LinkedIn

How can we design interactions that encourage specific behaviors? A while back, LinkedIn experimented with a feature: a little meter above the users’ information, showing their profile’s “percentage completed.” Suddenly, more users filled out their profiles. The feature didn’t have a clever interface, a sophisticated information architecture, or show any technical prowess. It just leveraged basic human psychology. As designers, we work hard to provide powerful features in our applications, but if users don’t take advantage, it’s all waste. We have to extend our designer’s toolkit, leveraging the latest thinking from behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric. Stephen will guide you through specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications, especially during the post-signup period, when it’s so easy to lose people. He’ll demonstrate how to engage your users through a process of playful discovery, which is vital whether you make consumer applications or design for the corporate environment. About Stephen: Stephen P. Anderson is a product strategy and design consultant who helps large companies create valuable customer experiences. Prior to becoming an independent consultant, Stephen spent more than a decade growing and leading teams of information architects, interaction designers and UI developers in the creation of all types of interactive experiences, bringing value to clients such as Nokia, Frito-Lay, Sabre Travel Network, and Chesapeake Energy as well as smaller technology startups. Stephen is passionate about elegant design, remarkable customer experiences and managing maverick teams– topics he loves to write and speak about. In addition to consulting, he is in the process of doing research for a book that will teach businesses how to attract and manage rockstars, superheroes and other misfits.