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I’m fresh off the plane from South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive 2010 and still reeling from some of the amazing people I connected with and talks I checked out in Austin, so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts of some of the top trends and highlights of SXSW this year. This year saw a record number of attendees – I heard as many as 17,000 (a 50% increase over last year’s 11,000) and you could see the difference everywhere.
Panels on user experience and social media were often at capacity, with long lines of people hoping to get in to catch the high-paced hour-long talks. SXSW’s notorious parties hosted by Foursquare, Gowalla, and Mashable and more saw the same surge in people, many even braving the rain on Monday night at the many outdoor venues to get a chance to network and, of course, get in on the open bar.
SXSW panels can be hit or miss. It’s a very loosely organized conference, where you can walk in (or walk out of) any session you’re interested in – no registration required. There’s over 400 sessions to choose from, and I typically had 5-6 really interesting panels to decide between in each time slot.
For me, this year saw a marked increase in the quality of panels I was able to check out. SXSW can be a good barometer for what types of things we can expect in the User Experience and Interactive worlds over the course of the year. It was most famous for the launch of Twitter several years ago, and startups have since capitalized on the massive event to make a major launch event, marketing push or announcement. Our local friends at Freshbooks and Rypple even got in on the action.
This year, at a keynote with Evan Williams, Twitter announced its @anywhere platform that will integrate Twitter into sites in a similar way that Facebook Connect does today, allowing users to more easily register, login and otherwise extend their social presence online.
Apart from this, several trends in the UX and Interactive spaces began to emerge several days into the conference.
Geosocial Apps
Foursquare and Gowalla, the geosocial applications that both used SXSW 2009 to launch, saw a huge surge in adoption at this year’s conference. They were initially met last year with a good deal of confusion, and the web app implementations made them difficult for users to grasp. I remember walking away with a green Gowalla t-shirt last year not really even knowing what it was (but admiring the cute line-drawn kangaroo they use as a logo).
This year, however, both companies launched new iPhone apps just days ahead of the conference with enhanced UI and interactions supported by specially designed badges and achievements for SXSW. Users signed up in droves and not an hour went by where you didn’t hear the words “check in”, “unlock” or “badge”. Attendees were often seen slinking over their iPhones, scrolling through their list of friends to see what sessions they were checking out, or the trending places as hundreds of people made their way from party to party after 5pm.
The rivalry between the two companies was clear even before the conference began. The feature sets of both have been enhanced and each has copied one another to a certain degree, so for me the deciding factor comes down to the user experience. Although Foursquare certainly has gathered a more solid critical mass of users, Gowalla was the standout for me this year, offering attendees a nice welcome banner the moment they touch down at Austin’s Bergstrom International Airport with links and locations to key SXSW events including badge pick-up and upcoming panels & parties (as shown above). Not so shockingly, SXSW awarded the the crown to Austin-born Gowalla over Foursquare at the SXSW Web Awards on Sunday night.
Neither application had been particularly useful for me at home here in Toronto up until SXSW, but that changed in Austin where they were great in tracking down friends and getting a sense for what was worth checking out at the conference and beyond. This worked only because I was a part of a very similar set of users with aligned goals, motivations and contexts for using the apps. I’m not so sure the usefulness of Foursquare/Gowalla will extend beyond SXSW unless you live in an urban area with a wired population; Like all social media, they won’t take off until your friends are on board.
They also have the not-so-simple task of assuaging users concerned with privacy that Danah Boyd so eloquently made a great case for in her keynote early on in in the conference. Provided Foursquare, Gowalla and others can address these issues, the opportunity for these companies to add the ‘where’ to our vocabulary of ‘who/what/when/why’ established by Facebook and Twitter presents an interesting opportunity to make more serendipitous social discoveries.
Content Strategy
As Dave pointed out yesterday, Content Strategy (CS) is seeing a major push as the “next big thing” in User Experience. A relatively new niche in UX, a Content Strategist ideally is brought in early on a project, working in tandem with the client and Information Architect do to audit what type of information a site will contain, and what forms it will take on. This Content Strategist has attributes of both an Information Architect and a Copywriter, and has the ability to weave a brand’s story into the structure of a site through different forms of content, including text, images, video, infographics and more.
How do you plan for the future if you don’t know what you currently have – or need?
It was clear at SXSW that this was a subject that was close to many of our hearts. Content Strategists Margot Booomstein (slides), Rachel Lovinger, Karen McGrane, and Kristina Halvorson (slides) collaborated to present three separate panels on the subject, ranging from why you should invest in a dedicated CS resource to how to implement it in your organization. The need for a Content Strategist became clear in these sessions, as they can offer clients predictability, reduce unnecessary whitespace and prioritize communication goals while reducing costs – words will always be cheaper than design comps, after all.
We’ve always made pretty bold proclamations in this industry that Content is King, but it really hasn’t been. Content is all too often considered as an afterthought after wireframes and design comps have been presented to and approved by the client. Relegated to boxes as placeholders and Lorem Ipsum, too many of us take a “do it later” approach with what is most important to the user. People aren’t visiting your site to look at colours and boxes, they’re there for a purpose, and the content should be at the core of any design.
Wireframes and design concepts are much more believable when populated with real content, both to the team creating them and the client reviewing them. Speaking from experience, the worst thing that can happen to me as an Information Architect is when I’m asked to design an experience without any content provided up front. It’s like building a house without having any clue how many people will be living there and decorating it without any regard for the resident’s taste; Ultimately, you’re going to end up with a pretty dry experience, a lot of filler and too much empty space.
Persuasive Design
Persuasive Design, like Content Strategy, isn’t a new concept, but is seeing increased focus by designers trying to motivate Web users down a path to take a desired action. It’s the use of tried, tested & true psychological techniques to take advantage of our innate subconscious wills and desires as humans. What it comes down to is taking advantage of concepts like sensory integration (providing a highly rich experience for many senses), social proof (when we’re influenced to follow the behaviour of others, like lining up in a queue), and scarcity principles (offering limited access to a beta or limited editions of a product).
There are many, many more biases and concepts that can be used to enhance Web design. In his panel on Persuasive Design (slides), Andy Budd calls them Cognitive Biases. Stephen Anderson called them Seductive Interactions, and handed out a sample set of cards he’s working on that he calls Mental Notes (see photo above) to help inject psychology cues into Web design.
Many of the examples Budd and Anderson used involved introducing concepts of gaming to give the site or service a sense of playfulness. As humans we inherently are drawn to play and challenges. By making tasks (even menial ones) seem more like a game, we’ve seen user uptake and productivity increase significantly. Take Google’s Image Labeler for example, which lets you play with a random partner online to assign matching words to an image. Google builds up its image search keyword descriptors, and it’s surprisingly fun and addictive to play.
Having started in to this industry by way of my love for games, I’m excited that to have started incorporating some more playful elements into projects here at Teehan+Lax that will benefit both our clients’ objectives and be fun for users. Look for more on that in a future blog post.
More to Come
Having sat in almost 20 sessions in about 4 full days, there’s a lot more to share from this year’s South by Southwest. Over the next week or so, I’ll be rounding up some of my favourite video highlights from the conference. Did you attend SXSW? What was your sense of what made waves of the conference, and how was it for you? Let me know in the comments.
I had the pleasure of speaking at the Acuity Forums “Executing Social Media” conference today in Toronto about corporate reputations in our hyper-digital age (aka social media). It’s a variation on a talk I’ve given a couple of times over the last few months that seems to resonate with a lot of marketers and customer service folks as they try to navigate the new reality of the social web and “always on” communications.
The event this morning was sold-out but for those who missed it (and wish they hadn’t) we’ll be doing this again in early March. There are a few tickets still available. If you’re planning on attending make sure to say hi!
My slides (minus my witty chatter around them) are available to check out as well:
As a fan of Vimeo’s, I was stoked to hear that Blake Whitman would be giving a talk at FOWD in NY. (You may recognize Blake from that time he had some questions about the homepage...) Blake’s presentation showed that cultivating a vibrant community online is, in no small part, a tractable design problem.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
Vimeo stands out to me because I think they’ve done a great job of embodying simplicity on the web. And it turns out that this is a by-product of thinking about their site in a really focused way. First and foremost, Blake explained that Vimeo is NOT a video site: it’s a community for creative folks who like to make and watch videos. So all of the design decisions are built around this core identity.
I’d argue that understanding the team behind Vimeo’s design decisions can help us bust some popular implicit myths about building online communities:
Myth 1. Online communities are like the wild-west: they work best when uninhibited by constraints.
It’s tempting to think that there’s very little mechanical or social control we can or ought to exert when it comes to building online community. After all, members need to feel like this is their space and we wouldn’t want to stifle engagement–especially early on. Vimeo’s approach challenges this notion.
Blake explained that designing for a specific type of user and imposing key limitations have made their online community flourish, not flounder.
For example, unlike YouTube, Vimeo constrains the type of videos you can upload. Another example: rather than deploying the standard designer’s toolbox for building community around content (e.g. ratings and reviews), Vimeo only lets members formally designate videos they “like.” Blake was pretty adamant: “Vimeo is not a popularity contest.” This makes sense when you think about it since two traits of a strong community—online or otherwise—are 1) shared identity, and 2) a sense of belonging. If other people in the “community” are trash-talking something you’ve created and contributed, both of these traits are strongly diminished.
Myth 2. Successful online communities require strong and deliberate social engineering
This myth swings the pendulum all the way to the other extreme. Clients often default into this line of thinking as a way of hedging their bets. Above all, they want to manage and mitigate potential risks associated with an open online community.
Vimeo demonstrates the promise of a much simpler approach: get involved and lead by example.
Vimeo hires community positions out of their actual community. Their staff are very active on the site: they engage with other members, are supportive where they can be, they make and post their own videos. The upshot of all this is that the team has a vested interest and and embedded perspective—they’re effectively designing their own community space.
To wrap it all up, Blake’s talk encouraged me to think about the cultivation of online community as a a multi-disciplinary undertaking, but assuredly one where design plays an important role.
To keep the conversation going, what are some other design principles that can be applied to these sorts of online environments?
I was recently going through my bookshelves at home, trying to find some books I could sell or donate. After scanning past titles like The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan and Bitter is the New Black, I came across all my old textbooks. It got me thinking about my days in college and all the people I used to look up to when I was a student, people like Molly Holzschlag, Dan Cederholm, Elliot Jay Stocks, Derek Featherstone and Jason Santa Maria. I looked up to these people as mentors and inspiration, hoping that one day I would be just as bad-ass as they were. I remember asking myself on every project “How would Dan build this?” or “Would Molly be satisfied with how my site validated?”. At some point, I became out of touch with these people. I didn’t have enough time to keep up with their blogs. I didn’t read their new books. I lost interest. And during that time, I had somehow become ok with it.
Read the rest of this entry »One of the challenges I continue to hear from companies looking to get involved in social communications is how to shift mindsets from tactics and campaigns to a holistic, conversational approach with customers, and what that means from an organizational and operational perspective. Additionally, while there are places within social media for fun, exciting campaigns, if you aren’t at the table having a conversation to begin with you are still adopting a push mentality to the web and missing key opportunities to engage directly with the people who care about your company.
A simple but powerful method I use to illustrate what holistic participation means in the social web is to “L.E.T. GO”.
What does this mean in practice?
Listen / Learn:
Engage:
Transform:
Evolution isn’t static.
Social communications touches every aspect of your business – sales, HR, product development, customer care, marketing, R&D, partners, etc. in a holistic fashion. People don’t think in silos.
Caring about how people truly experience your brand will drive your brand forward. In our hyper-connected world your reputation is what other people say it is. The illusion of control is just that, an illusion.
——-
Above all else, when thinking about “letting go” and participating, the number one rule is that you must be HUMAN. Let go of the marketing and corporate speak: no one is listening. Being human means incorporating and acting on valid feedback and changing when it makes sense. In today’s world it is a differentiating factor that will drive your business forward.
meshU, April 6
I’m doing a presentation on Evidence-based IA and Design in a couple of weeks at this year’s meshU event. I attended last year as a non-participant and got a lot out of it. Check out the sessions and register if interested.
Interaction ‘09: Recap
This past weekend I attended IxDA’s Interaction 09 conference in beautiful Vancouver, BC. The event, in it’s second year, brought together creative thinkers, educators and corporate decision makers from across the world to share ideas, inspiration and future visions on Interaction Design. The conference was a mix of workshops, discussion panels, and keynotes from speakers such as Dan Saffer, Robert Fabricant, Jared Spool and John Thackara, to name a few.
Before I go on, I want to say a great thanks to IxDA for putting on an insightful and truly engaging conference that covered a great breadth of topics and drew some equally great minds to discuss them with. Also, the food was great and the host city was stunning.
Day 1 of 3: Highlights
My first day began by attending Drawing Ideas, a workshop hosted by information designer William Bardel and Mark Baskinger, a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design. The goal of the workshop was to teach basic drawing principles to people who, like myself, had no formal illustration background.
Mark and Will started us out by learning the basics of drawing: posture, hand position, lines and circles before quickly accelerating through more sophisticated principles such as complex shapes, notation techniques and finally storyboards. The critical takeaways for me were first, I can draw, and second, I learned to use sketching as a tool for communication and not just a means to iterate ideas.
The workshop proved to be a great way to kick-off Interaction 2009 as it inspired me to change the way I took notes, allowing me to retain way more information for later use (i.e. this post).
Following a quick lunch we were enlightened (or burdened depending on who you ask) by John Thackara’s poignant presentation, Experiencing Sustainability. John talked about the state of the world via a series of “peaks” we have reached: Peak credit, energy, climate change, protein consumption and water to be more specific.
Like most sobering talks on where human consumption patterns have lead us, John presented a bleak state of the world that required great change to get us to where we need to be. Probably the most stark point he made was that even if we were to replace all methods of modern transportation with alternatives using clean, renewable energy we’d still have a great problem regarding energy consumption, climate change and mass transit.
Where John differed from a lot of talks I’ve seen was his ideas around how designers can play a role in this change. An ecosystem driven less by growth and more by a measure of human well being requires design thinking and action in areas such as community food management in urban centers, systems to manage multiple off-grid energy sources, creating direct channels between independent product creators and consumers and general resource sharing. Designers need to be engaged to solve these problems.
In short, John’s talk was far beyond the buy local, recycle, change a light bulb thinking we’ve come to associate with sustainable living and it was a breath of fresh air to see how these opportunities could engage designers. Needless to say, I added John’s book, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, to my shortlist of must-reads following his presentation.
The day continued with a great panel discussion around the need for Interaction Designers and the limits of existing undergraduate and post-graduate programs to provide for it. The panel was made of up of a mix of educators and industry heavyweights including Frog Design’s Jon Kolko and Liz Danzico, Chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design program. Though the discussion spiraled into a heated debate on how to better define Interaction Designers, so curriculum could be created accordingly for it, it was still insightful and provided discussion points among designers from all backgrounds for the rest of the weekend.
Before the day wrapped we were treated to a technically troubled (note: avoid using video in Apple Keynote) but overall inspiring presentation from Fiona Raby, designer and faculty member at the Royal College of Art in London. Fiona presented her student’s latest work, which I’m having trouble finding online but should not be missed. Keep her in your Google queue.
Day 2 and 3 highlights, including workshops on gestural/multi-touch interfaces, Frog Design’s Robert Fabricant and more, to come…
