SXSW: DAY 1

Since I skipped the entire first day, including all the parties, I was able to get started bright and early on Saturday morning. Â First thing I had to do though was pick up my badge at 9 am. Â There were quite the number of people who were there before 9 waiting to get their badges as well so I was a little worried that I would be spending a good amount of time just getting that done. Â Thankfully, the process went much quicker than the security line at O’Hare airport went the day before.

Anyhoo, these are the sessions I attended:

Session 1: Using Twitter to Improve College Student Engagement
Dr. Rey Junco, @reyjunco

As one of the niche sites I work on is specially related to the college market, I thought this would be a valuable session to attend. Â The content was a little different than I had expected since it was more geared to engaging students in an educational setting, not for general business. Â I still found it interesting nevertheless. Â The speaker was definitely quirky but in a good way. Â He was kind of like one of those professors that borderline being really cool and really cheesy at trying to relate to his younger audience.

While the studies in this session were mostly concentrated around twitter, facebook was discussed briefly in the beginning. Â One interesting point I thought that was brought up was that time spent on facebook is a negative predictor of how much one is engaged in facebook. Â Positive predictors are actually events, comments and viewing photos. Â In fact, less engaged students spend more time on facebook. Â Apparently, getting metrics on facebook is difficult and faculty was more interested in integrating twitter over FB.

The study conducted 2 experiments:
Study #1: In the experimental group, students were actively told to engage with twitter by the faculty. Â In the control group, students were actively told to engage in ning by the faculty.

Study #2: Students receive no active encouragement to use twitter
Rather than spend a huge chunk of my time writing up the activities and results of each of these studies, I found you can actually download some of the slides used in his presentation and even more detailed information about the experiments on his blog: http://blog.reyjunco.com/

Twitter Improves Student Engagement and Grades

The studies found that faculty must use twitter to:
1) Engage with students
2) Integrate course content
3) Encourage collaborative learning

Another takeaway I thought that was interesting about this session was a specific technology used during the study. Â The software was called Leximancer and it was used to link concepts across the various tweets of the students and faculty used in the study.

Session 2: Designing For Silence : Using Email for Good
Michael Jackson Wilkinson, Posterous, @whafro

I thought this was an interesting session to attend since we send a lot of email to our users and you always wonder what’s the right amount of emails to send before it becomes detrimental to your business. Â You have to remember that not only are you sending emails, but everyone’s inboxes are being filled with groupon, livingsocial, facebook, twitter and all sorts of sites you might be signed up for. Â So how do you keep your company emails from being lost in all the clutter and so that your users don’t end up unsubscribing from your emails all together.

“Strive to make noise only when it improves the silence.”

Bac’n (pronounced: bake – on)

Spam you sort of want to get. (haha)
Examples: Amazon purchase confirmations, twitter direct message notifications, etc.
Insight: Not everything everyone follows (such as every friend on facebook) is equal.

Things you can do to modify current email interactive with users before you see diminishing returns:

Bundling

Allow users to elect to wrap multiple notifications into oneExample: Daily digests versus instant notification of each interaction

Bundling Wisely

What should you bundle?
One idea: Customize on the frequency for each person or group of people.
Generally users give you clues on how frequently they want to interact with service such as how often/when they login

Highlighting Favorites

Reorder email content based on frequency of views
How much time are they spending on certain items

Since You’ve Been Gone

Give users a nice recap of things that have happened since they last visited the site
Example: Most active things others have been viewing
Example: What were the last 5 things I viewed the last time I was at the site. Â You can have the browser store these items.

Overall Lessons:

1. Don’t forget the important stuff

Don’t leave out the detail to get users to go back to the site. Â Generally backfires and ends up annoying users more than helping your site.
Example: Facebook photo comment notifications don’t tell you which photo your friend commented on

2. Don’t beat around the bush

If there is an action required, make sure it’s clear to the user
Be clear with what you want users to do with transactional email messages
Example: Big button for link you need users to take action upon

3. Meta data

Keep app or company name in the from line
Keep the from line to 20 – 25 characters
Specific subject lines

4. Effective messages are designed messages

This doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be the best looking emails
It more means that you should consider the hierarchy of what you want the user to do

5. Be careful with promos

Keep it so there is not more promos than content or that promos do not confuse user on what to do

Session 3: Metrics-Driven Design
Joshua Porter, @bokardo

This was probably in my top 3 sessions of the entire conference. Â The great thing about this session was that the presenter gave everyone a link at the very end where people could download his slides:Â http://bokardo.com/talks/metrics-driven-design (I wish I had known this otherwise I wouldn’t have been furiously trying to write down every word).

These are the key things I took away:

Optimization asks: What works best in the current model?

Design innovation asks: What is the best possible model?

Metrics are simply the numbers that measure the effectiveness of your business.

Example: “Must improve conversion by… “

5 Reasons Why Metrics are Designers’ friends:

Metrics reduce arguments based on opinion
Metrics give you answers about what really works
Metrics show you where you’re strong as a designer (and weak)
Metrics allow you to test anything you want
Clients love metrics

With metrics, you are measuring how you are moving people along the usage life cycle.

There are 5 types of metrics:

Acquisition
Conversion
Engagement
Satisfaction
Emergent

Acquisition Metrics

CPA – Cost Per Acquisition
If your CPA is higher than your lifetime value, you’re in trouble
Acquisition vs. Referral
- Example: DropBox
- Paying too much for Google AdWords
- Created 2 sided incentive program for referrals where both the referrer and referree benefit
- Extremely successful
- Increased signup permanently by 60%
Performable acquisition metrics include:
- Comparative metrics
- Revenue by channel
- Revenue by keyword
Email lists then to be extremely valuable

Conversion Metrics

Example: Twitter redesigned their sign-up flow
Looked at their most active users and re-engineered what they were doing
Made their site very topic based
They added a 2nd page – a category list where people can self-select what to follow

Engagement Metrics

From most traditional down:

Hits
Page Views
Visits
Unique Visitors
Returning Users
Registered Users
Customers
Frequency
Time on site
Daily active users

Cohort Analysis

Break up users into segments based on when they started

Prevention: Facebook Deactivation

Added “These people are going to miss you” section
Change accounted for 1 million people NOT leaving

Satisfaction Metrics

How likely would you recommend our company to a friend of colleague? (Net Promoter Score)
Score = % Promoters – % Detractors
Mint.com did not have a high viral score but had a high NPS

Emergent Metrics

Not obvious at first by more over time
Example: FriendFeed
- They discovered magic number is 5
- Introduced a way to easily add friends
Example: Blogger
- Realized most critical piece/metric was the number of posts

Principles of Metrics-Driven Design