Creating Engaging Mobile Experiences & Workshopping your way to customer empathy

This month's event will be a two-part affair, starting with a presentation and then followed by a hands-on workshop.

1. How to create an engaging mobile user-experience that drives conversions with James Banks

Did you know that here are over 19.6 million active mobile users with internet access in Australia? In 2014, effective user-experience design for the mobile web has never been more important then it is today. For this presentation, James will show you how to create a mobile user-experience that engages your audience, which will lead to more sales, leads or conversions from your website. James will also demonstrate how good mobile user-experience influences Google search, and how to can use this to your advantage by getting your website to rank higher then your competitors.

2. Workshopping your way to customer empathywith Ben Melbourne

Step one in creating an Experience Strategy vision is understanding and defining your target customers. This leads most UXers to excitedly proclaim that they need to go out and do some research and create some Personas. But what if the time it takes to create research driven Personas is a luxury you don’t have? Or if Personas are even the best way to get started?

In this hands-on activity, Ben Melbourne will introduce you to the power of the Empathy Map; a quick and simple workshop tool that draws on the knowledge of the team in the room to tease out those key differences between your customers.

In less than the time it takes to conduct one in-depth interview, you can paint a picture of your audience, prioritise them, and have your stakeholders walk out of the room in clear agreement about who your strategy is targeting; allowing you to head out and start learning more about them.

About the presenters:James Banks has been designing websites for over half a decade, and it is my passion to create online user-experiences that are functional, beautiful and purposeful. Through his digital agency Web3, he has been constantly applying, refining and redefining what makes for an excellent online experience across smartphones, tablets and desktops through our own internal and client web projects. It is his mission to share these findings from real-life application with the local digital community, so that together we can craft a better internet.

Ben Melbourne’s business card says he’s an Experience Design Consultant at ThoughtWorks where he does a combination of design strategy, software delivery and preaching about the importance of the keeping your customers at the centre of everything you do to companies who risk becoming irrelevant in the brave new digital world.