Why would 280 ordinarily sensible internet marketing professionals get up at the crack of dawn and convene at the Mill City Museum? Sure, the camaraderie was great. And the breakfast wasn’t bad either. But those are only two reasons our MIMA monthly events have grown to be so popular.

The real attraction, as always, was the content – a presentation on user experience given by Nick Finck, co-founder of Seattle-based Blue Flavor, a web design company that focuses on creating great user experiences.

So what makes a great user experience? And how can you test your website? Nick described seven fundamental building blocks, and provided valuable insights about them, that you can put to use today.

Useable. This should be a top priority for page-driven design. Very simply, make sure functionality works effectively for all platforms and browsers.

Findable. Lots of developers work really hard to make search functionality as robust as possible. However information architecture and navigation design is equally important. Or even more so. Remember: if you can’t find something, it might as well not exist on your site.

Credible. Give website users an emotional reason to believe in you, as well as a rational one. A clean, professional visual design that provides clear, simple content can go a long ways toward creating a sense of trust.

Accessible. This is not just about avoiding unnecessary java script or burying content in Flash modules. Give users the option to explore your site content without advanced functionality. This includes making sure your site is accessible by people with disabilities.

(The Web Accessibility Initiative is a global volunteer organization dedicated to sharing strategies, guidelines and resources to help make the web accessible to all.)

And there is a strong business case for paying attention to accessibility. Not only can poor website accessibility lead to expensive, protracted litigation, it can lead to lost revenue opportunities when users are denied access to your site.

Desirable. It is important to think about holistic user experience. Do you really know what your users desire? Do focus groups. Then make functionality easier for users and create positive (not painful) emotional experiences for them.

Useful. This is another big issue in user experience. Lots of technologies exist that allow designers to develop cool effects, but make sure they serve a purpose greater than just serving up some eye candy. That means no gratuitous animation or delays to load graphics.

Put another way: don’t make users endure your site and don’t go overboard with the gimmicks. Make your site fast to load and make it easy for users to find the content they are looking for. Web users are trying to find information and solve problems, so they are not looking for a CD-ROM experience with your site.

Bottom line: Nick wonders how many dollars are lost in missed sales opportunities and how many customers are lost because excessive features and functionality get in the way. Not to mention the dollars wasted on developing them.

Valuable. Focus on providing features that make your site easy to use. Focus on developing content and processes that allow users to find the information they need or complete a transaction in as few steps as possible. Don’t treat users as a source of qualified leads to bombard with marketing messages and touch points. Limit the level of commitment you expect users to give to you and let them choose how deep a relationship they would like to have with you.

Three other gold nuggets Nick shared.

1) We need to think, “device agnostic.” We are no longer designing just for the desktop. With new technologies and new applications – and many more advancements on the horizon, we need to serve up information and experiences based on the context of the device/application the user is using and what they are trying to accomplish by using it.

2) We need to fail more. Because we are not pushing ourselves hard enough. And critical feedback is important too. The more we vet usability and experience, the better it gets. Always remember: “Failure is not falling down. Failure is not getting back up.”

3) We need to come together on behalf of our users. Information architects, interaction designers, visual designers, usability experts, accessibility specialists, content developers and marketing professionals would be wise to keep our audience in mind at all times. It’s not about us – it’s about the people who visit our websites.

The key take away. The one most important thing Nick wants you to remember:

By creating good experiences for our website users, regardless of what they are doing or how they do it, we can successfully accomplish our business goals. And that’s what we all get paid for.

I’ll admit it. I’m bonkers for bunko. Johnny Bunko, that is, in the just-released paperback, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, “America’s first business book in the Japanese comic format known as manga — and the last career guide you’ll ever need.”

The book is written by bestselling author Daniel Pink, with art by Rob Ten Pas, who graduated right here in our backyard: at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Johnny Bunko is stuck in a dull, demanding accounting job, running numbers, testing scenarios, and considering enrichment courses like ‘Best Practices for Operationalizing Your Managerial Headset,’ when he bleats — “I want to go into advertising or work in a big design or branding firm.”

Well, okay then, Johnny Bunko. Come join all of us here at MIMA.

Through Johnny Bunko, Pink is displaying his none-too-subtle right-brain leanings, which he expounded upon in his bestselling book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. In that book, Pink claimed we’ve moved out of the Information Age and into the Conceptual Age, where succeeding requires “the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new.”

Exactly what Pink’s done with The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: craft a satisfying, if a bit juvenile, narrative, while combining the seemingly unrelated ideas of manga and career advice.

(By the way, apologies to all you left-brained MIMA members. We value your expertise. Really, we do.)

Pink’s read-it-at-one-sitting book is packed with career wisdom that would be preachy were it not delivered by a Japanese comic book heroine, who is, according to the trailer on YouTube, “the most kick-ass career advisor you’ve ever seen.”

Here are the six lessons she teaches Johnny Bunko:

1. There is no plan
2. Forget about your weaknesses
3. Persistence trumps talent
4. It’s not about you
5. Make excellent mistakes
6. Leave an imprint

Pink offers wonderful, quotable advice on each of these lessons, such as “the world is littered with talented people who didn’t persist (lesson 3), “you’re here to serve, not self-actualize” (lesson number 4) and “the most successful people make spectacular mistakes” (lesson number 5).

No stranger to marketing, Pink has also created a new word to accompany his book, “bunko” (not to be confused with bunco, the parlor game), cleverly working it into the story line by having Johnny look in the dictionary to find the verb form of his name, between the nouns bunionectomy and buns. (I warned you there was grade-school humor.)

bun-ko — (v) to make a mistake from which the benefits of what you’ve learned exceed the costs of the screw-up.

I predict it won’t be long before this verb appears in Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary.

The book’s trailer has some nice tight scriptwriting, including this enigmatic tagline: “explode your mind, embrace your chopsticks.” Read the book and it will all make sense.

Matter of fact, in the time it took you to read this post (and I thank you for that), you could already be through two chapters of The Adventures of Johny Bunko.

(Hat tip to Marci Alboher: Career Advice for the Short Attention Span.)

No way, you say.

Think again. Right here in our backyard, Target is asking agencies who might otherwise consider themselves competitors to collaborate. If you’re not cool with this, well then, maybe you better get with the program.

More and more agencies are being asked to set competitive agendas aside and work collaboratively on behalf of their common clients.

Over at MarketingProfs Daily Fix, I interviewed Lance Thornswood, Interactive Creative Director at Target, who speaks about his role managing multiple “best-in-class” agencies.

“I’ve yet to encounter any agency that can handle both the breadth and depth required across all our media types,” says Thornswood. “They either do many things reasonably well or one thing exceedingly well. By orchestrating the integration on the client side and demanding collaboration among our agencies, we get breadth by combining the deep expertise of the best agencies in each medium.” (Read the full interview here.)

Question for all you smart MIMA members:
Are you working side-by-side with competitors?
Is it working?

Please share.

New year, new words. Here are three neologisms for all you smart digital natives to use in 2008:

Friendors: Vendors who become friends. You’ll find the word “friendors” in Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary, which outsources the once-sacred role of lexicographer to folks like you and me.

She attended MIMA with two of her friendors.

Wait, you say, here in the interactive world, we’re not vendors, we’re partners, agencies, or clients. Hmmm. “Frartners?” Don’t think so. How about “Fragencies” or “Flients”?

Plan on deepening friendships with friendors, fragencies, and flients at all the great programs MIMA has in store this year.

The next word is a little less friendly:

Frenemies: A blend of “friends” and “enemies.” In other words, business associates or agencies who work together, but are actually competitors.

Though not a new word, frenemies is gaining traction in the business world, especially now that Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and CEO of the global agency WPP, used it to describe his agency’s relationship with Google, who is both ally and rival to WPP.

I’ve been intrigued with the word because it provides a handy label for discussing ambiguous business relationships that involve two or more agencies working together as partners — when they might otherwise be competitors.

Over at MarketingProfs Daily Fix, I offer examples of frenemies in the interactive space, when a client assigns, for example, the interactive portion of a campaign to one agency and the print portion to another, when both agencies could potentially handle the entire span of work. And I offer tips for successfully managing frenemies, if that’s your role.

For me, the only problem with the word frenemies is a touch of negativity. Enemy is a bit strong, a bit militaristic. And to succeed, frenemies need to focus on collaboration, not competition.

Frenemies has yet to make it into the standard dictionaries. You won’t find it in Merriam-Webster, although it is in Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary. (Although the latter definition is purely personal, describing two-faced friends.)

And our last word:

Froes: Synonymous with frenemies. A blend of “friend” plus “foe.” For a great discussion on frenemies and froes, see Bill Taylor’s, post at Harvard Business Online: The New Language of Competition: Are You Friend or Froe?

“Froes” was coined by Sir Martin Sorrell (so far as I can tell), and its use as a business word is not yet in Wikipedia. Before you write the entry, you should know that a froe is also a cleaving tool for splitting cask staves and shingles from the block.

We don’t have much call for that in interactive marketing.

Do you have examples of new words — to describe all of us? Please share.

Are you sitting in meetings, your BlackBerry partially hidden, texting, emailing, and Web browsing? Are you enjoying lunch with a colleague while managing your calendar? Are you on a conference call, but finessing a spreadsheet and muting the speaker to confer with colleagues?

C’mon, admit it.

You and thousands of other “digital natives” have a new moniker thanks to Lee Rainie, the 2007 MIMA Summit Keynote speaker and Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project.

You’re an “absent presence.” And quite possibly proud of it.

Raine’s oxymoron describes your essential multitasking self. Like the oxymorons “deafening silence” or “darkness visible,” Rainie’s term is a marriage of contradictions: you’re physically present, but mentally absent. Or, more charitably, mentally distracted.

This is not always a bad thing. As Jason Fried, another MIMA Summit speaker and founder of 37signals, quipped, “the email you don’t even know you’re getting is more interesting than the meeting you’re in.”

Mind you, Fried takes a hard line on meetings, calling them “toxic, costly time wasters that convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute.” He’d probably give you permission to be an “absent presence.”

So now that your species has been identified, let’s examine your traits. One, Rainie says, is that you “pay continuous partial attention.” You want to vigilant about, well, everything Web 2.0, but the volume of information is simply too great.

Another is that you engage in both “horizontal and vertical reading.” Horizontal reading is not what you do in bed. It’s what you do when you skim through 20 emails by scanning the subject lines and the preview text, scroll through your Google Reader for blog posts that catch your attention, or scan the abstracts on Forrester for relevant articles.

In horizontal reading, you’re skipping like a stone across a vast lake of information.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. I was just horizontal reading.” Try that next time you’re taken to task for multitasking during a meeting.

“Vertical reading” is the proverbial deep dive, when you — gasp — actually read an entire article or book or series of posts related to your topic of interest.

“Today, attention is both truncated and elongated,” explained Rainie.

Because I’m sensing that your attention to this post will soon be truncated, I’ll wrap up with a few suggestions. (And please add your own.)

When you find yourself behaving as an “absent presence”… politely ask that the meeting be shortened. Or grant the meeting organizer the courtesy of your attention. Eye contact and focused attention are powerful — to give and to get.

When it’s your (important!) meeting and people are becoming “absent presences”… speed up your delivery, distill your content, jump to deadlines and deliverables, ask for better behavior, or just end the meeting.

The digital natives will thank you.

Tired of being an “email” square peg in an “online marketing” round hole? Feeling alone in this mad, mad, online marketing world? Now there’s a hub for the people who have shared the panic of pressing the “launch” button on a mailing to 1 million people. It’s the Email Experience Council.

The EEC is, well as they concisely state it, “…access to the latest thinking, best practices and strategies in email and digital marketing.” You have access to statistics, reports, blogs, as well as the ability to participate in roundtables that cover key issues in our industry.

Many of the participants are key figures within the Email Marketing community who really understand the issues facing our industry. It’s nice to see Email Marketing getting a bit more stature in the Interactive community. After all…we’re a smart, good-looking bunch.

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When is a website like an advertisement? When is it like a software application? How do creative directors, user experience advocates, graphic designers and information architects work together to craft a creative solution? Who owns the “big idea” – especially when there are a million small ideas? Who gets to be “The Decider?”

Join Karen McGrane from Avenue A Razorfish as she shares possible answers to these questions (plus any you might bring along). She’ll share examples and war stories from client projects like Mercedes AMG, Kodak and The New York Public Library.

Details on: “Building Interactive Creative Solutions”

WHEN:
Wednesday, July 26

5:15 pm
Registration & cash bar

6 pm
Presentation

7 pm
Networking, food & cash bar

WHERE:
New Minneapolis Central Library
300 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis

COST:
Members $20
Non-members $40

Register Online.

Note: In order to register online you will need to login with your MIMA account. If you do not have a MIMA account, you can create one (hey, they’re free).