The Secret You

What is free will? Who is really in charge of your decisions? Is it you, your conscious self or your unconscious mass? How aware are you of your true self, the true ‘you’ who lays hidden in your consciousness?

In this amazing BBC Horizon episode “The Secret You” from 2009, Professor Marcus du Sautoy takes a deeper look into these questions and tries to show us the evidence of consciousness and its effects on ‘being’.

True, there is no direct link between my blog, on how to gain practical insights into online optimization, and this BBC Documentary (although I will try to make this link later), but the Neuroscience element is simply intriguing and I am confident many of you will find it interesting, too.

The most interesting evidence shown, was from an experiment that proves that we subconsciously make decisions long before we are consciously aware of them. In this specific experiment up to 6 seconds!

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Inspirational UX iPhone Apps

We have run into it at one point or another… the inspiration wall. With a plethora of blogs out there suggesting motives and methods to us on a daily basis it can be hard to lose sight of things.

Inspiration can be hard to come at times. I am always reminded of this fact when I listen to Faithless where Rollo sings ‘You don’t need eyes to see, you need vision‘.

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Tealeaf & Customer Experience Management

About 2 months ago I was asked to participate in creating a testimonial video for Tealeaf and how we have come to use it at Thomas Cook Netherlands to help gain insights into our customers’ experience.

Although the video is quite short, not even 5 minutes, there is a lot to say about Tealeaf and CEM (Customer Experience Management) in general. Let’s face it, quantitative data is fantastic but not always suitable to gain insights into qualitative actions. In other words, web analytics will tell me if something is going wrong, where and how often, but it won’t tell me how to fix or optimize it or even tell me how my visitors use my website.

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User Research vs Intuition

User Research and usability testing are (should be) two of the cornerstones of any company’s efforts to improve revenue generation through their online channel.

User Research allows us to create hypothesis that are aimed at improving the website’s user-friendliness, but more common, conversion. Usability testing allows us to test those hypotheses.

The resources needed to research, document, setup and execute usability testing are not dramatic, but they aren’t effortless either.

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Guerilla Online Panel Recruitment

In a past blog post I described in some detail some lean and mean methods to perform remote usability tests. The article is steadily bringing visitors to my blog, visitors, who like myself, need to find uncommon methods for performing online research in order to convince the corporate-powers-that-be, that what we can do is useful and critical to improving any company’s online services.

Working in an enterprise environment can seem daunting at times. As an online specialist, analyzing vast amounts of quantitative data, that often comes with an enterprise organization territory, is bliss. Qualitative data on the other hand often results in sleepless nights, loss of motivation, the sporadic appearance of grey hairs and for those less fortunate, receding hairlines.

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