What Was Your Ah-Ha Moment?
At every conference I attend, I walk away with a slew of new ideas. In the opening session on the last day, Reggie Henry, Chief Technology Officer at ASAE and the Center, called those ideas, “Ah-ha” moments and asked for volunteers to come up and share them.
I didn’t respond and neither did a lot of people. I felt bad for Reggie.
Maybe the people in the audience were too shy or maybe it was too early in the morning for people to respond. Personally, I need time to process ideas from a conference and it was too early in the conference (let alone morning) for me to respond.
My ah-has come a day or two later—sometimes a week later. I still don’t know all my ah-has but like so many epiphanies, the first one to rose to the top while I was stuck in 66 traffic on the way home: Do usability testing any chance you get.
There are so many ways to do usability testing and so many types of testing you can do. And some can be done at little to no cost. For example, if you are nearby another association, cooperate with them. Exchange staff and do usability testing on each other’s websites. Or test members when they come to the office or test new staff soon after they are hired (before they get the staff structure and jargon down).
I plan on using a form similar to a website feedback sheet provided in a session called Usability Lab: Simple Tests, Valuable Results for Your Website . It’s a form designed for new staff (and my association doesn’t get new staff all that often), so I plan on using modified version to use with members and other visitors as well.
That was Ah-ha number one.
So I will ask Reggie’s question again, what was your Association Technology Conference Ah-ha?
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Comments
I think Reggie asked the question too early for me. It all came together for me at Rob Wolfe's spectacular session, "Are Your Members Ready for Web 2.0?" Among other things, he suggested "progression." Add one thing at a time.
Our 2.0 project is going slowly - looking back, maybe we tried to do too much too soon.
My ah-ha: "Regression." Do a couple of things, focus obsessively on the early adopters, let word of mouth spread. More people will get interested, and then demand more.
Another: At Erica Driver's session, she discussed 7 tenets of the information workplace - I thought of eahc of these and outr website, and started conjuring 7 specific applications. aH-HA!
Posted by: Frank Fortin | February 2, 2008 6:19 PM
Okay, I didn't attend and so probably shouldn't respond, but I did have ah-ha's thanks to great blogging. One ah-ha was this handout (website feedback) mentioned above. Another was the comment about NetGen because I think we do tend to limit so much of our segmenting to age. Interestingly enough a Pew study that I heard about on NPR yesterday showed that their are demographic differences between those who have no land lines (14% of the households now) but that from a political/social opinion the lines aren't that clear.
My final ah-ha to share is that blogging (and RSS feeds that brings your great entries to my Google homepage) is a critical component to an association f2f meetings. Thanks to all you for bringing the tech conf to me which I hope I'll get firsthand next year!
Posted by: Peggy Hoffman | February 3, 2008 10:13 AM
Peggy - I just wanted to say I'm glad you did comment. We know that more nonattendees are reading our conference blog posts than attendees. Our conference blogging has two goals.
By far the most important goal is to try to give something useful back to the association community (or to put it in the words of our guiding principles: we're trying to "connect great ideas and great people to inspire leadership and achievement in the association community.")
A secondary goal is to make people interested in the conferences that ASAE & The Center put together.
I'm glad we were able to give you some ah-ha's even though you weren't there, and if it inspires you to be part of the face-to-face conversation at an upcoming conference, all the better!
Posted by: Scott Briscoe | February 5, 2008 1:39 PM