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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.
Content Strategy has recently emerged as “the next big thing” for digital designers and marketers. More than ever, businesses and brands are seeking to provide utility to customers, prospects and partners in the digital channel. At the same time, the proliferation of the mobile web and social media are redefining how we access, consume and engage with content online. As a result, there’s been a collective awakening to the importance of defining, designing, delivering and maintaining compelling content on the web.
Content strategy often requires a systems approach, emphasizing the structural whole as well as the sum of the parts. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy or standard way to express this organizational structure. We can outline the high-level goals of the content strategy, and we can enumerate the necessary constituent parts (the content itself, people, processes, resources, etc.) But we don’t have a good way to document and describe how these parts relate to each other and the overall goals of the system.
The Content Flow Diagram (CFD) is a modelling technique designed to fill this gap.
Download CFD Omnigraffle Stencil Here
Basic Elements
CFDs can help us visualize and think about a strategic content system’s macrostructure. There are 5 basic elements:
- Actors (stick figure) – e.g. users, content producers, editors
- Processes (circle) – e.g. publish, approve, rate and review
- Resources (document) – e.g. ontologies, attribute sets, guidelines
- Connectors (solid and dotted line) – directed paths and references
The primary structure of the CFD is the flow, consisting of a subject (usually an actor), a process, and an object (usually an entity), connected by a path. Here is an example of a typical flow:
Notice that in this case the process Create references Guidelines as a resource. This convention is helpful because it shows who will be using a given resource and for what purposes.
When a flow maps one entity onto another (i.e. there isn’t an actor involved), the process encapsulates a functional requirement for the underlying system:
It is often useful to show how resources are generated and maintained. This is achieved by designating a resource as the object of a flow:
Additional Elements
Although the five basic elements outlined above are sufficient to describe a wide range of strategic content systems, there are a few additional elements that can give us even more descriptive power.
- Goals (cloud) help us capture the underlying motivation and intent of the various actors involved. By including goals, we state our assumptions about strategic rationales behind the flows captured in the CFD.
- Portals (trapezoid) indicate what channels, platforms and points of entry actors use to access and manipulate content.
- Systems (cube) are essentially non-human actors. Content strategies often incorporate various proprietary and vendor-based solutions to facilitate community, search, data-flow and processing functions, etc. Incorporating these into the CFD helps us capture functional requirements for these systems and understand how they fit into to a larger operational strategy.
- External links (bracket) indicate where organizational boundaries lie and allow us to embed external resources and entities.
- Areas (rounded rectangle) show contextual groupings of flows. These groupings help readers parse more complex CFDs and understand the contextual domains that exist within the overall strategic content system.
It is also possible to layer on other dimensions of information through visual cues like colour, shading, line weight, etc. For example, one might use colour to indicate update frequency—e.g. evergreen content vs. responses to social media events that occur regularly.
Here is a more comprehensive example showing one possible (and fairly basic) content strategy for enabling online customer support (click to view larger version):
Conclusions
Content flow diagrams help us apply systems thinking to our content strategies by standardizing notation and making things visual and concrete. This modelling technique can be used casually—as in sketching ideas out on a whiteboard—or as a formal mode of documentation.
Content strategists should try to make their CFDs as intuitive and simple as possible, in order to promote collaboration. However, the CFD is a network diagram that can very easily grow in complexity. Therefore, it is often wise to break the overall system into logical pieces and model these separately, noting external connections where appropriate. Additionally, we can keep CFDs simple and purposeful by focusing on three primary questions:
- where does the content come from, and how does it lives and flow through the system?
- what are strategic resources necessary for and how will they be used?
- what are the major operational dependencies and responsibilities?
The CFD is one tool among many within the broader practice of content strategy. For example, one might conduct research, define high-level goals, generate resources such as templates, guidelines, policies etc. before or along-side the CFD. That said, the fact that content strategy is so multifaceted and multidisciplinary makes a systems-focused tool like CFDs even more necessary and helpful.
I hope that others find our contribution to this topic helpful and look forward to further improving and refining this technique.
With the news last week that Facebook visits have topped Yahoo! visits (via Compete), it’s seems to be increasingly clear that our social networks are becoming our new “web portals” for finding relevant news and information – the difference being that instead of being corporately-curated, they are peer-curated.
What makes Facebook so successful as our new “portal”?
In my view it’s that it’s not actually a portal at all, it’s a hub.
It’s not a means to capturing the Internet in one place, it’s about capturing your friends in one place. It’s about the connections that make up the threads of our digital life – our events, photos, contact information, birthdays, interests, entertainment, all as a personalized experience that we can expand or limit as we see fit. Facebook will continue to grow as more of our social lives move online, and migrating people away from the system where we have invested years of time and content will prove increasingly difficult for web properties that don’t tie-in with our existing networks.
What’s the missing link (so far) in tying our networks together?
A personal CRM and curation system. The ability to tag, categorize, link, promote/ demote, and import from various social systems to truly personalize the relevance of our contacts and their content together. We’ll need more signal than noise to be able to keep up.
While things will continue to happen in real-time on the web, human evolution does not happen in real-time and being able to manage our ever growing connections and interests without separating or limiting our profiles will be mandatory.
Will Facebook do it, or will a new start-up, or traditional media company, take the reins and migrate people away from the walled garden into a new hub?
(h/t Mitch Joel)
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:
Facebook Privacy Settings
I don’t use Facebook much anymore so I just saw the new privacy settings prompt when I logged in today.
Redesigning something as increasingly complex and widely used as Facebook is never going to be easy. People are going to complain. I’ve always felt bad for the slamming Facebook takes on UI design but unfortunately I’m about to pile on.
Here is the default screen for Facebook privacy settings
OK, pretty straightforward except what are my “Old Settings”? I setup my Facebook account a few years ago I have no clue what those settings are.
I looked at this screen for a minute or two and then by accident my mouse hovered over the radio button and it revealed what the old setting was.
[Note: sorry I didn’t grab a screen cap at the time and now I can’t get to this view again. ]
Why would you put a rollover on a selected radio button? I have no reason for my mouse to go near a selected radio button since there is no action I can do on that form widget.
Their account view of Privacy Settings reveals this info quite elegantly. Not sure why they wouldn’t use this for the initial prompt screen?
Measuring Up
In the world of marketing and advertising, knowing what interests people have in our client’s brands is somewhat exciting for us. At Teehan+Lax we use social media measuring tools to help monitor our client’s brands, and the competition. What are people saying? Is it good? is it bad? It is ugly…
“What’s particularly interesting is the negative sentiment has jumped to 40% from 15%, while the positive sentiment has dropped to 14% from 49%” @sysomos
The findings can help validate expectations, but they also yield some interesting insights and trends. But what happens when these tools are applied to measuring a person’s reputation?
Sure one could argue that celebrities are often thought of as ‘brands’ in today’s society, but imagine being judged by your peers and the general population and be able to physically see the results?
The folks at Sysomos (who offer a variety of measuring tools that we use) did an interesting experiment along those lines. They recently blogged about Tiger Woods’ reputation pre and post the latest media frenzy surrounding his accident and admitted transgressions. (You know where to find these stories).
The social media measuring results are fun and entertaining when it comes to celebrities – but what happens when your own reputation is on the line? There have been recent reports that the CIA have been investigating ways to watch the social sphere. Beware… one false ‘tweet’ and you may end up on a list!
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?
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.
Twitter Business
Talk to anyone in marketing these days and they seem to be saying the same thing, “how can we leverage Twitter”. It feels like the early days of Facebook all over again. And no one wants to be the kid at the party who isn’t tweeting.
I think marketers are missing the point. Twitter is not a magic bullet. It will not instantly increase top-line revenue. And it certainly won’t have customers gushing with brand love just because you send out what you want them to hear. That said, I think Twitter is full of marketing potential. If you use it correctly. If you accept it as a tactic in your marketing mix. And if you give it the attention it requires.
So, what exactly is Twitter? The team that created it provides a great history lesson. But essentially it is an instant message format that allows you to publish in 140 character bursts. It allows anyone to follow you, read your messages, and publicly reply to them. And if you choose to follow someone back, you can share private messages. Oh, and all your public communication is on-the-record.
But in marketing terms, Twitter is an extremely efficient access point directly into the mind of your consumer. It’s self-subscribed. The communication flow is 100% controlled by the consumer. And your success or failure is completely up to you. Create the type of relationship your customers crave and Twitter can change your business.
So, where to start:
- Decide if Twitter is right for your company. But know that using it to extend your offline ad campaign as 140 character soundbites could be a recipe for disaster. Twitter isn’t advertising. It’s a conversation. You need to respect your consumers’ views, and understand their relationship to your product(s) and brand. If they want information about retail sales offers, do it. If you sincerely want discussion about a product, ask for opinions and consider the feedback. [UPDATE: and as @thirtytwoteeth suggests, “provide useful/insightful updates.”] But most of all – determine your voice. This is likely the most intimate conversation you’ve ever had with your customer. Don’t squander it.
- Make Twitter part of your communication plan. And this really means you’ll need to find someone in your company to own it. At this stage of the game it’s not something you can pass off to your ad agency, PR company or digital partner. It’s fast becoming a critical component of your social media mix, and potentially, more important than your advertising. If the US Army has a social media strategy, so can your company.
- Most of all, embrace failure. The best way to find your voice is to start talking and listen to what your followers say. Engage them. Ask questions. And don’t be afraid to change. Twitter is extremely cost efficient experiment, so don’t let budget stand in your way.
These three tips are by no means the only way to get into the Twitter game, but they will get you started. And no matter what your objective is, Twitter can help you define your social media approach. This is only going to get more important as consumers continue to become more savvy. So, get in there and figure it out.
Follow 3beat on Twitter.
A “Massive” Change
If Obama didn’t have the youth vote down already, he knows where to reach them. Billboards urging gamers to vote early, and “vote for change”, have recently made appearances in a few video games, most notably in Burnout Paradise for Xbox 360.
While in-game advertising is not a new tactic, it’s certainly on the rare side for presidential campaigns. I say kudos to Obama, for recognizing in-game as a fruitful and growing medium. This isn’t the Obama camp’s first time saying, “yes we can” to new media, he’s a regular Twitter contributor, has launched a successful mobile campaign, and even an app for the iPhone.
