Topical and Tropical

Rants, Raves, and Other Mindless Babble

SXSW Interactive 2009

Posted on April 3, 2009 in Conferences, Design | comment bubble 2 Comments »

I realize SXSW finished up a few weeks ago, but I was just going through my notes and I wanted to make sure that I had some of my points documented not only only for my own purposes, but also for yours. Given that this was my second trip to Austin and this time I was attending with a few colleagues who had never been there, the trip took on a different vibe for me. I saw people that I recognized from my last trip, I met some new people, but overall I wanted to go there and get inspired. I wanted to learn new techniques, interact with different technologies, do a little networking, and bring something valuable back to the University. So in a nutshell, I sifted through my many moleskine pages of notes and extracted the most important nuggets of info that I took away from each of the sessions that I attended.

Panel: Everything You Know About Web Design is Wrong
- Customers rebel when they are forced to interact.
- Dots by themselves not significant. Together they create something powerful (ie. Seurat’s painting).
- Experience is the content. Roller coaster isn’t about the tracks, it’s about the ride.
- Designers share space with users who are also designers.
- Embrace visual design as a means to an end, a solution to a problem.
- Exploit, encourage, and protect the expertise of your team.
- Embrace ignorance and mistakes.
- Don’t be distracted by business models that don’t begin and end with the user.
- Tell clients this is the way you should be doing it and this is the question you should be asking.

Panel: Ooh, That’s Clever! Unnatural Experiments in Web Design
- Use clever attention-grabbing details (ie. Aerosmith logo upside-down example).
- People are naturally attracted to fun things.
- Use easter-eggs to surprise users and for viral influence.
- Parallax example with Silverback site shifting vines.
- Movie trailer example with action breaking out of fake-browser.
- Kano model of customer satisfaction. Quality of execution vs. happiness of customer.
- Designers must fill excitement needs.

Panel: Making Yourself Interesting
- Would you care if something went away?
- Give side projects the time that they deserve.
- Find something unique (ie. Bike Hugger).
- Find like-minded people who are into something and exploit that.
- Get Satisfaction example. Connecting and building relationships with communication.
- Content strategy: Plan, Create, Publish, Govern.
- Have the goods. Believe in your product and bring something real.
- Set new goals. Inspire yourself to raise the bar every time.
- Be courageous. Stay focused and be brave about promoting your message.
- Know yourself. Know your limits but don’t obscure your potential.
- Experimenting and commitment don’t really have to go hand-in-hand.
- Forget the concept of the big reveal. Get yourself out there.
- 1 way conversations losing relevancy. Users are becoming more demanding.
- Brand = collection of perceptions that companies shouldn’t try to control.
- Focus on things that add value.

Panel: Make Ideas Happen
- Leaders should speak last when in large brainstorming/strategy sessions.
- Prioritize your jobs on a whiteboard based on immediacy.
- Encourage people to speak up and don’t let go of the ropes (3 way tug-of-war example).
- Get rid of distractions and eliminate those things that clutter our lives.

Panel: Not the Same Old Story
- Example of how Wired magazine looks great in print and dumped in website template.
- Has to be a payoff or a personal connection to the content for the user.
- Participation increases when people can directly affect the content.
- Organic relationships between content should exist.
- People become attached and are more willing to speak up if they are paying for it.
- Big difference between awareness and understanding.
- Short form vs. Long form journalism conversation.

Panel: Designing for Irrational Behavior
- How can technologies provide us a way to see the bigger picture?
- Conduct social competitions and give people rewards for achievements.
- Use people’s natural curiosity to your advantage.

Panel: Web Typography - Stop Bitchin’ and Get Your Glyph On
- Embrace idea of print design inspiring the web design.
- Find ways to manipulate existing fonts (ie. kerning Helvetica example).
- Discussion about the @font-face line of code for font-embedding.
- Designers should use font-linking, get a EULA, and prevent font theft.
- webtypography.net

Panel: UX Team of One
- Leah from Adaptive Path. Awesome freehand sketch slides with transitions.
- Forrester’s CX Model: Interested, Invested, Committed, Engaged, Embedded
- Working together creates ideas.
- Start at the beginning and become an idea generator and then refine. Diamond-shaped graphic.
- Brainstorm, assemble an ad hoc team, and pick the best idea (E-vite example).
- 6 up template: grid used to generate ideas. Get 1/2 good ones and then move past wall.
- Spectrums example. First timer on one end, expert on the other. What level is the goal?
- 2×2 example. Horizontal axis = First timers, Experts. Vertical = Automatic, Manual.
- Word associations example. Write down a bunch of words and use them as a guide.
- Inspiration library example. Take screenshots of good sites and store them in an archive.
- Invite project managers, developers, etc. to participate in the design process.
- Make sketchboards. Get people pointing and creating visual vocabulary. Have clients make notes.
- Host open design sessions. Invite everyone and ask them to solve problems.
- Template based workshops. Design the box. Concept sheets. Write down verbs/nouns/etc.
- Decorate your space with sketches of work and get feedback. Show people what you do.
- Pass the pen feedback. Ask people to show you what they mean.
- Black hat sessions. Invite people, fixed time, and one person plays villian by finding holes.
- Design is about bringing all ideas together in an elegant fashion.
- Star to sail your ship by. Need a clear objective to move towards.
- Design principles: aspects that go deeper than just look (ie. E-vite = make it addictive).
- Design principles enable you to say no to clients and bosses. This is why the solution makes sense.
- Quiddity = essence of products and their experience.
- Start sketching. Schedule workshops. Draft design principles.
- Wireframes becoming obsolete. Get people to the table early, stay in communication.
- Example of putting sketches in a presentation and showing them off with annotations.
- Have people show you flaws in your products and designs.
- Bringing client in means they have a stake in the process/outcome.

Panel: Design for the Wisdom of Crowds
- Number of beans in jar example. Individually people all over the place. Collectively they were close.
- Lots of people (users) are making small decisions and affecting the image of the company.
- The Heisenberg Problem.
- Example of Flickr interestingness scale. Goal was to be number 1.
- Take away ranked list and becomes looser. Interface changes peoples perception.
- Popularity doesn’t always have to rule. Can show good/bad at same time.
- Explicit Feedback. Make a decision. Here’s an interface.
- Never use too many options.
- Implicit Feedback. Page views, searches, interestingness.
- Design matters. How you ask questions changes answers. Kvetch example.
- Red vs. Blue: people get afraid they pay attention to detail. Calming promotes glazing over.
- Brooklyn Museum example. Larger images got more attention.
- Get Satisfaction example. Best post = what people think is valuable.
- Importance of seeing things. Online misses important data (ie. smell, visual, etc.).
- When you feel out of control, you make up stories to fill gaps. Let people feel in control.

Panel: Web in Higher Education
- Small teams can do big things.
- Take risks on products and applications, especially if they are free.
- Be aware of social media implications.
- Brand awareness has to be automatic.
- Use Facebook and Twitter to establish relationships with students.
- UCLA has campus design/development group that gets together.
- Start blogs and post messages about what we are doing. Encourage transparency and conversations.

Panel: Video Blogging with Gary Vaynerchuk
- Awesome guy.
- Content is king. Marketing is the queen. And the queen runs the household.
- Reactionary business. Find out who your competitors are.
- Embrace who you are.
- Can’t get anything unless you take it.
- Find people who have had negative experiences and fix them.

Panel: From Words to Pictures - Shift Happens
- Visual thinking matters.
- Graphic recording. Need to have visual aspects spoken to people.
- Words aren’t bad, but people are inherently visual. Adding images = increases connection.
- People have a need for a basic understanding.
- Stimulus package example. $787 billion/767 pages. $1 billion/page. Couldn’t you add pictures?
- Kindergarten. How many can draw, every hand goes up. Read and write, few hands. 10 years later, opposite.

Panel: How to Protect Your Brand Without Being a Jerk
- If people steal your site content and ignore takedown notice, they become liable.
- Make sure you have the backing of copyright law.
- Trying to control what people are saying is unfair.

Panel: Wireframes for the Wicked
- Beginning of process = low fidelity idea generation.
- End of process = concept selection and high fidelity.
- Amount of detail increases as process moves on.
- Reference Zones. Major positioning of elements.
- High Fidelity. Detailed. People should stay focused. Specific content.
- Storyboards. Demonstrate core tasks and behavior of site.
- Standalone. No explanation necessary (ie. navigation pull-down menus).
- Specification. Insane amount of detail. All interactions shown.
- Sketch-style. Loose pencil on paper.
- Use OmniGraffle as a tool to create them.
- More questions during information architecture phase means more changes in design phase.

Panel: Color Angels
- Pick colors that don’t produce anxiety.
- Listen to what people are saying and ask for more specifics.
- Be aware of cultural differences when choosing colors (ie. The Knot changing to red in China).
- Color accessibility. Contrast is important. Print it out and check.
- Think about where else your designs will live. Must look good in black and white.
- Research colors in magazines, on the net, competitors.
- Use accent colors to break up chunks of content.
- Save swatches per project in order to port over different Adobe apps.

The Big Picture: Photojournalism
- Still photography enables lingering.
- Take advantage of what’s out there.
- Photos drive the story.
- Idea came out of bad navigation on Boston Globe site.
- Make captions short and descriptive.
- Chain of trust with photography. We believe what we see.
- Be sensitive to the objectivity of the reporting.
- Covered up images with javascript because kids are using as a resource.
- Got overwhelming response from photographers who want to participate.
- Tries as hard as he can to play by the rules and give copyright.
- Photos promote discussion and bring people together.
- Reduces quality of image so people can copy and print them.

Panel: Designers and Developers - Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
- Use different ideas and environments to solve communication issues.
- Joint ownership is the key.
- Mutual respect between all contributors to the project must exist.
- Make sure developers are brought into process early.
- Meetings that get people together to explain everything that’s happening.
- Specialization in skillsets is important.
- Developers want to understand the problem, and have data to back things up.
- Digg guy keeps track of what product marketers are promising to build.
- If developers give pushback because of technology they should be fired.
- Hire people that appreciate the skills of others.
- Worst project managers are ones who cater to every client need and bring everyone in.
- Hang out with colleagues and find commonality.
- Understand other peoples disciplines.
- Phrase things as challenges and not as features. Work together to find solutions.
- Conflict is a good thing. More friendly/healthy once you’re past it.

Keynote: Guy Kawasaki interviews Andersen (Wired)
- Big difference between $.01 and $.00. Charging creates value.
- Create celebrity status and sell it.
- Offer things free and try to get 5% of people to return the investment.
- Big cost is people leaving and doing something else.
- What motivates people? The negatives or the positives?
- Try something out, find out if you like it, and won’t be surprising when you have to pay for it.
- Brazilian example. Focus on what’s most important during time of crisis (ie. family, food, etc.).

Panel: Designing Change in America
- Building an airplane while in flight example. Short timelines, high expectations.
- Focus was on clear, concise messaging on “we” more than “he”.
- Communicating hope through imagery and not through text (ie. rainbow image).
- Established consistency and balance early in the process.
- Took Barack’s wordmark and modified the type.
- Elections are the equivalent of the Olympics of technology.
- Destroyed the fold in the website design.
- Open source style of government.
- Design should get a say in the strategy of a campaign.
- Respect, empower, and include.