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When was the last time you had a really enjoyable experience with a product or service? Do you remember how it made you feel? Do you remember what about it made you feel that way? What about your experience stuck out most in your mind? If you are like me, some of these questions can be fairly difficult to answer, while others may be incredibly obvious. On top of this, the answers may seem clearer in one case than they do in another. Welcome to the world of experience design. This post is primarily taken from the first part of a presentation I made a BarCamp Nashville in 2009, entitled “Whoa! Creating Engaging User Experiences“.

Slide from Whoa! Creating Engaging User Experiences

We recently launched a new site for Nashville Center for Laser and Facial Surgery. The practice is lead by Dr. Brian S. Biesman, a world-renowned authority on cosmetic, reconstructive, and laser surgery. For the site, the goal was not only to tell about Dr. Biesman’s practice, but to serve as a repository for helpful resources on a wide range of industry topics, including his own “Face Facts” resources. It was a lot of content — nearly 150 articles on research, services and treatments — and our goal was to make it user-friendly and easy to navigate. Think Wikipedia.

It’s happened to most all of us. We see some site that has great deals on products or services, and we sign up for an email list. But then, after receiving an email a month/week/day/hour, it gets to be too much noise and we hit that all-too-familiar “unsubscribe” link in the footer of the email.

We just wrapped up work on a site that we did for Ocean Futures Society, a non-profit marine conservation and education organization. The group’s chairman and spokesman is Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the legendary ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau. OFS serves as a “Voice for the Ocean” by communicating in all media the critical bond between people and the sea and the importance of wise environmental policy.

Today marks World AIDS Day, a movement that seeks to raise awareness of the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS. Of the 30 million people worldwide that live with the disease, more than 70 percent live in Africa. Nashville-based Blood:Water Mission is a grassroots organization that empowers communities to work together against the HIV/AIDS and water crises.

CentreSource had the honor of producing a video for BWM to show how they are an organization that is about action, not hand-outs. They are about empowering communities to fight against these dangerous threats, not about the status quo in failed programs. The video guides the viewer through the harrowing statistics, but then changes the mindset of despair to promoting one of hope and empowerment.

Over the course of the past few months, our designers and strategists have been hard at work brainstorming and creating a new centresource.com. We’re nearing the completion of this site and can’t wait to share it with you! One thing that we found to be helpful when strategizing the format and features for the new web site were observations that we made while using a tool called ClickTale.

I live in the wonderful town of Pleasant View, Tennessee. It’s located about a 30 minute drive northwest of Nashville. Yesterday, as I passed exit 31 on I-24, I saw a sign in bold red letters proclaiming… “FIREWORKS Sold Here!” Nothing too fancy or flashy, just red paint on a white sign.

I began to recall fond memories from my childhood… memories of the all-too-seldom family vacation fireworks stop. At every exit with fireworks I would beg my parents to pull over and let me partake of explosive goodness. I’m not sure if it was the idea of blowing something up, or the large red arrow that caught my attention, but regardless…I wanted them…NOW.

Thanks to Oprah (@oprah), the CNN (@cnn) / Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) follower race, and almost every other news organization, there has been a recent influx of non-tech users being introduced to the wonderful world of Twitter.  In general, Twitter is a pretty basic system to use and understand: it centers around the simple question “What are you doing?”, allowing people to post everything from late breaking news, to their opinions of the local record store, to raising money for a good cause, to sharing the exploits of their cute little puppy.

There is one question about “what’s with the funny symbols?” that I’ve gotten a few times from Twitter newbies, so I figured I’d write a quick post shedding a little light on the subject, and hopefully provide a little insight into how to quickly become a Twitter power user.

Content is king, right?It takes great content to both 1) optimize your website for high organic rankings on search engines, and 2) communicate the concept and benefit of your business to your web traffic.

Great content is keyword-focused, frequent, and direct. It’s also brief – probably even more brief than you’d want to assume.

This study on web usability highlights some startling facts for those long-winded writers among us (myself included):

• Users tend to spend a baseline of about 25 seconds on your page if they’re actually reading content. In that 25 seconds, they’re reading about 104 words.