The last batch of presentations:
Unconventional ways to promote your site
Paul Farnell
A really amazing talk that started out by saying that SEO, AdWords are conventional and talked about unconventional means of promoting your site / service / app. The first point being satellites – small freebish stuff that doesn’t need much work but are a constant drivers of visitors to your main site / service (examples: Litmus CSSVista, 37signals Ta-da Lists). Another valid proposition is to join social networks and forums that cover similar stuff your app does – a link in your signature can also make a lot of visitors. A big driver is the word “free” but since you can’t have only free stuff the guys at Litmus decided to launch every payable product/service with a short period when it’s free to use – they’re counting on the buzz since you can test the app without lock-in. This is a different approach to giving 30 days of free service when you register since it creates a bigger buzz when you launch. The main lesson is that you need to be human – you need to show enthusiasm (toward technology and your product) in order to build trust which will in turn give you access to passionate users (if they trust that you can solve their problem they will ask).
Evolving the User Experience
Daniel Burka
There are numerous ways of designing stuff – building complex stuff or building a modular structure. The first will give you a great solution if you know most of the parameters and the second will give you building blocks so you can build whatever you want. The thing is that even the first solution gives you possibilities to change – a nice example are older buildings that are now used for something they weren’t designed for. The web is also a good place to follow the users – what they’re doing is a direction for design and feature list and there is no excuse not to listen to this important feedback (you can also do this in architecture for setting up paths – set them where people walk, cause that’s the user pattern that evolved with the use of the park). Subtraction is also iteration – don’t be afraid to add, remove or just change small thing in the design – if you are you can always only deploy such new features to a limited number of users to see whether it works or not. Fixing things doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch – realigning the design is much more difficult but will land better with the users. There’s also no need to innovate to do something better – stuff that is out there works and you need to find out how it can work in your site. You also need to think of the iteration process – how often you’ll realign the page and how fast you can deploy and roll-out changes.
