The UX of You: Make Your Status Updates Valuable

Date: 2011.04.08 | Category: Social networking, UX of You | Response: 5

I sometimes see updates posted to Facebook and Twitter that make me wonder, “Have you really thought about the user experience of you?”

This is becoming increasingly important as people get more savvy about hiding, unliking, and unfollowing those that don’t meet their bar. Users constantly measure the value of what you say and once it drops below a certain threshhold, you’ll lose them permanently. Some are so frustrated with information overload that it just takes one questionable post to trigger their delete impulse.

Put yourself in the shoes of the people who receive the bits you are typing. Who are they? Where are they? How do they read their social feeds? What is their experience of what you are typing?  Are your sentiments scalable? If every person in their feed said what you are saying, what would their experience be like?

Here are some examples of head-scratching updates I’ve received in the last week:

• Just checked in at Starbucks
• This dinner is lovely
• Glad to be off work!

If every person who went to Starbucks, had a great dinner, or was glad to be off work posted as such, my feed would have a frustratingly low signal to noise ratio.

Is what you are saying valuable? Different? Actionable?

Let’s take each of those updates and make them worthy of someone’s time:

• Just checked in at Starbucks – the pumpkin lattes are spectacular
• Had a lovely dinner at Lark – it’s next to Central Cinema so it’s a great date night. And they take the Prime Card! <add a link>
• Glad to be off work – headed to Three Lions Pub if anyone wants to join

Boost your signal to cut through the noise by thinking about the user experience of you.

Five tips for beating presentation anxiety

Date: 2011.03.30 | Category: UX of You | Response: 1

Making presentations in front of a group of people is feared worse than death by most people.  Literally.  There is an antidote!  It’s called practice and preparation.  It is the only thing that will beat presentation anxiety.  Here are some tools that can help your preparation:

Start with the kindest audience

Once you know what you are going to say, don’t keep it to yourself until the big moment. Say it out loud. Yes, you may feel stupid but it’s very worth it.  The more times the words come out of your mouth, the more comfortable they’ll feel when you have the added stress of an audience in front of you.  An audience of dogs is a great place to start.  Then work up to a trusted peer or family member.  Get feedback, but mostly just focus on finding the right words to communicate your ideas.

Know how to start and finish

Write out the introduction and conclusion word for word. Memorize it.  Set yourself out on a steady course.  What may seem like child’s play to remember when you are alone may seem impossible to bring to mind when you have a room full of people staring at you.  And no one likes a talk that peters out.  Save something for the end, and be gracious and clear about how you are wrapping it up.  Are you taking questions?  For how long?  Is there a book signing?  Autograph session?  After party? 

Get control of your body

You can be nervous on the inside and calm on the outside.  It’s called Acting!  People do it all the time. If you can gain control of your body movements – no fidgeting, nervous pacing, or hands in pockets – and just stand fairly still with your hands relaxed and to your sides, you will look calm.  You can use your hands to emphasize points, but make sure they are moving at a relaxed pace.  Most of all, breathe slowly and deeply.  If you breathe slowly and deeply, you will relax yourself.

Know that the audience is pulling for you

The audience is not your enemy – they want you to succeed. Think about how you feel when you are in the audience and a speaker is uncomfortable.  You start to feel uncomfortable, too.  The presenter radiates energy to the audience.  If you feel calm, confident, and energized, so will they.

Join up

One of the greatest investments I ever made was to go through Dale Carnegie Leadership Training, which provided weekly opportunities to prepare, practice and perform in a supportive environment.  Toastmasters is another option and is free, and there are Toastmasters meetings most everywhere.

Join up with others on the quest to be great presenters – it’s incredibly valuable and fun!

Productivity Tips: Outlook Easter Eggs!

Date: 2011.03.28 | Category: Productivity | Response: 0

The best features in Outlook 2010 are not social network updates or  threaded conversations, though those are invaluable.  The best features are the little-noticed “Clean Up” and “Ignore”.  In 2008 on my personal blog I pined for official versions of these features’ early incarnations, Thread Compressor and Thread Killer.  Now that these features have made it into the consumer product, I can show you what they do and you will wonder what you ever did without them!

Clean Up

You know how threads can go on and on but you don’t want to delete all of the messages but the most recent because the conversation could have forked or you could lose valuable attachments?  Well the Clean Up button solves that problem. It moves all messages in a thread to a specified location (defaulted to the Deleted Items folder) if they are already contained in the thread elsewhere.  So it will keep the stray forked messages and the messages that contain attachments, but delete the rest of the duplicated messages.  If you are hesitant to run it on your important inbox messages, you can at least run it on folders that contain messy mailing list messages or archives of old messages.  And the space you save – breathtaking!   I love watching my inbox count go from 78 to 12 in an instant.

Ignore

Isn’t it irritating when you find yourself on a long thread that has nothing to do with you? Now instead of deleting it, you can Ignore it.  Ignoring the thread will automatically delete all previous and subsequent messages you receive. Take that, Canon vs. Nikon holy war!  My coworker, Omar Shahine, created the first version of Ignore, called Thread Killer, back in 2005. For that, and many other reasons, he is a local hero.

So there you have it – two wonderful surprises that I’ll bet you didn’t even know were hiding in the email program you use every day.  Who knows what the next release will bring?