Category: SXSW ’11

It is once again that time of year for my to Austin, TX to attend the South by Southwest Interactive conference. I’ll be collecting notes from the various sessions I attend right here on this blog (category sxsw) as well as on my SXSW sub-blog (http://sxsw.techory.com).

The 19th annual SXSW Interactive festival will take place March 9-13, 2012 in Austin, Texas. An incubator of cutting-edge technologies, the event features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer. From hands-on training to big-picture analysis of the future, SXSW Interactive has become the place to experience a preview of what is unfolding in the world of technology.

Friday 03.11.11

• No Child Left Inside: Mobile Tech Meets Education
• Matt Mulenweg Interview: The Future of WordPress
• The Connected Car: Driving Technology

Saturday 03.12.11

• Drawing Back the Curtains on CSS Implementation
• Ordering Disorder: Grid Design for the New World
• Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better
• Web Anywhere: Mobile Optimisation with HTML5, CSS3, Javascript

Sunday 03.13.11

• One Codebase, Endless Possibilities: Real HTML5 Hacking
• People as Peripherals: The Future of Gesture Interface
• HTML5? The Web’s Dead, Baby
• Cure for the Common Font

Monday 03.14.11

• Unbelievable eCommerce: Increase Sales By 10000%
• The Hero Inside: Invisible Customer Support
• The Future of Microformats
• Anatomy of a Design Decision

Tuesday 03.15.11

• Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information
• The Convergence of Traditional and Internet TV
• Improv For Everyone

Other Notes

• Daniel Slaughter SXSW Notes
• Daniel Spiller SXSW Notes

Presenters
Amanda Hirsch Writer, Actress, Online Story Strategist AmandaHirsch.Com
Jordan Hirsch CTO jordanhirsch.net

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

Improv is a performance-based art form wherein a show is created spontaneously in front of an audience.

You Are Already an Improviser:

• Your life is unscripted.
• Your choices create your reality.
• Honoring your improv skills = honing your life skills.

Specifically Improv Can Help you…

• Communicate ore effectively
• Make Decisions
• Navigate Change
• Have more fun!

Communicate More Effectively

• Give and take
• Yes, AND…
• Active listening

Make Decisions

• Consider your objective – you can respond much more quickly when you’ve already decided what you want/need.
• Know when to edit. You’re practicing trusting yourself.

Navigate Change

• Still no script – someone else can totally change the scene on the fly.
• Resistance is futile.
• Accept and build ("Yes, AND…")
  You have to take the things coming in… but you can build on top of them.

Have More Fun

• What makes you happy?
• Do it more.

The better you become at improvising, the happier and more effective person you’ll be.

Learning to improvise = learning to live.

Presenters
Michael Petricone, SVP, Government Affairs Consumer Electronics Association
Ned Sherman, CEO Digital Media Wire Inc
Todd Weaver, Founder & CEO ivi Inc

There are several policy and legal issues with the convergence of TV and Internet.

ivi TV

Todd Weaver’s ivi is the first online cable provider. They turn your computer into a set top box vs. running coax to your home/tv. They have been fighting for a few years for the right to carry content. They were sent to FCC because they are not governed by the FCC. Sept. 13th, they launched anyway. They got C&D letters from content providers, and counter-sued to try and clear the way. They are paying the same royalties required by law as all the other true cable companies. They are caught between some bad policy that hasn’t been updated for the internet.

At one point ivi had 75 channels pulled from traditional feeds in certain markets. they had to drop many after the lawsuit (preliminary injunction), and now down to 15 channels.

Pricing is $4.99 for just broadcast channels. Broadcast content is the most popular channels out there (sports and news definitely most popular).

Question: Why not go the long-tail route and take the niche channels instead of taking on the broadcasters
A: It’s about growth and trajectory, ESPN brings a lot more people and subscribers. A known brand has a massive audience already, and the long-tail channels get more eyes via discovery.

Question: Is there any presidence for this lawsuit?
A: Satellite had the same arguments and set presidence. ivi is trying to define what a "cable system" is. There is already a royalty system set up for "cable systems" and ivi wants to be part of that. They meet all the required points for this royalty system as a "cable system."

The situation ivi is in is very common in this field. Copyright law is still based on physical media – it has not caught up. We have a content industry is very reluctant to change and update. It is hard to see what is lost here with what ivi is trying to do. The broadcast industry should see these types of new mechanisms as more eyeballs on their content and figure out a way to monetize it instead of trying to block it.

Question: Two front war for ivi –
1. change the definition of the cable system
2. geographic exclusivity (rights are only paid for certain #’s or markets)
Why fight both wars?
A: The battle is copyright law (what ivi is being sued for) retransmission and royalty and FCC (other arm) retransmission consent.  The legal battle is only copyright law, with the FCC deciding on governing the internet.

Google TV

What is the status? The holy grail is TV + Internet experiences. Nobody has really figured out bringing the internet experience to the TV in whole. Google TV brought this closer, and it’s getting better.

The problem is that Google doesn’t have the content and are being blocked by networks. This is short-sighted on the network’s part. They’re basically saying you can’t watch content on a computer connected to a TV, but you CAN watch on a computer connected to a monitor. If you make it easy to access legal content, you remove people going to illegal content.

There is a battle between consumer electronics manufactures and consumers wanting content wherever they are and the content providers blocking content based on the screen they’re watching it on.

Google has teamed up with many other consumer electronics to try for "pro-vid". FCC requires that cable devices be available everywhere. Cable companies want you using their boxes. History: AT&T using only their own phones on their own networks. Similarly the cable box should work the same way (as long as it doesn’t harm the network). You can hook up the devices of your choice. Google TV would like to jump in on this and become a cable box.

Google vs. Viacom – Google was protected by DMCA, but up for appeal. There really is no clear winner in this. Google gets views, and Viacom (content owners) get promotion.

Final Comments

Content providers are concerned with non-authorized content on the Internet. COICA could shut down websites if they are considered as infringing copyright. There is no due-process.

Presenter
Dawn Foster, MeeGo Community Mgr Intel
Presentation Slides and Videos

295 Exabytes of data in 2007, amount doubles every 3 years, 4 months. Over 600+ Exabytes now. You want to find the needle in all of this data.

RSS Alone is a start. You can follow the sources you want, but…

• Do you care about everything in each feed?
• What about feeds you aren’t subscribed to?
• Can you keep up with what you have?

Prioritize Your Reader (Google Reader)

• Put thins you care about at the top (yahoo pipes, things you really really like)
• Categorize
• Don’t try to read everything. Get to what you can.

Outsource and Crowd-source New Sources

• Tweeted Times
• Digg
• Reddit
• Techmeme
• Stumbleupon
• Google News

The Real Magic is in Filtering RSS

In Google reader, a yahoo pipe of analyst research blogs mentioning Online Community, a yahooo pipe of analyst research blogs mentioning Meego.
You need to filter out thing you don’t care about.
Another yahoo pipe pulls in favorite blogs using PostRank to find only the ones with a lot of comments or social mentions.

RSS Filtering Tools

• Yahoo Pipes
  You can filter any data found in any field of the RSS feed.
• FeedRinse
• FeedDemon
• Code your own

PostRank

• Takes the best posts in a feed
• Ranks it on engagement (links/sharing/comments/etc.)
• You can get the output as an RSS feed
• Feed includes postrank number in a field which you can filter against.

BackTweets

• Data about links on Twitter
• Finds links regardless of shortening service
• No RSS Feeds (no longer available)
• But… You can use the API = Yahoo Pipes to build one!

Presenter Jared Spool, Founding Principal User Interface Engineering Video and Slides for this presentation are available at Jared's site. How do designers make decisions? Gray’s Anatomy book, 1858 describes the entire human body. This changed medicine by giving everything a word and a name. Anatomy: a study of the structure or internal working of something. We are missing this for design. New York Times vs. Havenworks.com vs. Etsy Design decisions went into all of these sites. Many decisions were made – all of the little decisions determine the design. The choices we make take our designs in one directions or another. We never talk about those choices, or the decisions made to go in one way or another. Jason Fried from 37signals He makes decisions for him. They only design for themselves. This type of design works. Self Design When we design something for our own use Works great when: Our users are just like us We regularly use it just like our users do Condition: you have to use it every day "dog fooding". If you find something frustrating, you will fix it for you and everyone else. Unintentional Design When the design just happens on its own Works great when: Our users will put up with whatever we give them We don’t care about support costs or pain from frustration Design Decisions Styles You can move from unintentional design to self design and start using it. Genius Design At a certain point you stop getting things out of research and just build based on experience. When we’ve previously learned what users need Works great when: We already know their knowledge, previous experiences and contexts We’re solving the same design problems repeatedly Activity-Focused Design vs.. Experience-focused Design List Users and Tasks those users do. Activity-focused design can only get us so far. Experienced-based – Six Flags thinks about activities, Disney thinks about the experience. Design based style guides do not work. Rule based decisions prevent thinking. They are not informed decisions. Design doesn’t work that way. Design wants/requires thinking. This FAILS on exception cases. Things fall apart when there are no rules. Teaching a bit of design is actually better. Pair good design organizations with poor designer organizations to create "The Process" or "Recipe." Sometimes we confuse process with methodology (being able to do something over and over again). Dogma also plays in and is a faith that certain things just work. (on the other side of the spectrum…) Techniques are the building blocks that go into every step of the process (they need to be practiced). There are also tricks, which are techniques not quite used the same way. The best companies did not have any dogmas or methodologies. The worst had a lot, and when they got stuck, they didn’t know where to go. Best used techniques and tricks, worst used rule and faith-based decision making. Design Patterns This is what we’ve done, and what has worked. Educate one pixel at a time. No hard fast "rules" that you must follow. Discoveries about Design Decision Styles

• There is a place for every style of design – every one has its purpose.
• Great designers know which style they are using.
• Great designers use the same style for the entire project.
• Great teams ensure everyone uses the same style.
• The more advanced the style, the more expensive it gets. Agencies can’t go beyond Genius Design Activity-focused and experienced focused must be done in-house
• The more advanced the style, the better the design.

What kind of designer do you aspire to be?

Between some sessions I ran across a live action Angry Birds room. You had to dress up like one of the birds and then fling plush Angry Birds at a cardboard structure of plush Green Pigs. I knocked them all down but one, and got to keep the plush Angry Bird.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Presenters
Ben Ward, Software Engineer Twitter
Frances Berriman, Sr Front End Developer Nature Publishing Group
Paul Tarjan, Web Hacker Facebook
Tantek Celik, Independent tantek.com

A couple years ago a microformat was started for recipes on the web, it was picked up by several recipe sites. Google recently added recipes search to their site hitting against the microformat.

The first microformat was proposed at the first SXSW on a session on the future of blogging. That kicked off the idea and a community formed around it. There were some simple ones at first. As more were added, a process started to form for creating future microformats.

There have been some issues with microformats internationally and with accessibility.

Creating a new microformat:

Draft (community agrees on the right way to move forward – stable)
Specification (a stable and mature draft)
Standard (market acceptance)

Presenters
Jon Swartz Tech Reporter USA Today
Kimarie Matthews VP Social Web Wells Fargo
Toby Richards GM, Community Microsoft Corporation

What does proactive support mean to you?

Companies need to use new technologies to reach out to customers as never before. Build channels for customers to come to YOU. Proactive support is about breaking down the walls of the store and letting you out to help people where they are.

Frontier airlines went out of their way to help a complaint. The customer went from complaining to praising the company.

Social Schizophrenia
Putting another face on social media that is different than the normal face. Comcast helps the high level people to spin their support. They’re not using social media correctly to the core. They’re putting frosting on a really disgusting cake. What do you do to consistently solve problems, not what do you do to appear like you are on social media.

Do some of these companies that get into social media know what they’re getting into? This can easily blow up in their face, and maybe they shouldn’t be there to begin with. In many cases, they don’t have the scale to keep up with it.

An organization shouldn’t depend on heros. Heros don’t scale – you can’t have people breaking rules all the time. It means that the rules aren’t right.

Twitter:
Only about 3.5% mention their experience on Twitter. It is a pretty small segment of people who talk about their experience on Twitter.

You need to make sure you have the resources to escalate the issues to the appropriate places.

Presenter
Paul Boag, Dir Headscape

Tidbit of information: Brits do not care about the royal wedding!

A Case Study:

Headscape increased ecommerce for a company over 10k% in 5 years – from a reasonable base. Where is the catch?

The company sells frozen meals to elderly people (average age in 80′s). The average cost of a meal is $5-8. Wiltshire Farms

Two Lesson Areas

Business & Design

A successful ecommerce site is based on great business and great design. You have to have a great client and a great designer (you need both). They must work together.

Business (why the client is crucial in the process) @mattycurry

You are unique if you are involved in an ecommerce site. You are NOT Amazon. Even if Amazon is doing it all right, they are doing it right for them and not for you. You can’t just copy other people (even people in your own sector).

Why are you unique in frozen food industry? The age of the audience. What makes your target audience unique? The problem with Wiltshire Farms had was their audience kept dying on them.

New Users: Getting started guide shows up very large on the home page for new users (only the first time they visit the website).

Care Workers: There is a section explaining things to people buying meals for someone else.

A Franchise Model: There was no consistent pricing. You had to put in your postal code to enter the site.

Don’t be seduced by sexy
Don’t test out new stuff on your audience. Sexy isn’t always right for your website. Are you going to generate the return to make it worthwhile?

Visit Users in their Homes:
Usability testing – they realized that their audience never used a mouse before. They found out that everyone used laptops. Go into their homes and find out how they live and get a sense of their character.

Test & Iterate

A small ongoing investment on a regular basis is better than one big investment in many cases. Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug, talks about monthly usability testing.

Multi-variance Testing: You discover things that work and don’t work very quickly. (Google Website Optomizer)

A Right Relationship

You have to have a good relationship with your client. Take them out and get them drunk. You need to be able to argue and be comfortable.

Remove Clutter

Again, you are NOT Amazon. The list of meals to choose from and cut it down (added a "see more options"). If you can remove it, do it. If you can’t remove it, hide it. If you can’t hide it, shrink it. Ask yourself what you can remove, what you can hide and what you can shrink.

Product Shots

Product shots are everything. Add great shots to sell your product.

Make Buttons & Links Obvious

Make links look like links and buttons look like buttons. The links are bright blue with big underlines, and the buttons look like they are buttons. Make it obvious and bold. It’s not about design, it’s about increasing sales. On pop-up dialogs describe what the buttons are going to do.

Always Provide Help

Find out what the major questions are and float them to the top of the help. FAQ’s suck, prioritize the questions.

Handle Errors Gracefully

"Oh dear, we have a problem. Let’s fix it together." Be nice with your error messages. Give them real practical advice.

Communicate the Value Added

Show and demonstrate the added value that you provide over your competitors. A large part of the home page is dedicated to value added. Why are you different? Why are you unique. Take some space on the homepage to add that – not just products, products, products.

Presentation Video:
http://boagworld.com/talks/unbelievable-ecommerce/