OHO U: Website User Experience

Lights, Camera, Call to Action! Proven Approaches to Creating Effective Videos

You spend a ton of money every year on expensive video production, photoshoots, and graphic design for testimonials, webpages, campaigns, and advertisements. But how certain are you that they actually appeal to their targeted marketing personas? These resource-intensive communication tools are too expensive to rely on a hit or miss approach. In this session we will show some tests you can run before you hit the publish button to ensure that your marketing spend has a greater return.  

You will learn...

•  Classification standards for the types of videos universities and colleges use to market to prospective students

•  Best practices for producing education marketing videos — duration, format, cadence, publication source, etc. 

•  How to create video concepts that will help you target individual personas and provide a more profitable marketing impact

•  How to use the tools you will need to evaluate the effectiveness of your videos before they are published

Jim has always been creative, from his days as a newspaper reporter and book editor to his time as a managing director for a regional arts facility. As Director of User Experience Research and Strategy at OHO, he uses that creativity as well as his expertise at ethnographic inquiry, heuristic evaluation, and usability testing to create user experiences that help clients meet and exceed their business goals. In addition to consulting for higher education clients such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Jim has experience consulting for Standard & Poor’s, Chase, and The New York Times. Outside of OHO, Jim is an award-winning playwright who has produced plays in New York, Boston, Dublin, London, and across the United States.

Using Heatmaps to Improve User Experience

Continuously updating your site is vital to a good user experience. However, most of the time we might think of those updates as purely content - focused. However, using a heatmapping tool like Crazyegg or Hotjar can help us identify user experience issues - as well as correct them. This presentation will focus on Crazyegg's capabilities, reading heatmaps, and fixing commonly seen issues. We will be using Crazyegg heatmaps from Bellevue College and OHO's site as case studies.

You will learn...

•  What a heatmap is and how to read one 

•  To Understand how to identify issues unearthed by heatmaps

•  To Explore manageable ways to correct or mitigate issues. 

Kelly O'Foran is a Senior Designer, UX/Visual at OHO Interactive. Her work often spans multiple phases of large projects for higher-ed clients, including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Columbia. (Not sure how formal you want this to be, but if you err on the informal feel free to add this next bit.) She's a very good cook, an intermediate knitter, and a novice runner.