Comments on: SparkUp Conference: What’s New in UX and Web Design

By: Pawel Brodzinski

Pawel Brodzinski — Mon, 31 May 2010 19:47:33 +0000

Thanks Vicky. I didn’t write the post to hear votes of support but I guess it sounds as I needed some. I might try more of that to boost my ego.

Anyway, regular readers are always appreciated. You, who take effort to drop a comment from time to time, are appreciated even more.

By: Vicky Stamatopoulou

Vicky Stamatopoulou — Mon, 31 May 2010 18:54:25 +0000

Well there was one positive thing about you visiting SparkUp… this blog post ;-) Thanks for reporting, it is always interesting reading you, even if I am not regular in commenting, I am reading you regularly , so your content and the package of this blog had worked at least to me. Best regards :-)

By: Pawel Brodzinski

Pawel Brodzinski — Thu, 27 May 2010 12:07:43 +0000

Thanks for warm words, Ryszard. Running a blog requires effort both inside and outside – that’s not a news for me, but one of things I suck at is drawing newcomers’ attention to the point when they start digging deeper. High bounce rate basically proves this.

The other story is of course with regular readers, like you. I hope there aren’t many people unsubscribing Software Project Management because they don’t like it anymore. Anyway I don’t have any indicator which would raise red light here.

Making people aware of the blog is a different story and it has little to do with the design thus I’ll just omit it in the discussion.

My general approach is you can’t blame users/clients/attendees/whoever for what they are and how they act. If people don’t read and don’t learn and what I do is writing and teaching I should try to overcome their behavior and get them interested in reading and learning. At least reading and learning this small piece of knowledge I share on the blog. After all, in terms of audience size, it will be my success too. So no, I don’t think it is a right thing to blame others.

About SparkUp: I don’t think it needs to grow. There was about 400 people already, while I personally expected 100 or so. Hopefully people standing behind the conference will focus on all the glitches next year – they aren’t that hard to fix.

By: podly ryszard

podly ryszard — Thu, 27 May 2010 10:01:26 +0000

Pawel,

About keeping people on the site longer, there’s a great article by Paddy Donnelly called “Life Below 600px”. It’s about a common misconception forcing designers to cram every important element of a page to the top (above 600px). This results in pages that people just glance instead of reading them.

This is not the case with this blog. You’re doing a great job in keeping the readers interested throughout your articles and they always encourage me to keep reading them to the very end. I don’t think you should be so hard on yourself. Maybe it’s not you, it’s the readers. After all, remember that most people don’t read and don’t listen anymore [ref to: why the world is a mess linked in one of your previous articles ;-)] What I’m getting at is, maybe the problem is not the site itself but all the things outside this site. Maybe you need to attract users that are genuinely interested in your writing and they will stay longer.

Anyway, thanks for this report from SparkUp. I hope this event will grow and become more professional in the future.