This just in: Sandra and I have been asked to speak at the upcoming Voices That Matter web design conference taking place in San Francisco from October 22-25. Sandra will be presenting a session called Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects into Leads, which also happens to be the title of our upcoming book. I’ll be giving a talk called You Can Have It All: Designing to Please Users and Search Engines Alike. I just gave a similar talk called Balancing Design, Usability and SEO at Web Design World in Seattle and it seemed to go over pretty well, so I’m looking forward to fine-tuning and updating that with some new material for this event.

Here’s the official announcement about the conference:

You’ve read their books.
Now grab the chance to listen to, learn from and mingle with your favorite New Riders authors and the most respected professionals in the Web design industry at Voices That Matter: Web Design, a conference hosted by New Riders.

At Voices That Matter: Web Design, our lineup of speakers will teach you new techniques; some will show you how to avoid the potholes and pitfalls in how-to sessions; still others will inspire you to try new pathways in creative, energizing, thought-provoking, idea-driven sessions.

Entertaining, informative, authoritative, but most of all, inspiring, Voices That Matter: Web Design will bring you face-to-face with the authors whose books have shaped your career.

Speakers: Corey Barker, Dan Brown, Andy Clarke, Curt Cloninger, June Cohen, Brendan Dawes, Robert Hoekman, Jeremy Keith, Peter-Paul Koch, Steve Krug, Eric Meyer, Steve Mulder, Sandra Niehaus, Derek Powasek, Dan Saffer, Nathan Shedroff, Dori Smith, Stephanie Sullivan, Charles Wyke-Smith, Jeffrey Zeldman.

I just realized they left me out of this list. How crushingly disappointing…

We’re actually pretty excited about this event, as this will be our first post-book-launch speaking opportunity (assuming all goes as planned between now and then).

So if you’re based in the Bay Area or you’ve been looking for an excuse to visit San Francisco, this could be your big chance. October is the best time of year to see San Francisco…

We hope to see you there.

Update: Leave us a comment if you’d like to get $100 off this conference.  The organizers have given us a discount code for our clients, prospects and fans (we have fans?).

When it comes to things that should, but don’t work right, I’ll admit I’m one of the most impatient, easily offended people I know. Analytical and idealistic to begin with, my years in the design and usability field have, evidently, only exacerbated these tendencies.

Fortunately for the web, most web users aren’t like me. Instead of becoming instantly irritated with bad design, lazy programming, or poor process flow, they simply shrug, scratch their heads, and muddle through the best they can. They call a friend, or get their 10-year-old kid to help figure it out.

It took me a while to realize this wasn’t just an occasional phenomenom, that most web users don’t expect their online experience to be particularly smooth, easy, or streamlined. In fact, they go online anticipating problems, and that’s ‘just the way it is.’ It takes a fairly significant failure or very high level of confusion for them to abandon what they’re trying to accomplish.

This is a generality, of course, and touches on the larger question of why users expect so little from the web in the first place. But it’s important to note that usability professionals have a built-in allergy to inconvenience the general population lacks. Does this mean we’re too hard on web systems, that we should reduce our level of persnicketyness? Is mediocrity acceptable, as long as the audience is OK with it?

A household lesson in just dealing

Take, for instance, a simple household example of poor design, one that causes user mistakes.

I recently moved into a new house, in which there is a small walk-in closet lit with a ceiling light. The switch for said light is located in a completely unintuitive place - outside the closet on the hinge-side of the door. Since the door can be approached only from the handle-side, turning on the light means reaching across the door.

The expected place for the switch would be on the handle-side of the door, ideally on the inside wall. And that’s exactly where I reach to turn for it, every time I go in the closet. When I don’t find the switch there, I correct myself, step back outside the door, reach across to the hinge-side, and turn on the light.

The error-correction process is annoying, regularly causing me to fume, “What in the world were the original builders thinking?” Obviously, they had very different standards for ease-of-use than I!

When visiting friends and family have occasion to go in the closet, I’ve observed the same error-correction pattern, but minus any railing against the building industry’s lack of appreciation for basic usability. They just deal.

Would it be easier for my visitors if the light switch were moved? Of course. Having the switch in the expected place would remove that error-correction stumble, replacing it with a pre-bundled behavior pattern requiring no thought. But even left as is, it doesn’t drive them crazy and it doesn’t stop them from going into the closet.

A switch by any other name

But that’s my closet. There’s nothing particularly interesting in there, and it’s rarely visited. What if we upped the importance of the switch, and its frequency of use?

Imagine the irate response if the switch were outside the door of a popular restaurant’s restroom. Or outside a hospital’s emergency surgery. In these scenarios, where the switch facilitates behaviors more critical and frequent than finding a pair of shoes, a seemingly small design flaw generates significant consequences. Not to mention ill-will.

A frivolous train of thought, of course, but one that points to a few important concepts:

1. It’s startling to observe how much patience and forgiveness most users have for things that should (by my measure) be irritating as hell.
2. Even patient and forgiving users benefit from having irritants removed.
3. The level of forgiveness you can expect depends partly on the importance of the flaw’s setting, and how often it’s encountered.

Have a usability example where a change of placement or venue impacted the user experience? Let me know!

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Breaking News! Persuasive Technology 2008, the Third International Conference on Persuasive Technology, will take place in Oulu, Finland next June.

The 2007 version of this conference, aptly named Persuasive Technology 2007, was chaired by BJ Fogg and hosted at Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab in April. This was Closed Loop Marketing’s first exposure to this community of industry experts and researchers and we were impressed. You can read a review of Persuasive 2007 here.

The mission of these international conferences on Persuasive Technology is to provide new insights into the ways video games, mobile phone applications and websites can be designed to motivate and influence people.

Next year’s conference, jointly organized by the University of Oulu in Finland and the University of Aalborg in Denmark, will also feature research themes on:

• Motivational technology
• Persuasive games
• Web 2.0
• Mobile persuasion
• Ethics of Persuasive Technology
• Business models for persuasive systems

Both universities have a long tradition in researching the human and social side of Information Technology. More recently, their focus has evolved to include Persuasive Technology. The University of Aalborg even offers the first full Master’s program dedicated to this subject.

Finland is often referred to as the “land of the thousand lakes” and becomes the “land of the midnight sun” in midsummer, complete with frequent sightings of the Northern Lights.

As it promises to build on the success of Persuasive Technology 2007, I’d recommend marking your calendars for June 4 - 6, 2008, as this will be a conference worth attending.

More details will be available during the coming months - and we’ll be sure to share them here on our blog. In the meantime, the most current source of information is located at the Persuasive 2008 site.