Future proofing –

  •  Gen Z
  • Will be 40% of all consumers in three year’s time
  • 8 seconds to make your point
  • Messaging apps overtook social networks in user figures last year
  • Care more about products than experiences – good ux essential
  • Faster, all devices, direct to what they need
  • Speed Google’s third most critical metric
  • Auto optimisation with nginx/apache
  • Rel attributes – preconnect, prefetch, preload, prerender
  • Mike King writes on 69% improvements here
  • Social, games, photos, web, shopping (use of mobile order)
  • Mobile ux – accelerated mobile resources
  • Mobile search – iOS 9 can now map app data to index (yay!)
  • Don’t be obsessed with site traffic, we’re a connected web
  • Rise of the personal agent, e.g. Amazon Echo and beyond

Future of personal branding –

  • These bullet points do nothing to highlight what an exciting talk this was, definitely follow @melcarson
  • Check out delightful communications
  • Book – pioneers of digital
  • Discoverable, personable, memorable
  • Why do you do what you do
  • Communicate your value
  • Dooer, writer, socialiser, speaker
  • Authentic, useful, relevant, actionable content
  • Future proof your own site, own your name
  • Make your out of office work for you
  • 60/40 professional/personal tweet split
  • Make LinkedIn (yuck) a living profile
  • Measure your success
  • Become an influencer
  • Book – introduction to personal branding

 Feature snippets –

  •  Google is saying “this is the world’s best answer to your question”
  • Don’t confuse this with a knowledge graph snippet (ie no citation link)
  • Check out Tableau (gets round Excel crashes with big data sets, e.g. site auditing)
  • Think about single purpose content, good SEO, your best pages
  • <h1><ol><table> standouts in snipped pages
  • getstat.com/data/fs

UX patents –

  • Google human interaction updating, e.g. watching a top ranked video for 5 secs, then bouncing to a second ranked video and watching in entirety
  • Google patent in facial recognition, e.g. restaurant search, measures facial responses to serp suggestions

What can we learn about ux from gaming –

  •  Can we make people feel about our sites the way they feel about games?
  • User interface, interaction and feedback in the same way
  • Minimalist, navigable, focused, framing
  • Show motion through images – lead them to the cta
  • Squint test to make sure the important things stand out (how they designed Crash Bandicoot)
  • Unique content for each channel
  • Newer games you don’t die and have to go back to the last save point
  • Side quests are like recommended articles “you like this, you might like this”
  • Visual cues to ctas
  • Create immersive experiences
  • Research art theory

Speed –

  • Hooray for AMP
  • AMP pages canonical back to main
  • No forms (input) but great for content
  • Twitter moments, Facebook instant articles etc
  • But bad for page per session, Google takes you elsewhere for using their ecosystem
  • JavaScript and third party font implications but you can do it selectively
  • Has a Drupal plugin
  • bit.ly/amp-intro

Data driven SEO –

  • Be sure of people’s properties, e.g. people who search for dresses don’t care about size at search stage
  • List your most popular stuff first and link your keywords to this
  • Keep an eye on trends and create new taxonomy for trending attributes e.g. “Sequin” dress
  • These audits and changes = 50% conversion increase
  • Don’t underestimate the importance of using customer language
  • OneHydra tool

Machine learning –

  •  Supervised and unsupervised
  • Takes around 1 million tries for a machine to learn, currently
  • Machine learning for hackers (book)
  • Can use for spam checking
  • UGC quality control, filtering, classification, relevant text extraction
  • Datumbox spam classification
  • Import.io = site scraping to get the data you need (e.g. house prices)
  • Can use it to recommend hotels etc, crawling all reviews ever
  • Predict trends, know the up and coming hotels
  • Identify user needs, e.g. searching hotels with nice restaurants nearby
  • Site auditing, identifying out of date/redundant content
  • ai-applied.nl
  • Algorithmia resource
  • Speech to text API
  • Great community on Quora getting into machine learning
  • Data approach makes it easier, you teach it irony etc

Building audience personas –

  • Gather basic audience information from your teams
  • Workshop formats help people discover what they didn’t know they knew
  • Use database
  • Look at their motivations
  • What challenges do they face
  • What interests them
  • Surveys, social listening etc
  • Look at serps, seo terms, related searches
  • (Ajax)
  • Answer the public tool – maps related questions to terms
  • On-site search data
  • Ask customer service teams what people generally ask
  • Competitor research, benchmarking
  • Basic segments, motivations by segment, identify and unite overlaps
  • Describe the behavior of your personas as well as names “explorer, strategist, etc”
  • Add human traits (e.g. interests, affinity in GA)
  • Also YouGov profiler
  • Empathy that comes from that helps us create good content
  • Document and share personas once created
  • Use them as a discussion point whether you create anything “Is this right for James?”
  • Overlay your brand values and goals

How to make every employee part of your digital team –

  • Our users interact with all these teams, why don’t we?
  • Vision, mission statement, key messages, core values, comms plan – these matter internally too
  • Break down silos, learn from each other, share success and failure
  • Interview employees, find out what motivates them and share it, pulls people together
  • Create an integrated comms plan to make the most of every opportunity people have internally, good for them, good for anything you share externally as a result
  • Make vlogs for anyone who can’t make sharing sessions
  • Recognise and reward people who live up to values or help achieve the end goal
  • Live the values, embrace the vision, follow the plan

Blogger outreach, influencer marketing –

  • Niche focused
  • They want – exclusive content, new opportunities, connections
  • They care more about their topic than anything else (including exposure, etc)
  • “no follow” manual action
  • Bloggers work harder than we, as an industry, give them credit for
  • Think of blogger outreach as part of your paid media work
  • Keep engaging all year round, you never know when you’ll want to work with them again

The science of persuasion –

  • Influence of web psychology in creating content
  • Engage, provoke response, convert
  • Understand decision making
  • Emotional not rational
  • Trust = increased purchase intention
  • Establish values, live and breathe them in everything we do
  • Support and enable
  • People are drawn to people like themselves, so learn who your audience are and reflect that back
  • Burger king YouTube ad
  • Personal stories
  • Adapt language to audience
  • Trigger words provoke reaction
  • Personalisation
  • Formula – number, trigger word, adjective, keyword, promise = killer headline
  • But you have to deliver