Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

I’ve just uploaded my presentation slides from yesterdays enjoyable How Do conference in Liverpool, titled ‘Speeding Up In A Slowdown’. For information you can see details of the conference and speaker line-up, including a keynote from Google.

My 35 minute presentation (shown below) focused on 3 key areas that businesses need to consider if they want to make serious improvements to their online performance, and all on working with smaller budgets than what they would have had pre-recession:

• Understanding visitors – using gorilla user testing to actually begin understanding what visitors want and why they don’t complete their objectives
• Measuring performance – its not good enough to just have analytics installed on your site, you need to be looking at goals, funnels and developing advanced segments to truly begin understanding visitor behaviour
• Testing and improving – using split testing to make continual, incremental improvements to conversion rates, click-throughs from key pages and overal website performance

I’m highly honoured to have recently been asked by How Do to speak alongside Google and PricewaterhouseCoopers at a conference entitled Speeding up in the Slowdown on Thursday 4th June 2009 in Liverpool.

Conference Overview

Coping with and emerging from this recession in a stronger and profitable state are quite simply what most businesses wish to achieve. This major How-Do half day conference in Liverpool has drawn together five outstanding speakers whose collective expertise can help companies achieve just that.

In the current challenging economic climate, companies who not only survive, but actually thrive, are those who can develop and utilise a true competitive edge. If you want to guarantee your business the opportunity to implement ideas that will help make it more productive, more pro-active, more competitive and ultimately more profitable, then this conference is for you.

How-Do has brought together an outstanding panel of speakers for this conference at Liverpool Science Park, all of whom are focused on providing the type of insight and information that can make a real difference to the success of your organisation.

Areas Covered

The speakers including myself will be covering five key areas of your business:

• learning first hand from Google on what’s really working online
• how to develop and win new business
• more effective communication and engagement with business media
• improving the performance of your e-platforms
• reviewing and developing your strategy in a crowded marketplace

The Panel Of Speakers Are

• Andrew Barke (Google)
• Paul Rouke (PRWD)
• Bill Gleeson (Liverpool Daily Post)
• John Leach (Winning Pitch)
• Eva Berg-Winters (PricewaterhouseCoopers)

Booking Information

Delegate tickets are £88 + VAT early booking/charity rate (for bookings before 22nd May or whilst tickets last), £118 + VAT thereafter. Places are limited and you can book online to reserve your place. If you have any queries please contact Cathryn O’Grady on 07918 174176, or by e-mail cath@how-do.co.uk.

The videos from my presentations from Usability: What’s The Use? are below for watching.

My presentation slides and further usability resources from the event are also available for reference.

Manchester Digital Introduction and Usability Primer

Usability – Stripped Bear from Paul Rouke on Vimeo.

An introduction to Usability: What’s The Use? by Shaun Fensom from Manchester Digital, followed by a short primer to usability by Paul Rouke, User Experience Director at PRWD.

No matter how many job titles there are in the usability and user experience field, at least all professionals share 1 common goal…

Usability – The Importance For Internal Business Systems

Usability – The Importance For Internal Business Systems from Paul Rouke on Vimeo.

Paul Rouke, User Experience Director at PRWD, talks about the importance of usability for internal business systems, specifically around staff productivity and process efficiency.

The presentation touches on common barriers to staff productivity, some of the main reasons for these barriers, plus a short video of a manufacturing company who are embracing user-centered design as a way of combating the traditional software development issues on a companies productivity.

The presentation also asks business owners a few key questions, such as do you listen to your staff, do you staff waste valuable company time doing repetitive tasks, and do you know what is the on-going cost to your business if you use un-usable software systems.

Usability – The Importance For Websites and Online Marketing

Usability – The Importance for Customer Facing Websites from Paul Rouke on Vimeo.

Paul Rouke, User Experience Director at PRWD, talks about the importance of usability for businesses communicating with both new and potential customers.

Featuring a case study of how a company improved their revenue-per-employee by 95% over a 2 year period, along with some attendee participation, this 17 minute presentation touches on a wide variety of websites and activities, such as lead generation sites, information portals and search engine marketing campaigns.

Most significantly conversion rates for e-commerce websites are discussed, where usability can have a remarkable affect on a companies bottom line, if the right decisions are made in making improvements.