Author: Ken

Sunday, 9 March 2008 - 2:00PM

Abstract:
One of the tech industry’s most intriguing story-lines over the last two years is the incredible growth of FaceBook from college networking tool to global giant. Hear the founder and CEO of this company talk about where the company is now - and where he plans to take it in the future.

Sarah Lacy (Moderator) - Author/Journalist, BusinessWeek/Yahoo!
Mark Zuckerberg - CEO, Facebook Inc

Wow. Um…painful.

I did not learn much, but I watched an interview go south in short order. Zuckerberg did not really say anything substantial.

Sunday, 9 March 2008 - 10:00AM

Abstract:
In this highly interactive session, the panelists will work together with the audience to co-create the next generation of metrics for engagement and interaction. We start with fun paradoxes of user behavior, exposing the systematic irrationalities of human decision making, and show their fundamental impact on designing interactions and incentives. We then present metrics and methodologies used by companies to engage and entice users to contribute data through interactions with the site (e.g., Amazon.com) and with each other (e.g., Facebook):

. Create strong and weak virality: Leverage the latest insights into viral engagement and corresponding metrics;
. Model users in a scientific way: Do wild experiments and learn fast from results;
. Engineer for feedback: Nail the incentives and interactions for both implicitly captured and explicitly expressed feedback.

This session is about co-creation. We provide the framework and start you off, and you provide the fuel to take the group to areas where nobody has been before. Please contribute your examples, and let us co-create the key ingredients for the next generation of relevant metrics for engagement and interaction that will help you reach your goal of getting passionate users.

Andreas Weigend - Principal, People & Data [blog]
Ming Yeow Ng - Discoverio

[link to the presentation? - these notes are still very raw]

1. focus on designing interaction )people
2 build experiment and measeure
3 Give uer metrics of user standing
help user to decide
economic framework

From participation to interaction

What type of interactions are you building today?

Early metrics came from print analogies (e.g., copies shipped), but they do not measure engagement very well.

metric must be for users to enhance interaction. they want to measure themselves/progress/evaluations. all of them must be positive. example: Yelp

This talk is going to cause some heated discussion

LinkedIn’s concept of completeness is a way to get people to want to interact.

GetSatisfaction.com
see NYT article - On the Internet, Everyone Can Hear you Complain
reciprocity has a lot of power for people - if you make reciprocity lightweight then it will happen. this applies to rating, evaluating, buying, etc.

mybloglog

risks:
Twitter succeeded because it allowed us to do what we wanted to do all along (tell the world what we are up to) without pissing everyone off.

a heavyweight commitment can actually pull people toward the light interaction rather than the null interaction. (Zoosk)

Problem: Those people who want always want to get attention from those who have. Creating currencies carves out time for the have nots if they save up.
example: ebay reputation system

Xobni: currency-based mail communication

discovery is the new cocaine - it is addictive

Etsy - check out how they allow you to explore/discover
Digg - user-ased vs. homepage discovery

Apache Social Network

Facebook strength: allowing adhoc conversation to happen about anything

Friday, 8 March 2008 - 5:00PM

Abstract:
The “user revolt” has become one of the most promising (and terrifying) community activities on social networks. Perhaps the best-known user revolt was the mass protest on Digg over publishing the AACS key. But other revolts have broken out on LiveJournal, Lifehacker, Facebook, and many other networks. This panel explores user revolts from both sides of the fence: panelists discuss how users can stage successful coups to get what they want from social networks, as well as the best ways for community organizers to respond.

Jeska Dzwigalski - Community & Prod Dev, Linden Lab (Second Life)
Annalee Newitz - Editor, io9.com
Gina Trapani - Editor, Lifehacker
Jessamyn West - metafilter.com

How can we handle pissed off users?

Newitz:

• Examples: anarchist, grassroots and op-ed/open letter from high profile users
• Respectively: Buying diggs, AACS key posting on Digg, The Drill Down open letter

Dzwigalski:

• Revolts by griefers are issue-based.
• Their initial way of making money was taxing prims which loaded the burden upon the more creative facet of the SL population. They protested with an American Revolution theme by dumping boxes of tea all over their areas and closing it down.
• Copybot problem in 2006.
• The more data transparency you create, the more users want.
• The best result is the users using a tool built to create a virtual social environment to organize in protest.

West:

• Much of what she used as examples were riding herd on sexism.

Trapani:

• Toto ad involving smiling butts. The company bought leader board and tower side ads and the response to the ads drowned out other posts.

My new word: astroturfing.

Saturday, 8 March 2008 - 3:30PM

Abstract:
The core dilemma for talented designers in any field is this: If you strive for greatness in your design, you will meet resistance; if you strive to avoid resistance, you can’t do great design. Different is scary. Great design has to fight with the idea that many see “better” as meaning “more of the same”. The better your work and the higher your standards, the more you’ll have to fight against the urge to stay within the warm, safe confines of mediocrity.

John Gruber - Raconteur, Daring Fireball
Michael Lopp - Apple, Inc.

They are talking about Mentos and Scott is going nuts. He even used Scott’s Mentos pic from Wikipedia.

Needed: A process to keep designers from killing engineers.

Design is a present: it is an unintentional discovery.
Packaging porn - Apple makes products who like to wait to iPod until Xmas.
WWDC keynotes are a storytime about what you are going to get for Xmas.

How does Apple do that?
A: They screw up a lot.
And they do it in the face of Fear of design feedback, fear of blue (subjective color demands), fear of critical feedback, fear of ponies - “I want a pony” comes from multiple places/people that are your higherups and represent the amorphous mandate.

Where to sweat:

• pixel-perfect mockups - this removes ambiguity
• 10 ot 3 to 1 - 10 mockups for every feature, get to three from iteration and then to 1 again
• Paired design meetings - brainstorm meetings in one meeting and then pair this with the production meeting. pair these togther eery week
• The Pony meeting - Pony people do not actually want a pont - they want their opinion to be heard.

Design is a Present - an unexpected discovery that you have

Gruber:

• It is incorrect to think that the better the design work the les resistance it will meet. example: the Beatle white album
• It is only in hindsight that this is true about this album”Better neccesarily implies Different”, but, “Different = Scary”
• What we get to stay comfortable is “Exactly the same, but dibetter which does not make sense “Exactly the same, but different.
• The Plea Bargain - basically the prisoner’s dilemna - the lesser route is statistically safer.
• “Don’t try to be orginal, just try to be good.” - Paul Rand
• “A logo derives it’s meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around.” Rand
• “It reminds me of the Georgia chain gang.” - said about the IBM logo.
• One problem that designers face is that ehy are expected to be clever (example: Apple’s logo)
• Design is making decisions and packaging them as a whole. Hitchcock got final cutby meticulously planning his movies through the use of storboarding so that there was only one way to put the movie together.
• Ford: If i had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.
• Are you willing to be called an asshole?

Saturday, 8 March 2008 - 2:00PM

Abstract:
Henry Jenkins was one of the most popular speakers at last year’s SXSW Interactive Festival, so we are very excited to have him return to the event in 2008. His foil in this conversation is best-selling author Steven Johnson, who served as the Keynote Speaker at the 1998 event.

Henry Jenkins - Co-Dir of Comparative Media Studies at MIT
Steven Johnson - CEO, outside.in

Johnson: What about the coming, second backlash to the gaming culture.
Jenkins: Never underestimate the power of parents to see their children as threatened or dumb. Moral panic can occur when we stop asking questions about how our children are learning and we assume we know the answers based upon the way things were for us.

Johnson: Where is the documented evidence of the skills that are imparted by this new environment?
Jenkins: The foundation of our traditional assessment is wrong for an era of collective intelligence. We pool resources. Knowledge is ad hoc and just-in-time from the pool of everyone. Total mastery measures will becomes more and more disappointing if we only consider the individual. Wikipedia is an excellent example of this. Pooling knowledge is how we work and play. It should also be how we teach and test, but it currently is not.

Johnson: Do you ever think of a new technology as just stupid?
Jenkins: The challenge is to find out why some activity is meaniful to the people engaged into it? It may not be meaningful to me, but we must assume that people as a whole are not idiots. They act in a certain way for a reason. Conjecture that assumes people are idiots should be questioned.

Johnson: Lost vs. The Wire … bring it.
Jenkins: Lost lives very much outside the box. Much of its activity is online and creates its complexity of engagement. The Wire is Hill Street Blues on steroids and may be pushing the limits of television that resides in the box.
The quesiotn is not what is wrong with these fans who have so much time on there hands, but, rather, what is wrong with America that does not tap into these people’s intelligence?
People are building skills and competencies in their play that makes them more able to face the problems of our society.

Johnson: “We are Wizards” documentary about Harry Potter features you. Can you tell us about it?
Jenkins: Fan fiction via the Harry Potter universe has exploded in this space (e.g. HP Alliance). A hunting society plays with bows and an information society plays with information.

Johnson: What are these young people actually like? Is there an actual crisis here? Is the interactive generation in worse shape? The evidence tends to say no.
Jenkins: Young people tend to speak in the “we” belying a collective purpose and intelligence while adult politicians speak more predominately “I - you”. Example: Obama. Obama’s lack of experience is seen by people not as a large reliability and more like a stub on Wikipedia which we will flesh out together. What we need to do is take that commitment to one’s WoW guild and bring it back into the places where we live, face-to-face, with others.

Jenkin’s new book: Convergence Culture
He references Toffler and Putnam

Saturday, 8 March 2008 - 11:30AM

Abstract:
Social media, interactive communities, and online marketing have ratcheted up the ways we use the web. What are the barriers experienced by people with disabilities trying to use web applications? From Facebook and YouTube to JK Rowlings and NetFlix, what level of accessibility is expected, achievable and reasonable? No one wants to give up the richer and faster experience facilitated by these new techniques, but should we really just accept that a certain number of people will be locked out? Sharron Rush of Knowbility moderates the panel and explores three critical aspects of this question. First, Susan L. Gerhart, a sofware engineer who has lost her vision, demonstrates common barriers. Lisa Pappas of SAS shows us how the industry is working collaboratively to address the problem. Finally Becky Gibson, a Web accessibility architect for IBM, demonstrates Accessible Rich Internet Applications being developed under the umbrella of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI-ARIA). Attendees will leave with a better understanding of the problem, will know how to participate in providing solutions, and will get code level examples of how to improve the accessibility of widgets and other rich Internet applications.

Sharron Rush (Moderator) - Exec Dir, Knowbility.org
Susan Gerhart - IT, apodder.org
Becky Gibson - Web Accessibility Architect, IBM
Lisa Pappas - Accessibility Analyst, SAS

Rush gave the example of Galludet using YouTube to communicate.

Gerhart:
(She is a developer who is slowly losing her vision to myopic degeneration.)
Her blog: http://asyourworldchanges.wordpress.com
blindcooltech, acbradio, podzinger - podcasts for the blind
largest criticism of the web: the amount of extra effort that is required for a blind person to navigate the web.

• “Click here” problem of non-contextual links.
• Headers not hierarchical and descriptive.
• Sidebar/global stuff coming before content in the document flow
• NVDA (http://www.nvda-project.org/) - open source screen reader is what she uses. This is important because it makes it affordable for those who cannot get the purchase of a screenreader subsidized.

accessibleworld.com - location for blind people to communicate
blogtalkradio.com - her example of attempting to navigate and getting frustrating

Pappas:

• Accessibility translates directly into profitablilty
• There are several demographic factors that are converging. The population is aging and the number of ergonomic adaptations rise accordingly.
• While AJAX provides great interface appearance, but they make it difficult for the screenreader to be aware of screen updates. Keyboard controls are often erattic and incomplete.

WAI-ARIA now part of Firefox 3.

You must check for:

• full keyboard operation
• color option and colorblindness support
• screenreader support

Tools:

• Use validation tools with caution. They can give false positives and a false trust that the tool has confirmed the usability of the page/site.
• Firefox extensions: Firefox Accessibility Extension and Fangs

Get actual people with disabilities to do user testing.

Color:
• [standard stuff…]
• Contrast of adjacent elements
• afb.org
• Consider allowing the change of serif/sans-serif as some people can read one or the other better.
• Demo: Color Contrast Analyser

Business benefits of accessible web design:
• Increased usability
• Widens audience
• Raises public opinion
• Increases scalibility
• Reduces litigation risk

Gibson:

• She works on DOJO
• AJAX should not be used to steal focus/update salient content
• Full keyboard support
• Be aware of how your page changes in high-contrast mode
• Be aware of teh flow of your pages when font size increases.
• ARIA (Accessible Rich internet Applications)

Saturday, 8 March 2008 - 10:00AM

Abstract:
You know the drill - you’re in the early stage of developing a website for an idea and suddenly realize you’re wasting time cutting up placeholder images, experimenting with fonts, and trying different form layouts when what you ought to be doing is making those forms actually work! But you want to demo this thing to your friends and get some feedback, and you want it to look decent.

We’re going to be discussing the pros and cons of borrowing UI and principles from other sites and folks who’ve done the testing.

Some things you’ll get out of this panel:
* Recognition that patterns come at all levels. Learn ways to be conscious of that and understand the implications of each level.
* When to filch so that you don’t bypass the thinking process.

Lindsey Simon - Web Developer, Google
Luke Wroblewski - Sr Principal, Yahoo! Inc
Skip Baney - UI Engineer, Apple Inc

Simon:
What is the difference between stealing a design and gleaning ideas from it?

Subtantial code: ???

Filch or fair? [shown several sites and asked to decide]

How do you know you have created a monster? (that you have copied)
- edited more than three meaniful times

Attribute code in your comments with a URL. Steer clear of large attributions inline to streamline the bandwidth.

Luke W:
The User Experience
When starting a quick project, some ideas require research to emulate (e.g., single-click voting on Digg) so that you can pinpoint that one thing that makes a difference.

Baney:
copyright©
[general copyright talk]

I think there is a conflation of trademark and copyright here. Some guy named Jared agrees

I have never seen so many iPhones in my life. Scott and I are keeping informal tallies for today (trying not to duplicate in our individual counts). It is about 11AM and I have seen 8.

Update (3:30PM same day):  I have seen 54 so far and Scott has seen 68. We are getting to the point where we needed some type of tagging system to avoid duplicates. We are working on this (e.g., numbered ear tags, ultraviolet paint balls or RFID stickers ).

Friday, 7 March 2008, 5:00PM

[I switched from another session, Battledecks II, at this point and joined the following in progress…]

Abstract:
We create the web. Yet twelve years and two bubbles into its history, we get no respect as a profession. And nobody understands what we do, unless we’re selling to Google or Yahoo. How can architects, designers, writers and coders work with clients, journalists and the public to foster understanding and get their best work produced?

Jeffrey Zeldman (Moderator) - Founder, Happy Cog
Douglas Bowman - Visual Design Lead, Google (and Stopdesign)
Liz Danzico - Information Architect, Happy Cog
Erin Kissane - Editorial Dir, Happy Cog
Jason Santa Maria - Creative Dir, Happy Cog

Focus: In the role you have with the website, how do you talk to others and what tools are in place to best communicate?

In the role of designer awards loosely define credentials since there is no series of tests or licensing.

Santa Maria: Flash is challenging what web design is often trying to do by breaking the rules of print - no fixed constraints that are based upon traditional rules (e.g., golden thirds, fixed width).

Q: Have you had the job being asked to create design without content to fill in?
Kissane: (paraphrased by me): Many clients are now realizing the efficacy of content strategies, but it is still a struggle to get everyone in the client’s workflow to understand the central role of content to the design.
Zeldman: Repeating the principles of where we were/are/will be is important and overrides the threat of seemingly talking down to the client. Web is often not their primary concern.
Klissane: Clients who are content-savvy allow a designer to attempt more detailed projects (e.g, they have there own editorial workflow or board).
Zeldman: Clients with marketing background are often great, but they may be in love with their own strategies and not understand the web.

IA understanding with the client achieves its tipping point…

Reputation for design:
A good designer needs to know about the line where the client suddenly takes a highly personal stake in the design. For example, the info design of menu labels may be open to negotiation, but the photo on the main page that represents them is on the other side of the line.
A better idea for the “three designs - choose one” may be presenting designs that address message in the bigger picture and not the placement of menus and color.

White papers demonstrating research on design and usability may grease the wheels with higher-ups.

It is dificult to solely tag South by Southwest as ‘Work’ even though work is paying for it. For me, it is the perfect mix of personal enjoyment and work geek. Picture a big overlap on that Venn diagram. I will be blogging everything I can from the conference content. A work-filtered version and unfiltered version will be posted here soon. It is not that I will be journeying into NSFW realms, but I do not want to worry that my definition of professional content will harsh someone’s mellow. Therefore, I am posting my notes here on my personal blog. Friends, Scott and Dave, are doing the same on their blogs.

Those who listened to me brag about coming to Austin in the spring to escape the Iowa winter can take heart in the fact that it was raining, 38F and windy here yesterday. It actually felt colder since I left my warm clothes in the car at the airport.

The map element on the banner graphic of this post is from here by the wonderfully, talented Dan Cederholm of Simplebits.]