On Tuesday February 10, 2009, Pure Visibility’s Michael Beasley will co-present

Introduction to Usability – An Interactive Discussion

under the auspices of the Michigan Usability Professionals’ Association (MIUPA). The event, hosted by Quicken Loans in Livonia, Michigan, will be from 6-8:30PM. Food and networking will start at 6PM, and the program will commence at 7PM.
The program will be led by Michael Beasley, User Experiologist here at Pure Visibility and current MIUPA President, and Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus, owner and principal of UsableWorld. They will lead an interactive discussion that will give you the opportunity to pose your own questions to two usability experts. You will learn about such things as:

• What is usability?
• How can I incorporate it into my organization? my projects? How can I deepen our practice of it?
• “Usability”, “User Experience (UX)”, “Human Factors”, “Information Architecture” – what’s deal with all of these names?
• What can my website analytics tell me about the usability of my site?
• How can I use end user tasks and goals to organize my website?

After an introduction to the basics of usability, Mike and Dave will open the floor to questions. You will set the agenda for this discussion through the questions you bring, so come prepared!

Location

Quicken Loans
20255 Victor Parkway
Livonia, MI 48152

Exit 7 Mile East from I-275. North on Victors Parkway from 7 Mile.
Enter main door, go to 3rd floor, meeting will be in the “Puerto Rico Room”

Cost

$10 for MIUPA Members, $5 for full-time non-working students, $15 for all others

RSVP

RSVP via email to events@miupa.org

Susan Weinshenck, Ph.D. in Psychology and Chief of Technical Staff at Human Factors International, is launching a blog and about to publish a book.

I have heard Susan speak a few times, at World Usability Day and at Internet User Experience conferences, and she is a terrific speaker, thoughtful and animated. Recently I have heard her talk about persuasion – what makes a website or advertising persuasive and user experience designers can improve websites and application experiences with this knowledge.

I’m always happy to learn from what Susan has to say, and I’m excited to subscribe to her blog. I’m sure it will get me thinking. I’ll let you decide for yourself, here are some recent posts:

• How do people decide? The Order Effect
• Undecided Voters? Not Really.
• Plot by Apple to convert PC users?

Here’s info on her upcoming book: Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? (Voices that Matter), available to pre-order now from Amazon.com.

I’m a fan of LinkedIn. Its helped me keep track of folks I value, and it lets me admire their paths as they move, advance, and change. Yet, now that most social networking sites are allowing me to aggregate my own feeds from elsewhere (think jaiku, friendfeed, being able to syndicate your blog as notes into Facebook, Plaxo Pulse), why should I or you bother aggregating feeds within LinkedIn?

I consider LinkedIn to be my primary professional profile online (due respect to all the others…it’s the leader in my book). The opportunity to enrich it was too good to pass up. As Chris Brogan blogged yesterday Drop everything run to LinkedIn now. What are you waiting for? Read More

Funny. I was just talking with some colleagues about locating additional social media visionaries and explorers here in Michigan, and, like magic, I stumbled upon Podcamp Michigan. They found me, following me on Twitter, and then I found Podcamp Michigan on upcoming.org and Facebook.

What is a podcamp you ask? It is a free, unConference focused on new media: podcasters and listeners, bloggers and readers, social media mavens, and anyone interested in new media.

Coordinates:

• Podcamp Michigan Twitter
• Podcamp Michigan Upcoming
• Podcamp Michigan Blog
• Podcamp Michigan Event Details
• Real-world coordinates: 11/8 9AM-4PM at Embassy Suites Hotel, 28100 Franklin Road, Southfield, MI

I was intrigued over the weekend by a tweet from timoreilly that “customer service is the new marketing”. The tweet linked to a recent video interview on O’Reilly Radar of Lane Becker, GetSatisfaction’s founder. In case you don’t already know, GetSatisfaction is a company that provides a web-2.0-kind-of-forum for customers to interact with each other and with representatives of companies about their experience with the brand. It provides an open space for folks who are mavens and devotees of a particular company to offer their expertise to resolve other folks’ problems, and a place for the disgruntled to vent and get solutions to   problems that arise.

I was really caught by the title of the piece, because the phrase is true on many levels. Great customer service is the basis for referral marketing. And in this day of public fora like Twitter, GetSatisfaction, and a proliferation of blogs, individual shoppers and potential clients are not only relying on their intimates and colleagues for referrals. They’re getting information about your company from strangers, and perhaps giving it more credence than what the business says about itself.

So, to this end, I was heartened to see in my Google Alerts this week that a client of ours, Cosmetic Dentists Donaldson & Guenther, got a great review from a client of theirs on InsiderPages:

The dental work was by far the best I have had done….It was also done very well, with a really unusual level of care and kindness.

We’re proud to work with clients who have happy customers, and even prouder when we see reviews like that. Lane Becker is absolutely right. Customers and clients have much greater influence over your brand in this world of user-generated content. It is the business’ responsibility to ensure that customers and clients have positive things to share, because share they will!

It’s funny. We worked with Andy King on two chapters of Website Optimization, and, until the book came out, we hadn’t seen the whole thing. I took it up north with me when I went on vacation, and I really got a lot out of the whole book. We’re sharing it with our clients, and using it to back up and further explain a few of the recommendations we make for them. Read More

So, I had to buy some curtains last night. I thought I would buy them the old-fashioned way, by driving to a nearby store, but I discovered that the local store didn’t sell curtains in the dimensions I needed. I could get cafe curtains or long panels at the store, but nothing in between.

So, I decided to go online. No, I wouldn’t be able to touch the fabric, yes, it would mean I’d have to postpone my new-curtain gratification, but it seemed like online there would at least be a wider range of sizes to choose from. At least, that was my first assumption.

I decided to go with known vendors, so instead of typing curtains into Google and seeing what I found, I tried Sierra Trading Post (an odd choice, I know). Here’s what I found:
They had 43 results, that seemed promising. The problem is that I wasn’t looking for “curtains” – I was looking a pair of curtains to fit a 46″x53″ expanse of windows. So, I didn’t need floor length panels. And that was all I could see as I scrolled down the page. Worse, I wasn’t able to narrow the results to see if they had any curtains in the sizes I was interested in. I had to review each listing. OK, well, maybe an outdoor surplus website isn’t the place to buy home furnishings.

Next, I tried sears.com and landsend.com. I did this because I have Sears gift cards I wanted to use up. Sears had 153 curtain listings on their site, but again, no ability to narrow results by size, so I would have had to page through 153 results to find the few, if any, that were available in the size I wanted. Again, most appeared to be panels for large French door type windows, not the kind I wanted. I was motivated by the magic of gift cards, though, so I dutifully checked the list. They did offer options to narrow by brand names, but I didn’t recognize the brands, and I was really only interested in curtain size, something that wasn’t available in the “narrow your search” options. I did find one curtain that might have worked, and I held it in my shopping cart, but I wasn’t sure it was the best option. For one, it seemed expensive (each curtain was $60 and I needed 4 of them…).

I checked LandsEnd.com. Neither “curtain” nor “curtains” turns up anything in their search, but if you click through Home Accents, you can get to Curtains and Rods, which had nice looking stuff, but again, nothing in the size I wanted. Since there were only two choices, though, I didn’t mind paging through them.

Finally, I did what I should have done in the beginning, I did a Google search for curtains. I skimmed the organic and the sponsored listings. I couldn’t do JC Penney, the top listing, because I had the Sears card. It just didn’t seem right. I skimmed down to Overstock.com and clicked through their ad. Now, when I searched for “curtains” on Overstock, I got 11 pages, 60 results per page. And, the absolute best, I got a way to narrow my search by size. Exactly what I’d been struggling with on the previous sites. I found several pairs of curtains that matched my specifications, and while I was there, I recalled I had a few other things to buy. So, Overstock did right by me, search wise, and I ordered more than just curtains when I was there.

So in my completely unscientific nonrandom survey of 4 sites, overstock.com was the best online experience because it offered me a quick way to find what I needed.

Pure Visibility has undertaken the strategic planning process described in Verne Harnish’s book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What you must do to increase the value of your growing firm. All of us here have read a fair number of management books, attended seminars on process, and the like. Heck, some of us have even taught seminars and workshops on process. But, we knew it was time to take a higher-level view, and Catherine Juon, our fearless Co-Founder, discovered the Rockefeller Habits book and inspired us to take it to heart.

She arranged that we each got our very own copy. In late winter (prior to our second quarter), we followed it and the supporting materials on Verne’s leadership and executive development website to conduct the critical first step – the One Page Strategic Plan.

In a 2-day strategy offsite, we constructed the following:

• Pure Visibility’s 5 Core Values
• Our Purpose, Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and 5 actions we can take in the next quarter to live these on a daily basis
• 3-5 year targets, our brand promise, and key thrusts/capabilities (our priorities for the next 3-5 years)
• 1 year goals
• Our quarterly goals (financials, critical #s, and “rocks”)
• Our quarterly theme, goal, and celebration/reward, and
• Individual accountabilities towards these goals

Yes, it sounds like a lot in 2 days. The participants were exhausted by the end, but it was a powerful process, not least because it bonded our team together and refreshed what brought us together in the first place. An especially powerful component was deciding what we were going to postpone – what we weren’t doing this quarter.

We recently had our second quarterly planning meeting, where we revisited what we’d accomplished, and then brainstormed this quarter’s priorities. Especially fascinating was that some of the tabled items from the previous quarter were now “ripe for the picking” in that we had the space to address them this quarter. Other tabled items stayed tabled until next time or never.

One of Verne’s key messages is in the first few pages of the book:

Anyone with children will recognize the fundamentals I’ve summarized as:

1. Have a handful of rules
2. Repeat yourself a lot
3. Act consistently with those rules (which is why you better have only a few rules).

p. xxi, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What you must do to increase the value of your growing firm.

Here’s to simplicity and focus, renewed and revisited. Go Team!

So, there’s a joke around the office that besides a few obvious stand-outs (our co-founder Linda Girard is one), that we’re a kind of odd bunch here at Pure Visibility. We’ve used the phrase “nerds with social skills” to describe the mix on our team (often in the same person) of hard nosed data analysis and more qualitative business analysis skills.

As we work for our clients, whether we’re improving the visibility of their site through search engine optimization and AdWords, Yahoo, and MSN PPC management or improving their site’s performance through tuning its usability, we use a combination of hard skills (let the numbers speak for themselves, prove it to me) and soft skills (listening to our clients, listening to our clients’ customers). I think the word cloud for our blog proves it. Because we’ve got a nice mix of technology and domain terms (“website” “salesforce” “online” “bounce” “AdWords” “domain”) as well as analytical terms (“know” “measure”) we’ve got “people” as big as any of them.

We believe the people are what should drive the technology, rather than the reverse. What does your blog’s word cloud say about you? Find out at Wordle.net.

Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti are more than Michigan Football, although that is one thing that makes living here exciting. We’re more than the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University. We have a great community of wonderful and innovative tech companies here such as:

• Accuri Cytometers – a powerful, compact yet inexpensive flow cytometer
• Adaptive Materials – portable solid oxide fuel cells – clean, long lasting portable power

(just to do the A’s)

and wonderful resources, such as Ann Arbor SPARK working to ignite innovation through supporting and growing the community of businesses through talent retention, business acceleration, and business retention, expansion and relocation. We recently listed some of our favorite groups and organizations supporting technology and entrepreneurship. All this activity goes to show that the midwest is a hotbed of creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Add another great event to the list! Ann Arbor is hosting its very own Startup Weekend June 20-22, 2008.

The weekend will bring together idea people and worker bees, marketing wonks and financial types, designers and developers, business folk and gear heads, web junkies and pragmatic project managers to build a set of new companies. The intense, 54-hour event starts Friday evening, goes all day Saturday and Sunday. The goal of the weekend is to enhance the local community of entrepreneurs, foster some new collaborative endeavors, and get some startups up and started.

Startup weekend is a national movement, with start-up weekend events in cities all around the US. Ann Arbor was picked from a list of cities based on local interest, in a web poll. Some international cities are currently up for votes. The last three startup weekends happened in Boulder, CO, Memphis, TN, and Portland, ME.

Startup Weekend provides a facilitator, Ann Arbor commercial and residential real estate management company McKinley donated the space, and the hard work and ideas will be contributed and fostered by the participants.

Hear ye, hear ye. Inviting all entrepreneurs, entrepreneur wannabes, and those contemplating entrepreneurship to learn more about the logistics, the location, and the yummy goodness happening at Ann Arbor’s Startup Weekend. Get your tickets from the Ann Arbor Startup Weekend website!