 Thank you. Thank you very much. Can you guys hear me? Can everyone hear me? Does that sound like it's on? Yeah, all right. I'll just start. Thank you for that. All right, so first up, who here has a website that they use to promote their business? Let's see. And who here has an e-commerce site specifically? Okay, there's a few. And I'm guessing the rest are like developers or people like that. Cool. All right, so I'm gonna start by telling you my story. It's the mid-90s and I am six months into an applied science degree here at Gardens Point, QUT. And I absolutely hate it. I hate it. This room is giving me the heebie-jeebies because seriously, I think it was in here that I might have just decided I was out. So all I'd wanted to do since I was tiny was to sing, perform, write songs, create, communicate. But my family were teachers and academics and I'd done well in school. So the obvious path was that I ended up at uni doing my applied science degree. You can imagine my parents the day when six months in, I rang them and said, I'm quitting uni. I am out. I've got a gig in a band with a couple of guys that have got some dates around Queensland, maybe Australia if I'm lucky. I'm gonna go and do that. Mum cried for about two months and dad, I couldn't ring without my dad going, have you thought about when you might be going back to university? They warmed up to the idea, though, when that band turned out to be Savage Garden. And they started getting some serious chart success, not only here in Australia, but internationally and suddenly I was off and I was touring the world. I spent about 12 months with Savage Garden touring as their backing singer and it was awesome. I went around the world probably three times with them. But during that, I always knew that there was something more I wanted to do. I wanted to be doing my own thing, telling my own stories. So when I finally left Savage Garden, I went on to pursue my own stuff. Now, mum and dad, there's a bit of Savage Garden, yeah. Darren Hayes would kill me if he saw this stuff, if you don't love it, that it goes up on him. Then in 2001, mum and dad really warmed up to the idea of the music thing when this happened. So I'm going to take it as a Niki, a favourite of his again, who goes from Savage Garden on this single is rocking up the chart. Everybody loves it, you know it, you want it. It's a Niki, we're pleased to meet you. I'm Rose McManus, so in a month or week, you're going now. I'm not going to play the whole thing. Do you remember the song? Can I stop it? Do you need the chorus? I'll keep going. Anyway, pleased to meet you. So I spent six months recording in Sweden, writing, producing, recording the album. And when I came back in July 2001, we released Pleased to Meet You as the first single. And it landed in radio, absolutely loved it. And it connected with people, which was so awesome, because this was my story. Like it was my actual story converted into a pop song and people, it connected. Radio played it and played it and played it and played it and played it and played it. And it went on to become the most played song on Australian radio for that year. We beat Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out of My Head in terms of airplay that year. You couldn't get in the car and change the radio. You'd hear it on one channel and I would literally change it because I was like, I can't hear it again. And then it would be on the other channels, like it just was unreal. So, you know, I'd really done it. I'd achieved the thing that I'd said I'd always wanted to do. 2001, we were awarded Breakthrough Songwriter of the Year by APRA, alongside Sia Ferla. She co-won that award with us. We were all over the TV, performed at the APRA Awards, lots of big festivals in Australia, you know. And I had an album that was coming out that was being described by Australian music heavyweights as the next definitive Australian pop album. Like, I was there. So, I know it's not cool to talk about money and what you earn, but people are always asking me, oh my God, how much money did you earn? And it's really interesting. I'm interested to hear and shout out what you think. It's really uncool, hey. What I earned the year that I had the most played song on Australian radio that I had co-written, co-produced, performed. Any ideas? 30? The year I had the most played song on Australian radio, my taxable income that year. At this point, everything was starting to unravel. The record company was on me telling me that I need to get a tan and a boob job and get photographed down on Bondi Beach like Sophie Monk was. They lined up a FHM shoot for me that I was like, there is no way I'm not doing that. And I had no ability to tell my story because it was before the time of YouTube and social media and self-publishing platforms where artists could do it themselves. I was at the mercy of the PR machine of the record label. And in that time in Australian music, it was very much you were either a manufactured pop, sexy, brainless, sex kitten, or TV pop star winner, Bardo. This was the time of Bardo. Or you were a triple J, super cool alternative. You were a true artist. Meanwhile, I was neither of those. I was a true artist, but I wasn't a triple J-style one. I was a commercial music songwriter, producer, performer. So I really battled with the record company to get heard. After a year or so of battling, trying to get other songs on the radio, it was just all too hard and the record company dropped me. And then shortly after that, my mom died suddenly and I was done. I was done. I was out, I was broke, I was broken. And I just never ever wanted to sing or perform or write a song ever again. I was done. So I needed to reinvent myself and I took some time off, travelled. And when I was thinking about what I wanted to do, it was really hard because it was devastating. I was so embarrassed that I'd been so publicly visible and now so I had nothing, nothing. And what it seemed like a shitty move from the record company at the time, they had a website built for us but we couldn't update it. They had no budget for making updates to it. And so my brother and I, who I lived with because of faxable income, we decided that we would get Dreamweaver and we would learn HTML and we would update this website ourselves. And that started my love affair with web because then I started being able to use the Niki site in a tiny way to communicate with people, my actual stuff. We had IRC chat on the thing and I would get on and chat with fans across the world. It was awesome, like in real time, it was the first real way that I could really, genuinely communicate with people that were interested in my music and me. So I went web, that's what I'll do. So I went and enrolled in a local tape course and started studying web there. It was so embarrassing because I'd get the occasional. You look heaps like that girl from that band. You're like, oh yeah, people say that all the time. Don't know. 15 years on and I'm now the managing director of Pixel Palace. We are a WordPress development. We specialize in custom WordPress. I have an amazing team. You are here today. And we all just love what we do. I am so happy to go to work every day. It's awesome. We work on great clients. We only take projects that we're invested in and that I feel like we can really run with and help tell a story and make a difference with. So what I love about it though is about web in general is that like songwriting, you're connecting with people through telling a story. And people always ask me, how did you, like some people don't understand the leap between my songwriting career and what I do now and what I'm so passionate about what I do now. And I have this analogy that a great website is kind of like a great pop song. So for me, a great pop song tells an authentic story. So the really good ones have an authentic real story that someone's experienced or is telling. A great pop song connects on an emotional level. It's packaged in the confines of a pop formula in order to have the greatest reach. It's hooky, it's punchy and it's succinct and it's original but it's comfortable and it's safe like it feels and it brings you back and you wanna listen to it over and over again. It feels good. And a great website does the same. It should tell an authentic story. It should connect on an emotional level. It should be packaged in the confines of usability in order to reach the most amount of people and good SEO. It's hooky, it's punchy and it's succinct and it's original but it still makes you feel safe and comfortable and secure. So for me, that's it. The biggest part I'm really passionate about and what I do is humanizing the experience. I love the idea of the storytelling and taking a person's story and telling it through their online experience. We've been doing this with both the businesses. So I run Pixel Palace. Started doing this with Pixel Palace which is why I'm here today telling you my story. For 15 years, I've told no one this story. I ran Pixel Palace as Jen Jevons with no mention of anything that I've done in the past and I started realizing that humanizing my story like this has massive value with making people connect with me. Understanding it wasn't all great showing some vulnerability. They remember me. I'm using it now. I'm telling this story. You can do this too. So this is what I'm here to talk about today. Humanizing your digital experience. There's two sides to this in my opinion. One that I'll start with is designing for humans. So human user, human-centered design, user experience stuff. And the other side is humanizing your actual brand. So let's start with designing for humans. So this is user experience stuff. So we try to do this with all websites. It's super important with e-commerce though. Starts with knowing your user. If anyone saw Kate Toon's talk yesterday, she talked about this fantastically. Understanding who you're talking to before you even start planning anything to do with your website. No content, no design, nothing. Who is it you're talking to? Understanding what they know about your business. What context are they coming to you from? What devices will they mainly be using? It might be different. What demographic? What is it they want from you and what is the thing that you could deliver that would just absolutely delight them in terms of your digital experience? So understanding that before you start. Designing for emotion. Understanding that humans are emotional creatures and we tie emotions to memories. So most of your big memorable experiences in your life will be tied to some sort of emotion and that's how we recall things. So making a digital experience that feels emotive or has something that is memorable in terms of emotion is super important. So this can be done with making things playful slightly like in our coffee beans delivered example if you have a look at it online you'll see the little mouse overs, the way things load in. There's a little bit of fun in it and it's engaging and it pulls you into the story. So that can be done too by photography, video, all sorts of stuff, the typography of the site, anything designing for emotion. Thirdly, understanding sensory adaption. So a sensory adaption in humans is where if there's a constant stimuli that you see or hear or smell over and over your brain starts filtering out that message because it decides that it's not important to what you need to know here and use your cognitive function for. This applies massively to web because if you are using a template that millions of people use it's the same template and it looks the same as everyone else or everyone in your industry has this same exact layout. This is gonna play into sensory adaption. People start filtering out stuff because it looks the same as everything else because they think it's either scammy or irrelevant and I don't need to pay attention. You can change this up by adding in little elements of surprise and delight into your site design-wise or things that are unexpected slightly in the design. Whether it's color, typography, photography, the wording, the copy, the headlines, not using the same headline that everyone uses so that you stand out and you jolt people out of that sensory adaption problem. And lastly, this is the big one for e-commerce in particular, understanding cognitive load in humans. So cognitive load is a big one in user experience because if people get to a site and they're overwhelmed, they switch off, they fail out. So lightning the cognitive load. Cognitive load happens with things like too many fonts on the page, too much content jammed in, not enough white space, not a clear user path, bad navigation, things like that, not knowing where to click. That just tires people whether they realize it or not and then they start dropping off. In e-commerce, it applies in terms of using guided selling. So you can reduce cognitive load by using guided selling in e-commerce, which brings me to coffee beans delivered. So like in my intro, you guys have told that about four years ago, my husband and I over a beer one weekend thought it would be a great idea to start our own e-commerce store since we'd built so many for clients, it'd be easy, right? So he had been, he'd owned coffee shops when we met in Sydney and was still very into coffee even though he'd come into sales. And so coffee seemed like an obvious one. We saw some gaps in the market SEO-wise for this. So within two weeks, we had a custom Divi set up in the first instance for coffee beans delivered and we were up and running and selling. And out the gate, this thing did pretty well. I actually presented in 2015 at WordCamp on coffee beans delivered and how we'd done it because it was, I mean, we see a lot of e-commerce stores launch, but this one did really well out the gate. We were selling straight away. That was cool. As it developed, we realized that there was a lot we could do to improve in terms of helping customers decide. So we did some polling and feedback of customers and Ryden in particular started ringing customers and asking for feedback on the website. And a lot of what came back was that it was fantastic. The product was fantastic. Everything was good. The only thing was that they would get to the site and sometimes there's so many options like we have so many blends, so many, you couldn't have it ground for all different machines. You can select your size. You can select for black, for milk, whatever. And it wasn't, if you didn't really know specifically what you wanted to buy, it was really quite difficult because we thought it was great that there's all these options. But it turned out that's actually confusing and adding to cognitive load. So we sat down and thought, how can we improve on that? How can we do some guided selling here to help people make a decision? And we came up with two things. The first one was LiveCat. Now, if you've got an e-commerce store, any website actually that's you're selling to people via the website, LiveCat is awesome. The stats that say LiveCat increases conversion on an e-commerce site by 30% to 40%. And we can testify that it did it for coffee beans. So when people are in a product, being able to talk to a real human and ask a question in real time, hugely helpful in getting them to get right to that in-bit and press go on the payment. So we use Talk2 on Coffee Beans to Live It. On Pixel Palace, we have Crisp. They're both free. There's paid versions of both, but it's super easy. App on your phone. Anyone on the team can answer the questions when they come in more often than not. It's right. The answer is the coffee ones, but huge in terms of improving the user experience. The other thing we did was helping people make a decision, right? So they would come to the site and they weren't sure what they needed. So we came up with this idea of a coffee quiz. And on the homepage now, when you land on Coffee Beans to Live It, there's two main choices. It's help me decide or buy coffee. And if you hit buy coffee, you just go to the products. If you hit help me decide, you land here on the coffee quiz. And the coffee quiz guides them through selecting the machine that they have, where they have it with milk, they have a grinder, how many coffees a day do they have and select your coffee personality. And then it filters some results with a cute little interactive animated funny thing. And then pops out three product suggestions that are very much based on the stuff that they put into their answers. So these are three coffees that would suit given what you had answered in those questions. It also provides a funny little snackable, shareable coffee personality. That, if I go back, I'll see if I can get it. That one was the Jon Snow bastard blend. So they're like social media, share things that are funny and people share them to their social media. And then when their friends click on it, it takes them back to start the quiz and they can get their own coffee personality. So really cool. When we did this, it increased our conversions by over 200% immediately. And in the heat mapping, we can see the majority of clicks, first clicks are going on to help me decide. So this has been amazing. This is built with a gravity form. That whole quiz is just a gravity form but built out into a really cool quiz. The other amazing thing that this does is give us huge insight into the customers, right? So when they go on order, this is then tied to their account and we have data that we can use. And when we get notifications through WeCommerce, the order notifications come through and it tells us they've got this machine. They've ordered before. They have it with milk. This is their X order or whatever. We have all that come through to us so that we can really personalize the experience in the next step. So, humanizing your e-commerce experience. There's stats that say after just one poor experience with a company's website, 60% of people are less loyal to the brand. So like this stuff really, really matters in a competitive market. And I think there's four key things around humanizing your e-commerce in particular. The first one is investing in the right technology. More so many times I see people, they set up an e-commerce store themselves. It's ugly as hell. Yes, it's got products on it. Yes, technically, if you're persistent enough, you can probably get to a checkout and buy something. But it is so competitive now that investing in this, as if it's a shop front for your business, you wouldn't make a shop that people walk into and it was just all stuff on the floor for sale and no lighting and no real customer service. You wouldn't do that. People invest in a real store. This is a store front. So investing in the technology and that's not to say you can't do what we did with coffee beans where we did a fairly dodgy divvy up first to test the idea and see if it will work. And once we had proof of concept, we went and did the whole hog and now have a very custom e-commerce. But investing in the right technology and making sure it's like super duper, performs to perfection, secure leaves no doubts in the customer's mind about purchasing from you. No errors, no broken links, none of that. So technology. The second one is make every interaction count. You are only as good as the last interaction with your website. They're only going to remember the last one. So you just have to make absolutely everything count. Again, performing to perfection comes back to the investing in the right technology. Communicating continuously. So many times you buy something from an e-commerce store and they've been emailing you with abandoned cart stuff or whatever and you're seeing their ads and then you buy something and you never hear from them again. It's like, what? Or maybe a few months later you might get a general email marketing email. It is five times cheaper to market to someone who's already bought from you than someone who hasn't. We have a huge retention rate on coffee beans to live in because we communicate continuously. So when you buy from coffee beans delivered, three days later we have follow-up emails, follow-ups from Recommerce Plugin that sends an email that says, hey, here's content specific to the coffee that you bought. Here's information about the blend. But also, if you haven't got your order yet, can you please get in contact with us because you really should have it by now? That means they feel like we've reached out and sent them. Some of them think it's a personal email from right and it's hilarious. They write back full. How's their day going? But that's awesome, right? And so then we can follow up if there's a problem and if there's not, that's great. In a month's time there's another follow-up email that says, hey, you probably finished your coffee by now or well into it. How did it go? Would you review for a discount? So we use the review for discounts plugin and it works with the follow-up emails. We ask them for a review. It automatically sends them a discount code when they do it and we have a site full of amazing customer reviews from the last four years that help our SEO, help our customer experience and communication, communication. It just keeps going around and around and around. So social, we remarket to people who have bought from us. So the social, we're touching them on social over and over with viral stuff, information stuff about how to make coffee. So they're seeing it over and over again. And then the last one, oh, in the communication too, we use that information from the quiz to send things like personal notes in their order. So if we see that someone's ordered, you see the same names come up sometimes or we can see on their thing that they're a really great customer who's been ordering every, they've ordered 15 times in the last year or something. We rather send them a personal note that says, hey, hope you enjoyed the Tia Dentro last time. With these ones, we suggest blah, blah, blah, blah, maybe it's a bit fresh roasted so maybe leave this one for another week. And so this personal handwritten stuff that we just occasionally throw into things and the team do as well, hugely turns our customers into like, they think we're friends, they feel like they're so loyal to our brand because it feels personal. And then the last big thing is humanizing your brand. This is huge for e-commerce stores in particular but for anyone online. So humanizing your brand, how do you do it? For me, it's a few things. First of all, opening up, showing vulnerability. Like if you run a store, when something goes wrong or coffee being delivered, we're really open about it. If there's a bad review, we will address it and try and be a bit funny but like absolutely 100%, you can see on Facebook if we've ever had bad reviews, they, a lot of the time they've come back and changed them because of our response but we're very open about if we've stuffed up, we're human, we're only small. Sorry about that, we're trying to do better. Being real and open and genuine and showing vulnerability lets people connect with you. Showing genuine character. So this comes down to like copy and photos and stuff. Like don't use standard corporate speak in things but talk like, a lot of the language on coffee being delivered is how Ryden talks. So you'll read it and it feels like you're just having a chat with him. Again, Kate yesterday was awesome, she was talking about this. So showing genuine human character. Creating human-centered experiences. So community online. For some things that might be like a Facebook group that you add all your customers into and they're allowed to join if they've bought from you or your business. For us we use the Facebook page a lot for this. Coffee beans now, four years on, has four staff. It's a company of its own, Ryden works full time on it and we opened an Espresso bar earlier this year and moved Distribution and Espresso bar and the Pixel Palace office all into one thing in the suburbs of Northern Brisbane. So it's become a monster but that coffee shop thing has let us have a real, like there's a sense of community, not just in the community at the Espresso bar, but online, like there's an ownership of the brand that's been amazing to watch over the last six months since we started doing this humanizing stuff in our marketing. The last one is the biggest one and it's founder first. So it's why I sat here and told you about my story and with coffee beans we have done this over the last, I'd say six to eight months, really six months and when we started coffee beans, Ryden was very reluctant to put, he didn't want to be the face of it and I feel the same, I'm really nervous about, it's hard to make yourself vulnerable and tell the what's and all stories of things but it's necessary. So he took a lot of convincing, he wanted coffee beans to be more like an Amazon of coffee where it was just like a marketplace and there was no real face to it and finally he came around and realized that this is the way we make this thing go, gangbusters. So what we started doing was putting him out the front. Nobody wants to read a mission statement from Tesla but they do want to read a blog post from Elon Musk. That's the summary of it. So with coffee beans delivered, what we started doing, Ryden started doing a lot more little Facebook lives on the Facebook page. He started filming videos that were him giving tips, adding value, giving tips and tricks on how to make coffee at home in a really personable, relaxed, friendly, not a wankery kind of way, just like I'm a dude, I'll help you with your coffee. And what this has done for customer feedback and ownership has been honestly gobsmacking. I can't believe what it did in terms of how it presented. This is one of the videos, I'll just quickly show you a bit of it so you can see what we did. Right, so the whole series, we just have a series of these and they go out on funnels on Facebook. That one in particular has gone absolutely viral, like the stats on it, I don't know if you can see, but we reached almost 100,000 people since August with nearly 12,000 engagements and the shares on it, 152 shares, 176 comments, not one negative comment. Insane amount of traction and interaction on that video. And on the other side, there's an example of, this is someone we do not know that ordered from us the first time recently, or in August. And she got her order and set up a photo and sent it to us on Messenger saying, hi guys, I just received my first order super quick too now, which one should I try first? And before writing replied and said, great, I suggest you do this one, it's a good one to try first. And she's like too late, I already started, bloody loved it, awesome, can't wait to try the rest. You got a regular, like people didn't send these messages, like they love the coffee and they do reviews and stuff, but we never got this thing where they felt like they knew, and then they could send them a message saying, oh my God, I got the present you sent. Like, this happens too with, like, anyone who's got an e-commerce store and deals with careers will probably know the pain. But that's our biggest pain point in coffee beans delivery is just careers. And so sometimes, you know, we'd get a photo in an email with someone going off on the attack because with a photo of their order and time marks on it because the career like literally run over the coffee. Insane. And it's not us, oh sorry, it's out of control from our end at that point. So it's not us, but they'd send an email and it was aggressive and on the offense because they thought we were a big company and they'd have to fight to get their coffee replaced or their money back or some sort of justice in this terrible situation. And you know, Rodney would always pick up the phone and ring again, humanizing the digital experience. There's a person behind this. And as soon as he did, they'd be like, one, my God, an e-commerce store has never called me. No one from an e-commerce store has ever called, like have you ever had a phone call from an e-commerce store? It doesn't happen, but it's so easy if something goes wrong to ring instead of hiding behind email. But what's happened since we put Rodney out the front is people email and they're like, hey, Rod, it looks like the stupid courier ran over my coffee. Oh, you know, I don't know, I thought you should just know about it because it's not very good for you. Like the tone is materially different in how they communicate with us because they feel like it's a person who they like. So I think this is super powerful and there's a generation coming through of digital natives that don't have a distinction between their digital world and their real world. And so we have to be doing this in order to really connect with everyone. So to summarize the founder first brand thing, you can be examples. You can be like an all organic snack food company, let's say. And your message could be, we make healthy snacks. Or you could be the founder that had her life changed by finding a healthy relationship with food and wants to share that with everyone. It's much more engaging. You could be an investment firm that invests in startups and that's great. Or you could be a personable investor who mentors at scale online because he loves helping startups and wants to share his insights from 20 years of trenches doing this with the world. Or you could be a digital agency or you could be a founder who dreamed of connection and popped stardom and went on to do that and be an award-winning singer-songwriter and then absolutely crashed and burned and had to reinvent herself. Did so came back as a digital storyteller for businesses and now loves authentically sharing her story and her passion with everyone. Who would you rather do business with? For me, it feels like a no-brainer. So to summarize in humanizing your digital or e-commerce experience, for me, it's about curating an experience that feels real and it's representative of your brand and that it focuses on how you want the customer to feel. So how do you do that? For me, you put a person out in front, first and foremost. And then you outperform your competition, create an awesome, unique online experience that's memorable and emotive and then you deliver your product faster. And that is how you humanize your e-commerce experience for the win. That's it. Thank you. Questions?