. : September 2, 2015 : .

An Event Apart – Day 2 recap

Yesterday, I posted a recap of my first day at An Event Apart – Chicago. Here’s my An Event Apart – Day 2 recap:

Matt Haughey

Everyone’s in the Customer Service Business

This was an extremely insightful talk. He really mad a point that we need to bring empathy to everything we do. This started to make more sense to me when he started showing ways customer service relates to the quality of your products.

I learned there is a correlation between the quality of your customer service and the quality of your products. Usually, the better your customer services is, the better your products are. This kind of surprised me. It’s easy to think, “if you have a bad product, you better have good customer support.”

Matt made his point by telling stories about past projects that failed or were mediocre, because there was no empathy for customer (bad/no customer service). Then he shared with us some of the work they are doing at Slack, and how providing great customer service has contributed to their success. I was surprised to hear that everyone at Slack participates in customer service. I believe his wording was that customer service is baked into every aspect of their company.

When you first start at Slack, you spend your first week doing customer service. After that, all engineers spend 2 hours a week doing it. They have regular customer experience updates. They watch twitter to see what people are saying about them – AND they actually respond. They are constantly pushing to go above and beyond. They even adopted a manatee for someone because she joked that she wanted them to get her a pony.

Some suggestions he gave during his talk that I walked away with are:

Set up an ‘everyone does support program’
Do whatever you can to get as close to the feedback loops
Break down walls (literally and figuratively)
Be aware of what’s tripping people up
Get as much feedback as you can
- User testing
- Show it to friends
- Show it to family
- Look at user metrics/analytics
- Take twitter seriously
- Have a non-judgmental forum for suggesting new features

Val Head

Designing Meaningful Animation

No coincidence that a talk on animation be conducted by an animated speaker! Val was very engaging and fun. She even edited code in front of a live audience! Major courage points for that

This talk reinforced our thinking that animations in websites should be meaningful and purposeful. An animation shouldn’t just be there to make people oooh and aaaaah. It should be used to meet a business objective. For example, it should draw your eyes to a product that you might want, or indicate the next step in a checkout process.

Val gave us some good resources:

She showed us how to use the cubic-bezier CSS property and how easy it is to use. She then gave us some tips and tricks for things like “Follow Through” and “Secondary Action”. I have a lot of ideas I want to try out :)

Gerry McGovern

Top Task Management: Making it Easier to Prioritize

This guy knows what’s up! He had so many soundbytes that perfectly encapsulated major issues on the web today. Here’s a few I was able to jot down:

“The worst way to design a website is to have 5 smart people in a room drinking lattes”
“Often what visually attracts is not functionally successful”
“‘Hits’ is how idiots track success
“Brand = B.S.”
“More content is the disease of the web”
“More people in the US trust car sales people than they trust politicians”
- Ok – this isn’t related to the web industry, but it’s entertaining
“You are as likely to get hit by lightning as you are to click on a banner ad”
- And he had the statistics to prove it!
“‘knowledge base’ who ever thought of that? Does that mean the rest of the site is an idiot dump?”

My twitter fead was blowing up with everyone madly regurgitating his witty remarks.

Aside from all the humor, he made some very valid points about how most websites have a lot of information that no one cares about. The people in charge of the company feel it’s important, and that’s why it’s there, not because it’s actually useful. He gave some really great advice about prioritizing your site in terms of the top tasks people will be trying to accomplish when they use it. These top tasks should be research driven and heavily tested.

Derek Featherstone

Content in Context is King

Derek explained that good experiences are heavily based on context. Many things contribute to context, not just the device you are using. He encouraged us not only to use responsive design techniques, but to also design around context. Ask yourself what people might be doing when they access your site.

He showed us some great examples of how air ports could be more helpful with their websites. Things like using geolocation and showing you what gate your flight is boarding at if you’re logged in and in the air port. If you’re on the highway on the way to the airport, it would show you where you need to park.

He showed an example of a website he worked on for a conference that was context aware in that on the day of the event, the home page displayed the schedule. It also disabled the “buy your tickets now!” button after they were sold out or it was too close to the event to purchase them. They also used geolocation to show you content that you would most likely need at certain distances. If you were far away, it would default to giving you driving directions. If you were really close, it would default to giving you walking directions.

The main thing I learned from Derek was that we should design things in ways that allow people to accomplish their goals with as little interaction as possible. To do a good job at this, we have to design around context.

Eric Meyer

Designing for Crisis

Eric started off his speech by recanting a horrible experience he had when his daughter needed to be air lifted to a hospital late at night. He and his wife were not allowed to fly with her. Someone he barely knew volunteered to drive them there to meet their daughter.

He was in the back of a car on his phone trying to get information from the hospital’s website about where he could meet his daughter when they got there. The hospital’s website was very unhelpful. It contained a lot of information that probably didn’t need to be there.

Eric made a strong point that if someone is in crisis mode, they do not have much mental capacity. All of their cognitive resources are being used on other things. We should design our sites with that in mind.

Not everyone is developing a hospital website, but there are other situations where this would apply. Another example he gave is that maybe someone is being threatened on a social media site, and they need to terminate their account as quickly as possible. Or, maybe you were in a car accident and you need quick information from your insurance website.

Eric gave us some good tips on conducting user testing to see if people can accomplish their goals on your website even in crisis mode.

Randomly blur the screen slightly with CSS
Randomly alter the position of things with CSS
Use JavaScript to change our ever 4th or 5th word with dashes
Force them to complete the task in less time it would normally take

This was a great talk. It really made me think of design from a different perspective.

Chris Coyier

The Wonderful World of SVG

Chris gave a brief history of the SVG format. He said it was invented in 1999. I believe he called it and CSS ‘old farts’. He talked about how SVG has largely fallen out of use, and that it’s time to start using it again!

Some of the benefits:

It’s vector based
- Small file sizes
- Looks great on any screen
It’s markup like HTML and XML
- You can put it in a <div>
You can apply strokes and filters
Useful for an icon system or to do charts
It’s very gzip friendly
Animations!

Chris gave us a few examples of when and how to use SVG as images, backgrounds, icons, etc. He also showed us many software tools that you can use to create and work with SVG files: Adobe Illustrator, Sketch, and Inkscape.

I’ve been incorporating SVG into more and more of my work. This was a nice validation of that, and I saw a lot more potential for using SVG even more in the future.