SXSW Notes

Tuesday, 11 March 2008 - 5:00PM

Abstract:
With the recent rate hikes impacting Internet radio, only the big guys benefit. Or do they? Will Internet radio look and sound like FM in the next five years? If so, how can the little guys survive? And, considering the challenges and costs, why would they even want to? This session will explore the positive and negative aspects of entering and staying in the Internet radio space, discuss how to make independent Internet radio work financially, and provide expert opinion on the future of Internet radio.

David Hyman (Moderator) - CEO, MOG Inc
Nancy Miller - Sr Editor, Wired Magazine
Anil Dewan - Dir of New Media, KCRW Radio
Tom Conrad - CTO, Pandora
Anu Kirk - Dir of Product Mgmt/Rhapsody, Rhapsody America LLC

Conrad: They are focused upon the move from broadcast to unicast of stations that understand what you want to listen to.

Kirk: There are many value addeds: album art, bilocation, artist info, xml data…

Conrad: There are three ways to look at matching music to a person’s taste…
Quantatative metadata - metadata about the beats and data of the songs
Qualitative data - genre, editorial voice
Social or collaborative systems reveal linkages
Pandora has moved away from solely rely on the music genome and now a combo of all three.

Kirk: It turns out that many people like a tastemaker/DJ - like KCRW.

Dewan: How do we use tech to do radio better? Create interactions. We are Old World meets New Wolrd while keeping curation and building this up with technology.

Conrad: There is nowhere to go to find out about what is most popular. The focus is not pushing but leaving the site a blank slate for the user. We think of ourselves of radio. Although terrestrial radio may have screwed up, there are may things that worked about it: simplicity, community, serendipity and repetition is not all bad. People like what they have heard before.

Kirk: What is different between that and a CD changer?

Dewan: Each DJ does not have playlists. they create it from scratch.

Kirk: DJs vs. robots both come out to 80% in the long run. [Me: I think this is a specious example, the ease with which I can switch up a station on demand with Pandora precludes the sameness of DJ vs. robots. It is harder to switch to another good DJ whereas on Pandora I can pull from dozens of stations.]

When will the reality of ubiquitous broadband give us streaming radio?
3G providers are scared that one or two users can drown a cell tower with streaming radio.

Tuesday, 11 March 2008 - 2:00PM

Abstract:
Is it a game or is it real life? When you get right down to it, is there really a difference? Learn about the growing popularity of ARGs from one of the most innovative minds in this industry. Jane McGonigal explains what it is like to be a puppet-master of this exciting new genre.

Jane McGonigal - Creative Dir, Avant Game

[Her slides can be found here.] [Her blog for Avant Game.]

ARG - alternate reality game
Goal: Make the real world more like games. We need the real-world to have better design.

Game designer’s perspective on the future of happiness

Positive psychology - a look at our brains not as something that malfunctions. It looks at the well-functioning brain - what makes us happy and satisfied.

[References: Laynard and Gilbert.] What they are discovering resonates with game design.

[Reference (opposing POV): Wilson, Against Happiness.]

This is not about warm, fuzzy happy, but capturing the best human experience.

Is what we are doing as persons who work with interaction also in the happiness business? We need to start thinking that our primary goal is optimizing happiness.

Her 2013 projection:

• Quality of life becomes the primary impact for measuring services.
• Positive psychology is a principle influence in this.
• Communities form around these visions of a life worth living.
• Value will be defined aas a measuralbe increase in happiness or well-being - the new capital.

Happiness is not a warm puppy or warm fuzziness. The concept is changing and includes:

1. satisfying work to do
2. being good at something
3. time spent with people we like
4. being part of something bigger

These points match precisely with the goals of games. Multiplayer games are the “ultimate happiness engine”.

Signals of the change: “I am not good at life” is an excerpt of graffiti she sees on the way to work each day. Being good at things in life is tough for some people. In a game mileu, one can walk into a huge collaborative environment where there are supportive humans and game-based rewards.

• Games come with better instructions.
• They come with better feedback to help us grow.
• Better community - even in competition there is collaboration that comes from a mutual buy-in to the virtual ruleset.

We are seeing global mass exodus towards virtual worlds.
[Reference : Castranova] It makes sense that people spend more time in game worlds because they are given better opportunities to succeed. This makes it a rational decision. The average MMO player spends 16 hours/week in the game. Yes, this can be exploited by entrpeneurs, but we are talking about taking what the game worlds have and making it in the real world. for many gamers the perceived quality of life is better in-game - virtuality is beating reality. What would the world be like if people felt good at real life?

Bad news
Games in 2008 - it is like we invented the written word and just made books - only books - and missed all the other media.

Some cool ARG examples:

• Chore Wars - get experience for home work
• zyked - treat exercise like an MMO
• serios - Virtual currency for getting things done in a company. Reveals relationships that are usually difficult to see.
• Citizen Logistics - What if life were like a game to help others. It knows where you are via GPS.

In order to imagine the future, it is good to look back twice as far as you want to look forward.
Example: soap kills germs article from 1931 - why not “Games kill alienation/depression/boredom”

Alternate reality comes from science fiction. It is not “alternative” or an escape. It is an another way of experiencing existence.
Example game: World Without Oil (WWO)

How are ARG amplifying happiness skills? Here are some gamespeak measures of these skills:

• mobbability - collaborate and coordinate massively large
• cooperation radar - knowing people’s strengths
• influency - the ability to adapt your persuasive strategies in different environments and with different communities
• ping quotient - your ability to reach out to people on a network and you are responsive; easily engaged
• multi-capitalism - knowing what capital is important to a given culture or group; bartering skills
• protovation - rapid, fearless innovation that damns failure to being a learning moment that is fun.
• open authorship - comfort with giving content away and knowing it will be changed. making something that is enhanced by others and not broken.
• signal/noise management - ability to handle so much noise and pick the salient signal.
• longbroading - abilirty to tink at a high level see everything
• emergisight - see patterns emerging and forsee their implications

These amplify our tendency toward the optimum human experience. How can interactive systems encourage these 10 superpowers?

Fertile ARG environs:

• Twitter is a great example
• Nike iPod
• Plane communication - onboard interfaces for games and communication.
• Hightech dog collars - (conceptual idea) MMO where your avatar is your your dog
• my car is a video game - Prius owner turns saving energy into a game
• Trackstick
• Neurosky transmitter

Lost Ring:

• ARG for the 2008 Olympic Games in Bejing (http://www.thelostring.com/)
• Goal: You can discover a lost sport that has not been played for thousands of years

Takeaway:

1. Soon enough, we will all be in the happiness business.
2. Game designers have a huge head start. Look at games.
3. ARs signal the desire, need and opportunity for all of us to redesign reality for a real quality of life.

Some of the questions:

• The military messes with this. They use gaming as a layer of abstraction that desensitizes soldiers to reality/human life.
• There is a problem in that some people opt out of reality. That is all the more reason to make reality options that emulate happiness goals found in games.

Other examples she has been involved in:

• Ministry of Reshelving
• Tombstone Hold’em
• X2 project ARG for scientists

Tuesday, 11 March 2008 - 11:30AM

Abstract:
Universities have played an historic role in developing innovative uses of technology. Most of the advances in the new social web have emerged elsewhere. This conversation will focus on work by various universities to explore how social media and UX techniques are being used on campus.

Three take-aways will be:
* How to rethink social media and UX for the academic setting
* How to get universities to open up to these new ideas
* See what great things are being done at other universities

Samuel Felder - Sr Designer, University of Southern California

We are here because we also view our inspiration and competition coming from outside our sister institutions - from the private sector.

The tension is where to put the web group - in the central IT group or in Marketing/Communications.

Moderator: sharing group formed - sharing patterns, snippets and centralized ideas. Calendaring, for example, moved to agile web apps - a web services model. This focused upon using small solutions/tool and not huge purchased solutions. This freed development.

Other universities have a stronger branding institution-wide - templates.

Check out the University of Chicago’s new redesign as it is a result of user testing. the entire process started about 2.5 year ago. This is for the entire university.

It seems many places have differing web groups vying for tech and/or branding leadership. How many get a mandate from on high?

Biggest backlash comes from people who are told that the mian pages are not primarily for them. This can be alleviated by creating role-based sub-pages (e.g., researchers, alumni, etc.).

The idea is to build something that is easy enough and useful enough that people who do not need to use central services *want* to use central services.

RSS is a wonderful element from which to build all kinds of interfaces.

Check out the MIT admissions site: 8-12 students blogging about what it is like to be at MIT.

??http://web.lesley.edu/default.asp

University of Kansas and the gators have good branding policies.

Cool idea: Building a pretty output for a Subversion repository to handle those things that are, basically, versioned documents (e.g., the catalog). USC is working on this.

Identity management with Shibboleth for single sign-on for Internet2.

The role of the web council is key.

Tuesday, 11 March 2008 - 10:00AM

Abstract:
The iPhone may be the most disruptive technology of this decade. The countless ubiquitous computing tools available to User Experience professionals mean convenience and usability headaches. With boundaries blurring between web and mobile, how will the UX discipline change? This panel explores challenges for designing Rich Internet Applications for multiple devices.

Kyle Outlaw Sr Information Architect, Avenue A | Razorfish
Kate Ryan (Moderator) - Sr Content Strategist, Ten Digital
Scott Jenson - Google
Karen Kaushansky - Sr UX Engineer, Tellme
Loic Maestracci - Dir of Mktg, Groove Mobile

The iPhone represents about 200+ patent filings and 150 million in development.

Kaushansky:
Goal is “voice in” direct to data out.
“mobile” is not a descriptive enough word for the multiplle contexts the user could be using the device within.

Jensen:
His job thus far has ben to make Google work on crap browsers.
The iPhone, with its full browser support, has changed the playing field.

Outlaw:
site: designblog?
The iPHone will be extremely disruptive within the tech and UX.
Sees his business becoming part agency - part lab
smartpox.com - app that creates 2D bar codes to be read by phones
FoodNinja - app to find restaurants developed for the iPhone.

iPhone loves and dislikes:
- Pro: Scrolling really worked with a finger - not as an afterthought.
- Con: The iPhone does not yet do the simple task of being a phone or SMS.
- Pro: Audacity of the design: no menus or scrollbars. Sim that is configured for unlimited data.
- Con: Apple is perpetuating the myth that this is the web.
- Pro: visual voicemail
- Con: Why does it take 5 clicks to make a phone call
- Pro: Simplicity
- Con: perhaps the combo of software and hardware will be its undoing

Jensen: There is always a tendency with any new tech to try to do the same things we did yesterday with it. With the iPhone the innovation will come from left field.

Outlaw: iPhone stripped the device down to its four core features and did them in a satisfying way.

Possible contenders:
the Sidekick - nice keyboard
PSP Slim
Skype (with 3 in the UK)

Jensen: SMS app is poor, but this is a product of Apple designers saying no until it hurt perhaps.

Open Access:
Examples: Google Android or the iPhone SDK
Carriers control the distribution channel and this slows down development

Outlaw: Going into these areas where standards are thin, developers will need newer ways - Agile.

Jensen: Currently, the iPhone is considered a consumer of information, but as battery life and bandwidth improve they will become producers of information.

Outlaw: Phone will cease to be a specialization and succumb to the collision of phone/web/pc. The channels will mix (VOIP calls from a website).

Killer app predictions:
- Luggage search application
- Using the phone to mediate my data in the cloud
- Infinite battery and bandwidth

http://lifeaftertheiphone.ning.com/