Our “Lady Luck” has rolled the dice and Dominik Schwarz is the winner! Congratulations! The ticket is right on the way to you! For the others: There will be another DfC.
We’re sold out for the 6th DfC. We are very happy about this and are looking forward to a great conference on Friday. But there is one last chance for you to join us. 
Our premium sponsor Cortal Consors is giving away one last ticket!
Here’s the schedule for the 6th Design for Conversion on July 1. Make sure that you arrive on time, otherwise contact us. If you haven’t bought your ticket by now, there are still some available!
08:30 Onsite Registration and breakfast
09:30 Opening Speech
09:45 Martin Kupp – Organizational Creativity – Learnings From the World of Arts
10:30 Team Setup – nobody is left behind
10:45 Workshop-Session 1: Getting to know the challenge and going wild
12:15 Andy Budd – Persuasive Web Design
13:00 Lunch break and open discussion (let you settle down and get real)
13:30 Dan Lockton – Design, Mental Models and Behaviour Change
14:15 Workshop-Session 2 – Off the wall ideas (decide on one idea and develop it)
15:30 Eric Reiss – Of buttons and brains: four keys to successful conversion
16:15 Workshop-Session 3 – Making your ideas stick (prepare your idea for presentation)
17:30 Semi finals: Presentation of ideas to casestudy-owners
18:00 Short entertainment
18:15 Grand finale: Presentation of ideas to Keynote-Speakers
18:45 Special Talk: Arjan Haring & Maurits Kaptein- Persuasion Profiling
19:00 Closing Speech and announcing the winners
19:15 Barbecue and open discussion
22:00 Afterparty
Merely four weeks to go, till we lift of with the 6th Design for Conversion, we proudly announce the second casestudy, by our premium sponsor Cortal Consors. Wouldn’t it be interesting enough, that a bank opens up to a format like the Design for Conversion conference, it even gets better. They attended last year as participants, just to return fully engaged. Expect a striking casestudy with insights and challenges.
The case owners, coming from the user experience team of Cortal Consors, will be present and introduce the challenge and the themselves to you. Be ready to drive them nuts with your questions. So, please welcome our premium sponsor and casestudy-owner Cortal Consors! We’re very happy to have them with us.
If you missed out before our first casestudy – it will be coming from the WWF (World Wildlife Fund). They’re also up to a true conversion challenge. Hits me, that I can’t be a participant. Let’s see, what you will make out of these two casestudies.
Pecha Kucha, ist japanisch für “wildes Gebrabbel” – und genau das kann schnell entstehen, wenn man auf der Bühne steht, auf der Leinwand hinter einem 20 Bilder ablaufen und man zu jedem Bild genau 20 Sekunden etwas erzählen darf. Gnadenlos folgt der Bildwechsel und eh man es sich versieht, sind die 400 Sekunden rum.
Ich kannte Pecha Kucha nicht und war bass erstaunt, als sich am 27. Mai im Kölner Stadtgarten etwa 250 Leute einfanden, um dem wilden Gebrabbel über Donaldisten, Wohnungssuche, Nasenoperationen, Horrorcomics, öffentliche Toiletten und andere Themen zu lauschen, zu bestaunen und zu bejubeln. Ich brabbelte über die Design for Conversion – Rockstar für 400 Sekunden!
Ich liebe herausforderende Konzepte und so fiel die Entscheidung nicht schwer, selber herauszufinden, wie wild der Vortrag wird, wenn man versucht die Design for Conversion in 20×20 Sekunden einem sehr gemischten Publikum zu erklären. Vorweg, es wurde “charmant” und wer die korrekte Zahl meiner “Ähms” rausfindet, bekommt auf der Design for Conversion Afterparty von mir ein Bier ausgegeben.
Zählen könnt ihr die “Ähms”, wenn ihr euch den Vortrag samt O-Ton hier anschaut und -hört: Pecha Kucha Vortrag Design for Conversion. Auch alle anderen Vorträge sind mit O-Ton digital verewigt und in diesem Blogbeitrag über die Vorträge der 10. Pecha Kucha Köln zusammengefasst.
Editor’s note: We’re a very glad to have found a hardcore fan in Adana Washington, a professional writer living in Michigan, USA. Here’s her take on the Design for Conversion. She even wanted to write it without us promising to return to the USA. Isn’t she great?
As someone who loves to learn new things, I have become enamored with persuasion design and online media lately. Working with Arjan Haring and Maurits Kaptein after connecting over their PersuasionAPI has really opened my eyes to the vast possibilities that await us all when we combine marketing and technology. So, as a person who thrives on generating new ideas, after hearing about Design for Conversion, I must say: I am envious.
I have not been to any of the previous conventions, so I can not judge Design for Conversion. Yet from the impression I get from reading about past events, I would love to be a part of the open-forum, brainstorming typhoon that is Design for Conversion. But alas, I am just a humble writer (and office assistant) in Michigan. I can’t afford to hop a plane to Cologne for a day to join the competition. I can only daydream of being able to join the dynamic workshops, the free-spirited experts, and the attendees hailing from all different disciplines and walks of life. I am a huge advocate for generating and sharing ideas, and I am passionate about creative thinking and problem solving. Those attending Design for Convention will be able to work with like-minded people — under the guidance of industry experts, no less. To have the opportunity to participate in consecutive workshops, facilitated by high class, world-renowned experts, while reflecting on design process and persuasion technology? It is sure to be an intellectual utopia.
The best part, in my opinion, is the competition that weaves its way into the Design for Conversion conference. Having just read an article on using contests to spur creativity and innovation, I can definitely see how competition can bring out the best in people – especially if you have to present your ideas and solutions on stage. Not only would you be presenting your ideas to the case owners, but you would also be competing in the semi-finals, in hopes of presenting to the conference speakers in the grand finale. To witness these industry experts competing against one another to present comprehensive, compelling and behaviour-changing solutions is a treat in and of itself. Competition always engages people even further, because no one wants to present anything less than stellar work to their peers and case owners.
If only there was a way that I could participate in the Design for Conversion workshops. I already have a list of speakers that I want to meet. And I’ll be watching the DfC news feed to find out more about the case studies. I’ve already started brainstorming solutions for the WWF case study. Part of the motivation may have been my obsession with pandas, but can you blame me?
[Update 1 - 2011-05-24 - Editor's note: Added the fourth challenge by Martin Kupp.]
A little more than a month away from the nicest conference I have ever been to, I asked the keynote speakers what they think is the biggest challenge in their field right now. This is what they told me. And I will add some thoughts of my own to make me look good ;-)
I’d say that one of the biggest challenges is designing for the ever increasing number of devices and platforms. Back in the day we only really had to worry about the website or web app. Now we have to consider the mobile experience, the tablet experience and the app experience across several devices. Pretty soon we will have to consider the interactive TV experience as well.
Some of the troubles include how much functionality to replicate across platforms and how much UI consistency do you need. Should you consider all of these platforms and simply different UI into the same service, or should you consider them separate products in and of themselves. All very tricky questions and all with the same answer, “it depends”.
Source: Logic + Emotion
Arjan’s commentary: excellent choice of challenge. Start mixing this up with a multichannel persuasion strategy and you know what lies ahead. Every device has it’s own role to play. It can be the case that a mobile phone app is a great start to connect with your brand the first time. And the app can be used to persuade you to register to the email newsletter and so on and so on.
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Nothing simulates the real life better than the real life. That’s why we always emphasize, that we have real life casestudies, you will work on during the consecutive workshop sessions at a Design for Conversion. This will naturally motivate you to pull out the best out of you and your team mates. You just don’t want to screw things, especially when you have to present your results later on – in front of the whole crowd, the case owners and the speakers. Isn’t it beautiful? So the casestudies are of utter importance, and if you’re interested I’ll explain a bit or two about them.
4th Design for Conversion - Greenpeace casestudy
Oh boy, I did it again and couldn’t find an end, so before we get to the details, here all you wanted to know about our casestudies in short:
I’m quite busy right now, to tell the people about the DfC and invite them to join. And virtually all the time I get the question: “What happened before?” As our event archive is quite a mess currently, let me try to answer this here.
My first contact with the DfC was in 2009, the 2nd DfC in Amsterdam. And it blew me away. What an energy and inspiration in just one day. Read my blogpost at uxzentrisch.de (in German) about it. I was hooked.
And after my first DfC I really questioned the value of usual conference formats. So, I had to bring the DfC in 2010 to Germany to give more people the chance to experience this better way of doing a conference. That was the 4th DfC in Cologne and it worked out quite well, even with a new crew. Later, I even jumped to New York City to help out on the 5th edition last November, to bring the DfC experience to the States. This worked also very good and were well received. And now we’re heading for the 6th DfC – the 6th!. I’m quite sure, nobody thought the DfC would get that far. And we’re definetly not finished with it.
It does help winning to smile even more.
It always starts in the morning with a bunch of participants, that are tired (getting up early) und irritated (what will happen) and it will always end with a cheering crowd, that is quite exhausted, but totally happy about the achievements of the day – even if they didn’t win. Everybody is smiling. That must be good for something. And that happend at every DfC since we started. We must be doing something right.
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Source: Wired's article, Welcome to the Brave New World of Persuasion Profiling
There are a lot of people out there that are wondering what Persuasion Profiling exactly is.
Maybe you have read Wired’s article Welcome to the Brave New World of Persuasion Profiling. Or you have heard of PersuasionAPI, the startup company that was born at right here at Design for Conversion.
If you will attend DfC in Cologne the 1st of July, the crew of PersuasionAPI will be doing a special session on Persuasion Profiling FOR THE FIRST TIME IN PUBLIC.
But if you won’t be there, here is a first example of how Persuasion Profiling works, as taken from the scientific paper (PDF) by Maurits Kaptein and Dean Eckles Selecting E ffective Means to Any End: Futures and Ethics of Persuasion Profi ling.
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Some days ago, At the UX-blog uxzentrisch.de our team captain Marian Steinbach wrote a fantastic blogpost (in German) about the DfC and why he is excited about the Design for Conversion and urges you to participate. I can’t translate the post right now (anyone to help here?), but Marian also embedded some footage of the 4th DfC, which I gladly share here. Now, I stop writing and hand you over to the visual experience. Maybe you can feel a bit of the magic that happened at the 4th DfC.
If you’re overwhelmed of so many photos, maybe you lean back now, and enjoy three minutes of video footage – made by the awesome guys from Meta-Fusion. They did a great job on covering the 4th DfC and maybe they’ll be back for the 6th DfC if they don’t need to help saving the world. Video right after the jump.
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