Whilst we left Matt to the OpenID talk at the Hilton, Kieron and I had a wander to the Convention Center to listen to Jared Spool from User Interface Engineering talking about the Journey to the Center of Design.

Just a few minutes late and the auditorium was packed, so finding a small corner to sit down, we listened to Jared’s talk on user-centered design. A very entertaining and interesting look into the world of User Interface and UE. Talked very much about the way we probably need to change our perception of what customers want based on Ue tools such as heat-maps, anayltic data. The reason behind his theory is actually, does anybody know what these metric devices actually show?!? An example was heat-maps and why would a company want to spend thousands on investing why people don’t look at the companies x-sell promos on their site. His reasoning is that we are all used to these promos now and don’t want to be told what to buy. Lots of times, people KNOW what they want when they log onto your site, don’t try and push them into products they don’t need.

Another slant was on the use of metric data (ie - Google Analytics). Does the peak in a site page show that we have customers interested or is it simply that the customer was lost and didn’t know they were going to go on that page anyway!? Was a lull in the volume on a page because of a bad page or that the customer knew what the page was on about and didn’t want to view it?!!

A very good exercise utilised around 40 of the delegates in the room that had pre-completed a form on the way in, using a measuring scale from +15 to -15 and they had to stand in front of which number represented their perception of the company from +15 being brilliant to -15 being very poor. It was an interesting mix, especially when he used StarBucks and MacDonalds and then Apple and Microsoft! Genius.

It was certainly an eye-opener to the thoughts of UE and User Interface.