PRWD

Fresh from 2 of the most productive conference days I’ve had in recent memory, at Conversion Conference London, here are the things I loved and the things I didn’t have quite so much affection for.

If you attended please share your favourite or worse bits in the comments.

Loved

• The conference brought together all the leading optimisers in the UK
• There were a diverse range of presentation styles on show to keep the audience engaged
• Seeing some of the people I respect in the optimisation industry in the flesh for the 1st time
• There was quite simply tons & tons of shared learnings being provided (see a write up of day 1 and day 2 from Koozai)
• There were enough genuinely useful links to sink a battle ship
• I was surrounded by very, very intelligent people
• Conversion Conference isn’t about the sponsors or exhibitors, but the attendees & presenters
• Seeing Mr Dark Patterns in the flesh
• Being on the advisory board of a conference that was around double the size of 2011
• Getting away with playing a 40 second video clip of an eccentric karaoke singer

Loathed

To be honest loathed is a bit strong – this is what I didn’t enjoy as much or could be improved for 2013…

• Having a guy fall asleep in my presentation – a first, that I’ve seen anyway
• Some of the short talks deserved more time to deliver their message
• Having 2 tracks which meant I missed out on some other great talks
• The general subdued nature of the audience and lack of participation
• The timing of the conference meant that it simply wasn’t feasible to attend for our multi-channel retail clients who are currently in the Christmas madness

If you attended please do share the stuff you liked and didn’t like, as I can take this on-board for when we are planning next years.

This years Conversion Conference London is almost upon us (27-28th November to be precise), and once again I have had the privalidge of being on the advisory board. OK so you could say that I’m biased, but this years 2 day conference is genuinely shaping up to be a must attend for anyone either already working in conversion optimisation, or those looking to get a much better understanding of what its all about.

Below I have provided 5 damn good reasons why you should consider attending, not to mention a 15% off promo code which I’ve provided further down the page.

5 reasons to attend Conversion Conference London 2012

1) Nathalie Nahai

Nathalie Nahai is an award-winning speaker, Web Psychologist, and author of Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion. She is one of the conference keynote speakers and her talk is titled Web Psychology: The future of online influence.

With a background in psychology and digital strategy, she is one of the few leading voices in this field to have both academic and hands-on experience in engineering online persuasion.

Nathalie helps businesses to psychologically optimise for better engagement online, and lectures internationally on the subject of Web Psychology and Online Influence (audiences include Goldman Sachs and Southampton University).

She is also a member of #OgilvyChange, you’ll find her tweets @TheWebPsych and her blog at TheWebPsychologist.com.

2) Dr. Harry Brignull

Harry Brignull is a User Experience Consultant. He designs experiences at Clearleft, blogs at 90percentofeverything.com, and curates Darkpatterns.org — a site dedicated to understanding deceptive user interfaces, with the aim of stamping them out and improving the web for everyone.

Harry’s roll off the tongue session title is ‘Don’t be evil! The slippery slope of black hat CRO, Dark Patterns and Manipulative Interface Design.’

Harry has has provided consultancy services for clients such as The Guardian, Dennis Publishing, Haymarket, Sainsbury’s, Cadbury, Vodafone, O2 and many others. Prior to his UX consultancy career, Harry was an academic cognitive scientist and researcher.

3) Paul Postance

Paul was most recently Head of Conversion at my old stomping ground Shop Direct Group. I have already had the pleasure of taking a look at some of Paul’s slides, and lets just say that although he made not be a well known figure in the conversion optimisation field, the work he has been doing over the last 10 years is exceptional. He is full of enthusiasm too which is very infectious.

Paul is doing a couple of sessions with one of them titled ‘Conversion Optimisers, where are you and where is your place in the organisation?‘. This session is particularly important as through our experience brands have a long way to go really see the potential of embedding conversion optimisation and tesing within their company strategy and, importantlly, culture.

4) Craig Sullivan

With a twitter name of @optimiseordie you don’t need many guesses as to what Craig is passionate about. He is one of my trusted industry associates and is certainly a veteran of the conference circuit. What I love about Craig’s sessions is that he is one of most of open speakers I have watched, and the amount of insights he provides from his work at Belron (aka Autoglass) is exceptional. Take a look at Craig’s slideshare page for examples of some of his previous presentation sessions.

In summary if you haven’t watched Craig speak you are missing out, and for those that have, come along for the ride as you can be guaranteed to be entertained and engaged.

5) Darrell Benetar

Darrell is the founder and CEO of Usertesting.com, and with a session title of ‘Top Usability Mistakes: Lessons Learned From More Than 100,000 Usability Tests’ what is there not to look forward to.

At PRWD we spend alot of time either with users either during moderated test sessions or through remote user testing, but we’ve got a few more tests to watch before we reach the 100,000 milestone. I reckon this will be a superb session packed full of insights, cringeworthy moments and a host of user comments which you wouldn’t expect to hear.

Conference Links

If you’d like to read more about Conversion Conference London 2012, why not take a look at the full agenda, the full list of speakers, and see who else along with me is on the advisory board.

So, the Call to Action! (with 15% off too…)

Hopefully you’ve read enough for you to consider registering to attend this event. Matt will also be in attendance so you’ll have chance to speak to both of during the course of the 2 days, just in case you need a bit more persuasion! Oh and did I say I was speaking too on persuasive design techniques?

For those of you considering attending Conversion Conference London, I wanted to share 6 reasons to attend what should be a fantastic, insightful and engaging 2 days.

I have been privileged to be on the advisory board for the conference as well as presenting at 2 of the sessions, on e-commerce best practice and rapid fire live page critiques.

Read on to find out more about this 2 day conversion conference.

1) Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimiser – Bryan Eisenberg (Conversion Guru!)

With three best-selling books and more than 15 years of conversion optimisation experience under his belt, Bryan Eisenberg is legendary for his work is persuasion architecture, persona development and conversion rate optimisation. In this tell-all keynote, he reveals the intimate secrets that few insiders ever get to hear.

Glimpse into the history of CRO and understand what will happen to this discipline in the future. Learn from almost two decades of successes and failures — why Bryan thinks most marketers are still in the dark ages in terms of conversion and testing, and how his simple three-step formula has streamlined the testing process for some of the most successful companies on the web.

If time permits, we put Bryan in the hotseat when he opens up the session for a no-holds-barred question and answer period that could transform the way you think about online marketing.

2) Mobile & Realtime Optimisation – Amy Africa (Eight by Eight)

Why is your established online strategy not transferring well to mobile? What are the important factors (and what aren’t) in determining how to increase your mobile conversions? What delivers results, how do you deal with “abandons” and save up to 60% of them? What should you be tracking? For anyone currently active in mobile, or planning to be, this is a keynote session you really cannot afford to miss. You’ll hear why your mobile conversion strategy has to be different and pick up the tips and tricks you need to put it in place.

3) Praxeology – Lessons from a lost science – Rory Sutherland (Ogilvy)

Advertising and communication has changed immeasurably over the last twenty years. But our tools for understanding people and brands remain largely trapped in the 1970s – if that. Can a missing science fill in some of the gaping gaps in our knowledge?

4) E-commerce Best Practices – Paul Rouke (PRWD) & Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Factory)

How do you design your ecommerce website to persuade more visitors to convert? What guidelines should be followed when designing product and category pages? Learn guiding principles for making changes to your ecommerce website that will significantly increase your conversion rate.

5) Rapid Fire Landing Page Critiques – Paul Rouke (PRWD), Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Factory) & Rob Jackson (Conversion Thursday)

Your landing page stinks – it’s just a question of degree. Bring your URL and our experts will give you some quick and actionable tips to immediately improve performance. Guaranteed to be an educational and entertaining session.

6) Plus lots more engaging and insightful sessions

Along with these 5 reasons to attend, take a look at the day 1 and day 2 agenda to see what other sessions are on which may interest you.

Use #ConvCon to follow the conference live

If you are unable to attend you may want to keep any eye on the #ConvCon twitter hashtag which I expect will be getting used extensively during the course of the 2 days.

Further resources on conversion optimisation

If you are looking for more resources on usability and conversion optimisation, view our up-to-date list of articles, case studies and presentations – Conversion Optimisation Resources

What you’ll find here is:

• Usability & conversion optimisation articles for lead generation
• Usability & conversion optimisation articles for e-commerce
• Tools that you can use to monitor & improve your website
• Conversion rate optimisation case studies
• inks to presentations & slides from events & conferences

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you at the conference!