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 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’ve noticed a few new services that have replaced the traditional registration form (email/password) with email as an alternative sign-up method.

TripIt, a travel service that creates a single, readable online itinerary from your flight, hotel or rental confirmation is the first site I noticed doing this. To register, a user simply forwards a hotel, flight or rental confirmation email to plans@tripit.com. The site automatically registers you and replies with a confirmation and link to your new itinerary. Brilliant. (Note: TripIt also provides the classic registration form as well).

What’s important about this is that they’re reducing a psychological barrier to entry. Most people using Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, etc. feel signing up for yet another online service is an annoyance. After a while, another registration form can feel like a burden. Email-based registration avoids this barrier by rolling registration and the way you interact with the service into one action. For example, the same way you use TripIt is the same way you sign up, by forwarding emails to plans@tripit.com.

Of course, form-less registration doesn’t fit for every solution. While flushing out the IA for ImageSpark, our home-brewed creative inspiration tool, we decided upon the classic email/password registration. The reason being that the core interaction with the site isn’t done through email but rather integrated browser and desktop upload tools; For ImageSpark, there was no gain in baking in an email-based registration. (Although we hope this won’t stop people from using it.)

A service like Posterous however, which uses email to create and update a blog, is built on avoiding forms at all costs. It makes sense than that your first email registers you and initiates your first blog post, all in one.

I’m pretty sure we’ll see form-less registration grow into a design pattern as new services emerge. And I’m looking forward to using it, so long as the situation is right.

Following the inauguration, whitehouse.gov has been updated to reflect the Obama administration’s promise to use interactive media to make government more open and accessible.

I’m assuming the Presidential Pets section will get a good amount of traffic too.

Just released LinkedIn Applications... so good to link my Slideshare and our Blog right into LinkedIn. This should have happened months ago. I would like to connect my Twitter to it…

I am reasserting my Valentine’s Day post that RIM should buy LinkedIn.

I’m not sold on NYTimes.com new feature, TimesPeople, a social tool designed to share your activity – reading, rating, commenting – with other NYT members. If you’re a recent reader of NYT, you’ve probably noticed a floating bar appear above the content that prompts you to sign up for it.

Here’s an excerpt of the description from the FAQ:

...when you recommend an article, comment on a blog post, or rate a movie or restaurant, these activities will become visible to other TimesPeople users in a special toolbar at the top of every NYTimes.com page. You’ll also have a personal page that keeps track of your TimesPeople activities and lets you browse your network of readers.

The problem, as I see it, is that I’m not solely the selector of what information gets disseminated. And that is what is really at the core of the social web; It’s not automation, spewing every action I take for friends to consume and filter through themselves (unless you have a sophisticated filtering mechanism like Facebook’s wall). It’s about happenstance, finding and sharing that amazing article, restaurant review or inflammatory comment that you know certain friends will appreciate.

And the legwork (registration, adding friends, etc) to do that in a new tool is just not worth the time it used to be. Why not leverage the friend network I already have on Facebook? An app on Facebook that does the same thing would involve less investment and probably have more reach. I’m on Facebook more than I am on the Times, which would be the only place I could see my friend’s browsing activity using this tool. Ed. note: There is a Facebook application that works with TimesPeople.

Regardless, I’ve always had respect for the New York Times and what Khoi Vinh’s team has been doing for online. I wish them the best success at it but as a daily reader myself, you won’t see me signing up anytime soon.

Recently, Digg hired Allen & Co. to “explore its options” which is how Investment Bankers say “for sale”.

For a site like Digg it is natural that the managers and investors would be looking for an out. What is unusual is that its users feel they have a right to tell Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose how to run their business.

In sites like Digg where users create almost all of the value of the site, do they have a say in the future of the site?

Companies love the idea of social media because their users do the work. They create the content, they create the network effects, they create the page views. But they also gain a sense of entitlement. They feel like they created the site.

Compare this to other current mergers. In the Microsoft Yahoo merger, most users don’t really care (except Flickr users who protested). I bet no one other than Wall Street really cares about Delta’s proposed merger with Northwest.

This is the dilemma of social media. What obligations do sites have to their users when it comes to business decisions that impact the user experience?

Eric Schmidt from Google decides it’s time to define Web 3.0.

An article in Advertising Age asked a panel of digital experts for their thoughts on the biggest trend or challenge in today’s online space.

Not surprisingly, many of the answers pointed to the evolution of online video. Obviously, that’s a huge question that we’ve written about here before. It’s also especially top-of-mind right after the Super Bowl.

Many people also talked about the need to coordinate across all channels and eliminate the walls between them and help create a more unified connection to the consumer. That’s an issue that we think about every day here at Teehan + Lax, so I was glad to read those comments.

But I think the best response was this one, from Coca Cola’s Shane Steele:

“One key challenge for marketers is to determine how to evaluate and choose from the ever-expanding new-media and advertising options. While there is simply not enough time and resources to take advantage of every opportunity, it’s imperative that marketers evolve with the changing media landscape.

“The ideal is to identify and test new platforms that offer a first-mover advantage, that are measurable and that can be scaled effectively to deliver a significant return on investment. From a process perspective, this requires risk tolerance, rigor and speed, which can be significant challenges for organizations to overcome.”

Here is a great idea for a site. PriceProtectr monitors sites with price guarantees and let’s you know if the price of an item changes. If it does, PriceProtectr sends you an email and let’s you know you’re eligible for a rebate.

I wonder, if this site is succesful, it could actually put itself out of business. Retailers offer price guarantees knowing a high percentage of people will never take advantage of it.

By increasing redemptions, PriceProtectr could actually, make price guarantees uneconomical for retailers. A little example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

A very interesting new video product called Adbrite has launched. It is a great product for embedable video.

Here is how it works. You upload a video to Youtube or another video sharing site. Tell Adbrite where to find the video. Adbrite imposes a watermark and adds advertising in a fairly non intrusive way to the video stream. You can generate revenue from the videos you upload even if someone embeds the video on their site. It also allows advertisers a way to interject advertising into the user generated content video world.

YouTube to copy in 3, 2, 1…