Audience Research

Organizations that invest substantially in digital communications have an obligation to track their success. Success is best measured in terms of progress toward one’s objectives. And objectives should be more than just getting more pageviews and visits.

The dust has settled from SXSW 2011. I’ve had a chance to catch up on email, get over the conference crud I brought back, and my hearing in my right ear is slowly returning, so I thought now would be a good time to share some of the things that I learned at SXSW with you.

I’m on the plane to Austin for the “South by Southwest” (SXSW) interactive technology conference and getting hungry already – thanks to the SXSW iPad app! This Interactive event attracts thousands of people for a five day event about digital & interactive technologies and creative ways to use them.  It’s big – about ten concurrent sessions running throughout the day – about social change, online marketing, gaming, design, the future of journalism, online business strategies and more.

 In the interactive world everyone has their own opinion and ideas on what makes a pleasant, effective user experience. Usually that leads to the exclusion of the real question, “what do users want /need?” When done correctly, A/B Testing can settle the argument, giving the audience an indirect voice.

Colleen Gray contributed to this post.

How do you organize your music library? By genre? Alphabetically? Remember High Fidelity (2000)? John Cusack’s character organized his collection autobiographically. Cusack plays the role of Rob Gordon, a record store owner and compulsive list maker. In the scene below, Rob’s friend Dick comes over to Rob’s apartment while he is in the midst of organizing his personal record collection.

On January 23, Forum One sponsored UXCampDC, an unconference focused on all things user experience-related attracting close to 100 practitioners from the DC metro area.  From Forum One, we had Suzanne Rainey, Brian Verhoeven, Courtney Clark, Matt Humphrey, Kate Bogh and