Startup designer workshop

This evening I attended an event organized by “Stockholm startup weekend”.

The main purpose of this organization is, like you can get from the name, the startup weekend competition: a 54 hours event about people working on their ideas and trying to set up a simply structure of their startup. At the beginning of the evening they explained this event and the winning team of the past year gave some tips.

After all these preliminary speeches, the main purpose of the meeting took place: a lesson, following by a workshop, entitled  “Online conversion from a designer point of view” led by Erik Ceder from Veryday.

He gave some important suggestions about how the web site of your startup should be, we can resume the concept in 4 points:
1. Credibility: it doesn’t have to contain “dark patterns” which mislead the customer, instead it has to include statements by testimonials and social proofs which enhance the brand experience;
2.Personality: the website must be playfulness (for example using a mascot), consistent and unusual in order to capture the attention of the customer;
3.User experience: we have to focus on the conversion goals, we have to drive the customers attention where we want;
4.Disposition & Layout: obviously the website has to be attractive, it doesn’t need to have too much information on the same page but it has to emphasize the most important points.

Talking about the workshop, its main task was the rethinking of the website of a very innovative product, Easystove (http://www.ezylife.com/shop/ezystove): a wood cook-stove, created to help the poorest populations, which is very easy to use. Divided in groups we have to produce a preliminary layout about the new website, created in order to sell the product to the people who do camping.

The event was very interesting, especially regarding the website tips, but the best part was to see how the designers work: it was amazing to watch how they translated their ideas in effective layouts in only one hour. They are very gifted people to take into account when you develop a startup!