use in your demonstration.

Finally, have fun and love what you do.

By Tomek
Published: 11 May 2009
1 Comment

Gold for Cardonald

Just home from the Scotland's Colleges Marketing Awards where Cardonald College took home more awards than I suspect they have shelf space for back in Glasgow. 

In total they picked up four awards, and without a doubt the highlight of the evening was watching Jude collect the Gold award for their website.

Keep an eye on the site over the next few weeks as we roll out the latest round of new features.

By Kerry Reid
Published: 19 February 2009
3 Comments

Lessons for charities

I came across this article on eConsultancy about the many ways in which Obama harnessed the power of digital in his campaigning, and how charities could use these simple strategies as part of their campaigns, fundraising, marketing.

It did make me think about how we all (not just charities) need to be monitoring, responding, engaging online - and yes, I do know how time-consuming and resource-intensive it can be! I also know that it can be very effective, and very powerful.

tictoc has done lots of digital work for charities: we've created virals, Facebook apps, developed websites and campaign microsites, ensured sites elicit donations, run eNewsletter campaigns, carried out Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click marketing campaigns... but I don't think we've done the whole lot for one client. Which just goes to show how at the moment, charities are probably not being quite as joined up and coherent online as they could be.

Let's not forget that some of these lessons can be learned by businesses and brands too. Online reputation management is becoming a hot topic, and it's something we're starting to work on here at tictoc.

If you've seen good or bad examples of businesses, brands and charities doing stuff in the digital world, tell us about it!

By Kate Wooding
Published: 13 November 2008
0 Comments

Silver lining for etailers

New research shows that the current economic situation may have a silver lining for etailers - although 64% of respondents said that the economic climate would force them to reduce their overall spending, 56% said that they would continue to shop online as much as they are already, while some will even spend more.

The report, by E-consultancy, also looks at the importance of price, user-reviews and recommendations for consumers when online shopping.

Responses show that price comparison sites are becoming more important - the report suggests that retailers should be submitting their product feeds to price comparison engines to take advantage of this - and that user-reviews are also of growing importance, particularly to the younger market (72% of the 25-34 age group said they would be more likely to read online reviews, the figure for over 55s was 53%).

Matthew Tod, one of the authors of the report, commented "We can see from this report that silver surfers are not into social media or comparison engines and are intending to spend more as the downturn does not touch them. But on the other hand a whole group of more financially pressed people now use social media to make decisions and then comparison engines to find the best deal. Complexity rules and simple strategies will fail if online retailers don't understand this."

By Kate Wooding
Published: 15 August 2008
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More restaurants, less hunger!

By Super Administrator
Published: 26 September 2007
0 Comments