My employers recently sponsored an IXDA London event based on the recent Interactions 12 conference in Dublin. The event was held at the Sapient Nitro offices and with a joint event between their team, my boss and colleagues plus a handful of volunteers, the event seemed to go very smoothly. 

One of the other reasons I was on hand, was to capture some sketchnotes. You can see the results below. 

Thanks to all the speakers — Boon Chew, Giles Colborne, Jonathan Khan, Virginia Cagwin, Pete Trainor, Jason Mesut and John Waterworth.

Last month on the 25th May, I had the pleasure of attending the very first Research Thing event at the Fortune Cookie offices. The first event was themed around Diary Studies and there was three speakers — Boon Chew, Lee McIvor (of Lightning UX fame) and Beth Duddy. 

For those of you not familiar with User Experience techniques, a diary study is something that requires users, or observers of users, to keep track of activities or events in some form of diary or log for a particular period of time.

Thanks to all the speakers, sponsors and organisers! 

I recently bought some clothes from Boden and noticed this little gem on their sign-up form. Underneath where they have the options to select your date of birth, they have a checkbox which says “Mind your own business, I’ll keep my date of birth to myself”. I thought it was a real nice touch, as there is nothing worse than a company making you disclose sensitive information without a real cause. 

If you click on the link in the form which says “Why are you asking me this?” it brings up this little dialogue which explains the benefit of giving this information — We’ll give you birthday offers! — and the ramifications of not doing so — We just need to know you are over 14 for legal reasons. 

It would be interesting to see the different conversion rates depending on whether this was included or removed from the form, although I suspect they would be taking into account the benefits of having age data or whether there was an increase in customer spend after they received these offers. 

Another thing I was impressed about my Boden experience was their after-sales experience. I emailed to query about a discount and received a well written and detailed email in return, from a real person. Plus, a few weeks after my order arrived, I got a discount voucher in the mail, for my next order. It serves as a gentle reminder and perhaps a push to commit to another order. 

The best thing is that all these changes probably came from different departments (marketing and UX) but overall they add up to a great experience for the customer.