#webvisions

This year at Webvisions in Portland I am giving a keynote on Artificial Intelligence and fabricated empathy for cognitive learning systems. If you want to join me and the other amazing speakers, and need reasons to convince your boss of the value, here are five solid reasons you can use in your debate.

I have heard about the conference via the Chicago Content Strategist Meetup group. (Thank you Hilary Marsh) I got a nice discount too, and the timing was just right. The company I work for, Nimlok is going through some new website growing pains and was looking to hire new design + development team to tackle the new re-design. I came to the conference looking for solid advice and get more familiar with how we can improve on the new site's user experience.

I enjoyed Meaghan Fisher's presentation the most. It was the most applicable for what my team is going through at the moment. I think most of the time when you attend these conferences you are looking for tools and something that you can back to your team and say here is what I learned and we can implement it this way. She was also kind enough to upload and share the slideshere. The takeaway for me that your website and user experience must delight and kick-ass. It is helpful when you figure out a personality and establish emotional connection with your user. “Everything has a personality: everything sends an emotional signal. Even where this was not the intention of the designer, the people who view the website infer personalities and experience emotions… Horrible personalities instill horrid emotional states in their users, usually unwittingly.” This is from Donald A. Norman's book Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things.

The few examples that do it well:

Plated. Meal subscription service. Big statement to say what is their promise.

Duolingo. It has a friendly owl that walks you through the steps of how to use the service.

Shopify. Ecommerce platform that uses human language in the space. Compare to Magento that sounds like any B2B service site out there. Other stand outs that able to keep a human touch are, Airbnb, Big Cartel, Squarespace, Zenpayroll.

Dropbox sign up. Won a Webby's award for best design. User guide that's fun to use.

I have been speaking at Webvisions for many years now, here in Portland as well as in Chicago and Barcelona. It’s a wonderful conference with awesome speakers.

Interestingly enough, they have a website with information about the event. Register with the promo code “WYNER” to get 25% off the registration fee. Why? Because Wyner delivers, that’s why.

This year’s theme is “Hack Happiness,” and comprises two days of workshops followed by two days of sessions. What’s more, Adam Connor, who fell very ill just days before his Portland session last year, is back to health and happiness. This is your second chance to see more beard (even though there’s a lot of that going around).