 We're going to get started. Getting back straight up on here. So I'm here to introduce Jennifer McKnight. She is a Carolina girl with a tendency to be laid back in serious settings. While this didn't always work in her favor in the corporate world, she eventually found her calling in as a writer. She now plans this full-time as a UX writer, while also running an online content agency in January writing and marketing. And now I'm going to get out some just-guessing notes. And I'm going to hand this out, while she keeps starting. Hi, everyone. I'm going to start by saying what she just said. I'm a writer, I'm not a talker, because this is actually my very first time doing any kind of public speaking whatsoever. So if I get a little untied or confused, please choose me. I think I'll read my website. It's really better, right, Brittany? So who's ready for a second talk on writing and experience? I'm totally sorry to disappoint all of you guys. Before we get started talking about that, what do you guys think you're dressed? Yeah. So this dress, I actually spent as much time thinking about what I'm going to wear, as I did what I'm going to say and how I'm going to say it. Because what I'm wearing is just as important, because that is part of my brand. Brand is going to define how people view you and you guys are going to pay attention to what I'm wearing. So it was the story behind the dress. It actually is quite relevant. So I live in a very, very small town. It's so small, it doesn't even have a town designation. And I have a neighbor there. She's a young girl, and she's a local. And she wears a hair covering, and she wears very modest clothes. And typically speaking, it's not very much remarkable about her clothing. She's dressed by design. But she has this crocheted pantyhack that she wears. And it's so obvious, like, wow, that's cool. It's a crocheted pantyhack. Where did you get that? And she goes, I made it. I said, ah, what are you going to make me want? And she's looking at me like crazy, but I'm serious. I don't want to wear those crocheted pantyhacks. So she just kind of laughs at me every time I ask her, and I can ask her. And there's about a couple weeks, and then one day I ran into her and she had a crocheted pantyhack working. And I was like, oh my god. I literally jumped into it now a few times. But the funny thing about it was it didn't stop with the pantyhacks, and it was a scarf, it was a hat, it was some fingerless gloves. I was just like, girl, seriously, can you like make a dress or something? I got children to speak. The first thing that popped in my mind was I'm wearing that dress. I'm not kidding, that's the first thing that went in my mind. And so the thing, the reason that I immediately thought of this dress is because this dress is very descriptive of who I am. The story behind it, my personality, just the things that I value, it really defines me. And I felt like if I looked it up here and thought to you guys about branding, I'm gonna wear this dress. That's just the end of it. Another thing about what I just did, I just told you a story about me, rather than if my parents said, hey, I do this, I do that, I do this. That is an experience. I gave each of you an experience that's going to hopefully elicit me. Sorry, I forgot to introduce, this is my son. All for me, okay? But before we started talking about branding and user experience, well I just totally went off the cards and he said, what are you doing, mom? This is not how I'm going to do it. I'm sorry. Before I started talking about branding and user experience, I think I should kind of explain why I'm qualified to do so. I've been working in content marketing for about nine years. Prior to that, I worked in experiential marketing. And prior to that, I worked as a journalist. All of these things were as a pre-master. I love them, thank you. But I've also had some regular jobs, all in the tech industry, all in customer service or sales, mostly for the benefits. Because I absolutely adore free marketing and I have been doing it since 2015 solely. But I totally fell in love with my career. Oh yeah, me was to say, I love content. Especially with the background of working in content management and working as a journalist, I really have a passion for content. And what I really like about content is this ability to tell a story. If a design is great, you can really kind of give it a feeling of a product with a design. When it comes to content, you can tell a story. As stories, you make experiences. The internet is a great place to actually use content in that manner to create stories and experiences. I first have my first website in 2000. It was a baby registry site for my daughter. And what I remembered about it, I'm not a website developer. This was literally probably the only site I've ever coded to scratch. And back then, it wasn't even white, it was just, I guess, transparent. And if you wanted to do anything you had to like, put a tedious amount of code, like for everything, you wanted it to have something like that. That was a lot of code. And that is exactly what was on my website. I was like this. I remember it. I was like, I don't even know what to do with this thing. Back then, when you look at the stories, you go, wow, that's pretty ugly. But in 2000, I was just like, I don't even know anybody else who could make one. It was a big deal. Back in 2000, websites were mostly about utilities. The fact that it was there and the fact that it saved people time was a big deal. If you have a business and you have a website that meant people didn't have to call, they could just go on the website and find the information that they needed. But in 2009, things started to really change. That's about the same time as most of the media became a thing. And then everybody wanted to be on the internet. If you wanted to serve people, sell to people, or even meet people, you have the ability of a net to get people in. So the expectation of websites changed exponentially. It's not enough to just have an employee you have to actually attract them to somewhere. You can do it with them. So in 2010, my, I had an experiential client. He stayed there. He had a booth in the exhibition hall. And it was different than everyone else's booth because it was literally just him sitting there with a power happy problem that I remember him. Like, literally he's the one who forgot. His call to action is his method of getting people to stop was, do you want to buy some meat? I swear if I didn't actually know this man, I think it was a great like get up but I would literally leave it just being himself. Okay, so the thing about, he asked me to be a spokesperson for his business because I would say I'm working as a spokesperson for a LASA company. So I was also at a booth but I was doing a lot more than he was and he had to set up anything. And he asked me to work for his company and I said, no, that's not happening. But he kept bugging me and eventually I helped him out with his marketing and I helped him out with sponsorship opportunities, promotion ideas, public relations, that was a lot. And eventually I ended up doing his website as well. So now I was an independent marketing person. I used to be an experiential marketing person. So what happened after that, the thing about Idle Leaf is, he is like many other small businesses in that he doesn't have time to focus on his marketing. He has to focus on supply and demand and quality and logistics and all these stuff. And he had to meet with my help to help with marketing. And if you make the websites that you make, this is hard if you do any type of design or help for small businesses, they're gonna expect you to do their marketing as well because they, most of the time, I don't have the time or the expertise to really know how to present themselves to customers. They just know that they want to. And so it becomes your problem. So small businesses need to be concerned about bringing in user experience. It's not just something for big websites, it's for every website. You need to be concerned about brand names and user buildings and user experience, excuse me. The difference between a new example I like to think of is, say you had people, you had some type of setup where people need to turn in some paperwork. And you have the paperwork there, you have the stapler right there. They just come in and they staple it and they put it, you know, get it done. Well, what if you had a beautiful receptionist who took the papers from them, stapled it and got it done. One of them's gonna make more of an impression on your customers than the other, even though they both do the exact same thing. That is the difference between bringing in user experience and not having it. So now that I've kind of given a little bit of an overview as to why we should care about bringing in user experience, I'm going to give a very basic overview of what they are, followed by some actual tips on how you can use them in your day to day, what about them. A brand is more than a thing, right? It's not a brand name, there are two different things. A brand name would be something like in a Tylenol or instead of, we use brand names a lot in our society, but branding is the idea that something has a personality. It's when a product or service is more than the actual product or service. It's most valuable when you're talking about marketing and sales, because if you have to, two people have to sell the exact same thing, which is typically case online. You want your signature in there. People perceive your product or service into coming through and eventually make up what is the brand. It is a value added attribute. It's the perception that people have about your product and can either hurt or help you depending on making sure that that perception is a good one. The big thing to remember though, there is no perception. People are interacting with your product or service and not having any feelings about it. It's not a brand, it's just a product or service. You want to be memorable in some way and that's what makes you a brand. It can be defined, but it's difficult. And part of the reason is because it's based on perception, it's based on something that's not really concrete. So trying to put your actual definition on, okay, this is what the brand is. The minute you understand what that brand is, it may shift into something else because this is based on not just one person's product or service, but a whole group of people's thoughts about it and then as more and more people have thoughts or something goes viral, it can just spiral out of control and then change. So defining a brand is definitely a art and it's a reason why there's brand strategies and all these brand specialists because it gets really complicated. And I'm not trying to go on to that. I just want you guys to understand that it is a very big topic that even if you have a negative brand experience happening right now, you can change it very quickly. And the process of doing so is branding. Branding is endowments products and services with the power of the brand. It's taking a product or service and giving it a brand, giving it something that people associate with it other than the actual product or service. There are a few ways to do this. You can do it with advertising, you can do it with product design, you can do it with your in-store experiences, you can do it with the pricing, you can do it with the specific identity of the product, but with the terms of web design, you can impact advertising, product design, and in-store experiences, all in the little things that you're doing within your website. Incorporate branding into web design. The easy way is by using video elements that have people in them. Even if you're selling something that is extremely boring, the minute you put a testimonial on there with someone who has a compelling and a compassionate story, people are gonna identify with that product a bit more. That's branding. You can also try characters that personify human qualities. You know how to sell sugar cereal? You put Captain Crunch on it. That's how you sell sugar cereal. It's with a character and you didn't even take that character and you add more personality to it and it doesn't matter what the product is. You can do that in web design. I think if you also think of that being more of a character, they can be the actual people, but they have that whole caricature brand that goes with it. The last thing I have is aesthetics that enlist an emotion. When you're designing, think about the aesthetics. Think about how people are going to feel by what you're seeing. That goes on to the psychology of branding and stuff like that. That's more specific design principles that come into play with branding. But it's also, from my point of view, content has to do with tone, choice of language, all of that is gonna have to do with aesthetics. Okay, so these are some specific ways that you can kind of link to human experiences and emotions and websites offer unique opportunities to enlist emotions and create experiences. And these are the ways, but specifically within a website that you can brand. With advertising, it's how you, specifically how you use copyright on your website, your choice of language and your whole advertising strategy, your slogan, all of that's gonna come under advertising. Your in-store experience is relevant to like e-commerce stores, how they go through the checkout process on your website, that's how effective branding, visual identities, your choice of logos, colors, fonts, yeah. And usability is how easy it is to navigate through a website. It's difficult to get through your website that can cause a negative brand experience that it won't be good. So once again, the summarized branding, websites are one of the most effective ways to brand your product or service because you can do it from advertising, you can affect the in-store experience, you can affect usability, it has multiple ways of impacting the brand. You can brand through other measures, of course, and if you talk to a brand strategy, they'll probably have way many, a whole bunch of ideas how to brand, but websites are a nice, easy way to do it, or at least get started. So I'm gonna move on to user experience. And user experience, where brands, and websites can create experiences that lead to branding, experiences create the individual perceptions that lead to branding. They're very much related, but they're very different at the same time. So let's go a little bit deeper into user experience. According to Don Norman of the Nelson Norman Group, user experience is everything. It's not just when your website user interacts with the website, it's everything that's going on with that user before, during, and after they interact with your website. Because of this, the best way to put it is it's highly riveting, existentialism, and I swear I practiced that word like two months and I still can't say it perfectly, and that's about as vague as the term is, it's just one of those things that you just, it's hard to define existentialism and user experience at the same way. User experiences will create perceptions that are not always quantifiable because they're incorporating more than the obvious experience that the web designer or web developer might seek or what they think is going on. So you have to do the research to really understand the experiences of your users and that is a complicated process. It's tied to emotions and attitudes which also makes it a little bit more hard to measure because just like in branding, the experiences that people have, the emotions that people have, the big forms of perceptions, they all are going to change on a limb. They all can change based on what's going on where they live, what's going on with them that day, anything. So to really try to understand your user experience is a challenging task because of that. And the last and most important thing I want to point out about user experience is that it is separated from usability. They're not the same thing. They sound the same but they are not the same thing. User experience is the experience that someone has when they interact with the website. Usability is how easy it is for them to have that interaction in the first place. They are related but they're not the same. So you should always be thinking about usability and that's going to affect both branding and user experience but you shouldn't just think about usability. There's way more involved. So the core of user experience is ensuring that users find value in what you're providing to them. That is the goal when you think about user experience. Thinking about the user, making sure they're getting something out of what you're doing. That whole concept of utility that we used to have on websites back in the day. So here are some ways to define and determine whether the website that you have is going to provide a good user experience. Number first question, is it useful? Do they come to a website and they don't immediately say, wow, that was a complete waste of my time. Number two, is it usable? Are they able to navigate through the website without having any obvious problems and glitches? Number three, is it desirable? When they got to the website, did they go yay or did they go, that's, number four is it findable? This means both from the SEO perspective and they get to your website without too much searching also from the on-page search option. When they are looking for specific information within your website, are they able to find it without much effort? And the five, is it accessible? Can they open your website on their tablet, on their computer and on your mobile? You want to be able to access that information wherever they are at whatever type of level they're at and that's very important to your experience. The last, is it credible? Because no one likes fake news. They can just throw random stuff in your website and people will get irritated when they find out. User experience will determine how people interact with the product or service. I mean just forgetting the whole conversation about branding, even if you only have a product or service and it doesn't really have a brand, your user experience is going to determine whether you have repeat visitors or not. If they're not, they're having a good experience, they probably won't come back to tell you. So, now that we've kind of gone over branding and user experience, I'm going to talk about some tools that work with WordPress that are going to help with these things, okay? First is, I will say I do work with this company, SlipPlan, and although they hate me, I also use the product. So I'm speaking from personal experience as well as I know the product, but I like to set this finger out there. My journalist did that for myself. But SlipPlan is a website planning tool and it helps with user experience because it's going to make the websites more useful, findable. It's based on information architecture, which is a science that studies how people access information and the best ways to do that. And so it has a lot of tools for information architects or people who want to have their websites. So with SlipPlan, you can create site maps, plan content, plan the content out, diagram your site structure, and construct design mockups. Because it's going to help improve usability, it will likely help improve your branding if you're trying to brand. You have a better brand experience. It is a, it doesn't have a plugin available for WordPress. It's called the SlipPlan quarter as a 30 day trial and the price is based on the number of users that you have. So it works in an agency that seems to be quite well. Next one is Yoast, which I'm sure most of you are familiar with. Yoast is a search engine optimization software and it too can help with both branding and user experience. Obviously Yoast is going to help with findability. You know, it's going to make your SEO better which is going to help there. But it can also improve branding because when you have the right stuff showing up in search and people click on that and they actually come to a website that is exactly what the search result said it should be, that makes them happy. And that's going to give them a good experience. It's also going to reinforce the actual identity of this brand that you're trying to put out there. This kind of comes into play when you see people who are brand specialists, personal brand specialists who will go in and bury pages online. I don't know if you've seen that before but you have like negative things written about online and their job is just to go in and hide it so that when you search, when people search for your name they don't see the negative stuff. So Yoast can basically do that for your business. It can help you manage that so that you're only showing what you want people to see on your search and your results. It can be pretty helpful and depending on how you use it. Yoast can also help with site speed, project quality and accessibility. So it helps with a US feature to findability, accessibility and credibility. It is a free plugin but there's also a premium version. So the next one is called Admin Custom Login and this is a plugin that lets you customize the login screen. And basically this is a branding, this will help with branding. If you have any type of WordPress site where people have to log in, you want them to be hit with your brand not just the WordPress logo, ideally. The more people see your name, your logo and they associate with this is what this business is about, this is what this product is. Like say your product brand is the color purple. Even like on your login page, you don't want to have that blue WordPress thing. You want it to be purple and have your brand on there and that just keeps the brand going. This also helps with site security which not with my talk at all but it's very important. So especially on sites where you have people logging in you want to make sure you have the security. So I put it on here for mostly because of the site security and does some branding. It's $25 for single use license and $75 for if I use full price with a product. Okay, the next one is obviously good for switching to change and optimization but it is a big one for user experience because you can take the analytics from there and the data that you get from it and determine what type of experience the users are having without asking them. Now one of the easiest ways or another way to find out what type of experience users are having is by doing surveys and getting feedback in different ways but other than doing that you can look at the data and Google Analytics is free. Everyone can do this. So something to look at is the bounce rate, page engagement and actual user slow. By looking at those page you're able to see which pages are not working for your users. Which, how long are they staying on the site? Maybe this isn't the right, you have to figure out why they're leaving but it shows you where to focus on so that you can start improving. How usable your site is, it's going to impact both branding and user experience and if you use it to improve your SEL then that will also impact the findability. Google Analytics, let's have a draw back, it's extremely RTS if you don't know what you're doing so you want to get someone that knows how to understand Google Analytics or you can do the training through the website which is free to me. So it's just a matter of figuring out and taking the time to learn how to read it. It's how analytics academy, that's one that Google has, is free. So Google Analytics works with multiple plugins on WordPress so you don't have to get like one specific with Google Analytics, there's third party ones. You also don't have to use a plugin, just most people recommend using a plugin. And the last one is one of my favorites called Slider Revolution. In my business I sometimes make websites for people like Idon'tBeat who would otherwise not get a website unless I tell them they have to get a website. So I do those type of websites and I have a helper on my team and he does anything and I love it, love it, love it, love it. Slider Revolution is a slider plugin and it's going to extend the functionality of your visual content. And as I said earlier, videos and pictures are extremely useful for creating brands because they give that personal feeling no matter what the product is. It's just got like a hand and face on there and people are like I relate to that. So Slider Revolution makes it even easier to cause, to create those label experiences. It has accessibility features in addition to that. That makes it, you put the videos in there and then your page scrolls super fast. It has extra security features. It's really easy to add video and pictures to Slider Revolution without like making your site, without removing your site, without extra extra stuff. So I highly recommend it for that. It's $24,000 for a website and or you can buy a full license and build a thing and just keep reading the thing. And that's what the guy from my team does. They have like a thing with it built in. All of my websites that I've built have some version of Slider Revolution in it. It's great. So I think that is all I have. Oh yeah, this part. Okay, thank you guys. But that's all I have. I hope you guys have questions because I need to spend a little time with questions. What do you do to study your audience, besides people in the mix, when you're doing that client and take you, how do you question them and let their audience let their perceived audience know? That is a great question. And I can actually only answer what I personally do. That's okay with you. And once you guys understand me, that I am like very, I only deal with very, very low tech people. There are a lot of different ways to get that answer though. There's a lot of high end technique. And I would recommend, if you want a really good answer to that, is to go to Slip Plans Vlog, because we have a lot of tutorial on it. But my personal thing, to answer your question, okay? When someone comes to me, since they want a website, and I want to make sure that I'm branding it correctly, I'll pick up your ideal target base to be. First question I have is, who are your competitors? If they have competitors, then they probably have similar customers. And then I look at where those customers are going. If you go, if it's, I go really deep, then I would go to that website, that the competitor's website, and then see where their traffic is coming from. And see what their traffic, what type of website they visit. Perhaps I go to the social media sites and see what other pages they like. And then look at what type of people like that company, that all the connections and you can work out. And you study the competitive research. You study the language that they use, everything. All of the, I just study all of their branding and figure out, okay, how are they getting their customers? Do we want those customers? Or do we want to go after someone completely different? And we have that discussion and figure out, okay, who's our target? With IWB, it was easy because he had an experiential campaign. He just did trade shows and fairs and everything. And he could tell me who these customers were. He could describe them to me. And then I went up to Idaho and I got to know him more better. A lot of times I really spend a lot of time getting to know what the business are, figure out what they're about, and then I just brand them specifically rather than work it out that way. Is that answer it? Okay, thank you. What do you do when you have a client that their brand is kind of hanging by that? Is it that like, they don't have a brand at that point? You start with that. You have that so much money, they like the best. Yeah, that was driving me crazy. Most of the people I started with, they don't. Okay, wait, first of all, you said they have multiple brands. Let me build. They have multiple designs, right? The brand is going to be what other people think of them. What, if they have been established for a while and they have customers, then what I would do is go after customers and find out what exactly is sticking. It's kind of the same way as what SEO guys do when they, SEO people, they'd be political friends, but with SEO people try to figure out which page is worth keeping. They go and look at how much traffic has come in, how many do you know, and they decide which one is keeping based on what actually made them money. It's the same idea with branding, which image is working for them the best, right? There's AD testing, right? AD can come up with a few ideas, different designs, throw it out there. Social media is a great way for that because it's not committing. So you just put out some different identities for a while, see which one fights, see which one people like, and then make the website around that. Or make multiple websites, multiple landing pages. See which one is going to respond the most and then make the website out there. Yeah, absolutely. So you're wondering when you're working with small businesses, how do you explain to them that they need to be concerned about user experience? And still pay you, yeah, pay you the extra money for it. With people who don't really care about technology that much, I really give them actual examples and one thing I would do, I mean, depending on the person I work with, but say, what was the example, what was the business she said for real estate business? Perhaps they have to deal with the MLS, right? Say, these terminology that they're familiar with makes them feel like they know they need to go on the same page. So, oh yeah, have you ever had to go on the MLS website? Yeah, how fun is that? And then let them vent about it for a minute and be like, wow, how many real estate agents are there in your area? And then, you know, let them talk about that so, if someone had a choice and they had to go to a real website or your other person's website and you were just like the MLS, which one do you think they'll deal with? That's something real for them to understand their own frustration that they feel and then put that back on them and make them feel like the customer they're trying to get. And sometimes that works. It took me a while to convince the overriding to be to the website to think about two years. He did not see the point of it and I had to put it in language to do with understanding and the reason for his point of view that he couldn't understand. People are maybe less comfortable with Google taking more of their data. Yeah. What would you recommend instead of Google Analytics or analyzing the customer experience? That is a very good question and I would say there definitely are other tools besides Google Analytics. I would also say that I can't name the one on the top of my head because I don't work as a US analyst. And a US analyst would tell you that I chose Google because it's free and it's easiest for most people. But yes, there are definite tools. You can either reach out to me directly. I will ask at Slip Plan on Monday and they will tell me. I won't have it. It will not say, you know, I'm gonna answer that question. Or you can check their website out. That's what I would recommend for that kind of information. On Matano's website, what are we not supposed to do with it? What was the code again? It's Matano. Oh. You got the word for you with it? Yeah. Yeah, now that they changed the name. It's called Matano. Oh, okay. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you. He's at Quantcast, Q-A-N-T-C-A-S-T from the level as well. Question based? No. I mean, you can take a word for me about the S-3-A-S-T. It's got a 3-1 to be awesome. Any other questions? Have you found that on-site surveys are helpful or useful even when the talk pops up? Is there a cell footage in here? I'm seeing you've got a question. Is that always a good way to get feedback from your users if they're just online users who don't have any scores here? Are the surveys that have been activated or are there other ways that you can get that feedback? Again, a little bit more than I do. I don't actually do any UX analytics. I'm more focused on branding with me personally, but I think the name UX Mastery, the website's popping in my head, is one of the good ones that have, they have these type of discussions and like, okay, what are some good ways to improve your experience? There's, I should have had that off, but I could look it up after this talk and tell you some of the websites that are really good for deeper diving into some actual practices such as that. Thank you guys. Definitely, if you have any more questions, feel free to ask me after this. Thanks.