[Build Backlinks Online] Thinking Big: An Interview with #MozCon Speaker Kyle Rush

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Thinking Big: An Interview with
#MozCon Speaker Kyle Rush'


Posted by Erica McGillivray

When we sat down in our big MozCon command room â think the
Enterprise-D's swank Observation Lounge â we knew we wanted to bring
someone who'd worked for the Obama re-election campaign to MozCon. Why? Because
no matter your flavor of politics, the re-election campaign was full of internet
marketing brilliance and used big data to connect with its audience in a way
that affected the world. This is what we're all trying to do, right?


When we sent feelers out, Kyle Rush answered our call. He served as deputy
director of frontend web development for the Obama for America campaign. Kyle's
currently director of technology at The New Yorker, and he'll be speaking about
how to "Win Through Optimization and Testing" at MozCon, July 8-10. You don't
want to miss this advice about testing and conversion rate optimization. You can
follow Kyle on Twitter @kylerush and on his blog.


How did you come to work for the Obama for America campaign?


I've always been interested in technology since a young age. In junior high, I
would spend all of my free time on the family computer making websites. In my
second year of undergrad, I got really into politics and changed my major from
advertising to political science. I followed the '08 campaign closely and really
admired how the campaign was able to innovate in the political field because
political campaigns are notorious for deploying outdated and unusable
technology, if any. After graduation, I worked for Blue State Digital which
contributed to the '08 digital effort. My boss Teddy Goff left Blue State to
become the Digital Director at the Obama campaign, and I asked if he needed an
engineer. Two weeks later, I moved to Chicago.


What did you learn most about yourself as part of such an intense experience?


A lot of political staffers will tell you that working on a campaign is like
building an airplane while you're flying it, and that's very much the case. I
moved to Chicago, where I had never lived, on a two-week notice. We quickly
hired some engineers and built out a team. During the last half of the campaign,
we worked seven-day weeks and not less than 10-hour days. We saw all the work we
were doing play out on TV every day. There were extreme highs like when we had a
90% chance to win the election a few weeks before the first debate. There were
extreme lows like when we lost the first debate badly. We worked 18 months
towards one night, and then we won. I think that we all learned that the limits
we thought we had don't actually exist and that we can go as high and far as we
want to.


What was your favorite win for the campaign?


The obvious favorite win is election day, which was one of the happiest days
of my life. Aside from that, though, I would say the day we tested our
"sequential" donate page. At that point, we had already optimized all the
low-hanging fruit, and it was time to put some serious investment in a variation
to try and beat our control donate page. We put in a lot of thinking, time, and
effort, and we ended up beating the control by 5%. That was a huge win, because
it taught us that even though you might think your page is optimized, there is
always more you can do.


What win surprised you the most?


I don't know if it qualifies as a win, but the Democratic National Convention
was by far the most surprising thing that happened during the campaign. The
convention went perfectly, but the amount of traffic we received to the website
during the convention was unreal. We blew through our entire test queue for
donate pages and were just coming up with tests to do on the fly while the
traffic was pouring in.




Okay, for those us who are political nerds, did you get to meet President
Obama? What's he like?


We did get to meet the President! He came to the office several times during
the campaign to talk and meet everyone at headquarters. For having the stature
of the President of the United States, he is very human. The day after the
election, he came and hugged everyone at headquarters. He is a great guy.


Switching gears from your past to your present, what's inspired you lately?


Web performance is always really inspiring to me because deep down it's what I
care about on my engineering side. Specifically, I really like to read about the
way that other engineers make web apps feel like native apps on mobile devices.


We're all a bunch of data geeks. What are some of your favorite metrics to dig
into?


I'm a performance engineer at heart so I really like to look at metrics around
page speed. My favorite metric is time-to-paint, which is the amount of time it
takes for the browser to do its first render of a web page. This differs from
the pageload metric in that the browser often paints the web page before all of
the assets have loaded. For this reason, time-to-paint is a more valuable metric
to me.


As an engineer obsessed with UX, I also like to focus on metrics that quantify
user frustration. On the Obama campaign, I spent a lot of time measuring any
form error from a validation error on a certain field to the number of
validation errors that occurred for each for submission. On our donate forms, we
found that the people most commonly had two errors on their form submission
which were the employer/occupation fields. Then we wrote a script that measured
if people were entering any data in them at all. Turns out people weren't
entering any data, and we soon came up with solution to fix this problem. Once
we solved the problem, our error rates plummeted.


MozCon attendees love to engage on social media with speakers. What's your
favorite social media network?


Instagram is definitely my favorite social medium. It's beautifully simple,
and it doesn't require a lot of attention, unlike Twitter. You can go a week
without opening it and not feel like you missed a lot.


Finally, for some pure fun, what music have you been listening to lately?


I like pretty much all music, but I really like upbeat/dance-y music. Lately,
I've been listening to Kanye's new album Yeezus non-stop. Typically though, I
listen to house music at work and while working out. Over the past few days,
I've been listening to songs like "Boy Oh Boy" by Diplo, "Play Hard" by David
Guetta, and "Alive" by Krewella.


Thanks, Kyle, for sharing with us. Can't wait for your talk at MozCon. Follow
Kyle on Twitter @kylerush and on his blog. We'll see the rest of you there!




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