Designing the Usage Lifecycle Workshop in Boston Oct 25

A quick announcement about a workshop I’m giving in Boston in October on the Usage Lifecycle.

The workshop is for designers, design managers, product folks, and other people responsible for web sites who are struggling with creating a great user experience.

The workshop will cover, among other things:

• How to design for the psychology of sign-up. You will learn four design strategies for improving your sign-up process right away.
• How to get users immediately engaged in your product. You’ll see how successful social sites get users engaged early on in the lifecyle.
• How to create seamless sign-up sequences. You’ll see how techniques, such as explaining your product’s benefits and showing how your product works, can make dramatic improvements to your user conversion rates.
• How to write online copy that motivates users to act. You will see how copywriting is the easiest and fastest way to improve your sign-up process.
• How to take advantage of the psychological principles to persuade users to convert. I will share several psychological principles, including the principles ofSocial Influence and Reciprocity, to effectively motivate and engage users.
• How to design for ongoing participation by users. You will see how users are more willing to continue to use your product if you reduce the amount of commitment on their part.
• How to measure how well your site or application is converting first-time visitors to loyal customers. The funnel analysis is an effective method to show how effectively your site is moving people along the usage lifecycle.

This is a full-day, immersive workshop for design professionals. (btw: If you sign up by September 10th the workshop is only $695 – a savings of $200 off the final registration price.)

For full event details: Designing for the Social Web Workshop

Although the idea of the usage lifecycle came from my book: Designing for the Social Web, most of the content in the workshop is new, coming from consulting work I did after I wrote the book as well as a lot of the work we’re doing at Performable. We’re learning a ton of stuff building a tool to help others improve their customer experience, and I’ll share some of what we’ve learned during the workshop. Here is an example of the type of stuff we’re learning: Why A/B Testing isn’t just about Small Changes

I’ve given several versions of this workshop already at private companies and at conferences (like UX London). I’m very happy with it so far…the feedback has been extremely positive and I feel like it’s core content that companies can implement immediately.

The workshop is being organized and run by my good friend Christine Perfetti, who ran events at UIE for years and who is currently starting a solid set of events under her own brand PerfettiMedia. She’s already given two successful usability bootcamp events herself (in Boston and SanFran) and is planning more events in the upcoming months.

So I’m really looking forward to this…I get to come in and focus on giving the workshop and have all the hard details taken care of by Christine. If you’ve never run events yourself then you are missing a whole lot of behind-the-scenes planning and organization…I’m happy to have Christine do that for me. I think the workshop will be fun and we’ll learn a lot from each other.

So, October 25 we’ll be holding a workshop on creating great user experiences, integrating social features into your app, and the usage lifecycle. Sound good?

Please let me know if you have any questions!