SXSW Notes

Monday, March 16th at 03:30 PM
Presenter: Kathy Sierra – CreatingPassionateUsers

You to your goal – where you want to be (business, product, company, performance in something)
There is a big F&*#%ing wall in your way!

You can’t make incremental progress to get through that wall.
Incremental vs. a Breakthrough

When the incremental things don’t work – Incremental is an arms race.
Quality or Features arms race or Marketing arms race or viral arms race.

How do you get past that wall w/out incremental steps?

Breakthrough ideas or performances – suddenly becoming a WHOLE lot better at a skill. Maybe helping your users make big breakthroughs.

WOM (word of mouth) vs. WOO (word of obvious)
What’s stopping us from kicking ass? (stuck in SLR “P” mode)
People are afraid of sucking – we need to get them to upgrade.

Anyone can compete…

–Get to know each other: Flight vs. Invisibility, what would you pick? (convince your neighbor why)

What super power would you give to your users? Picture it on the super suit (pivot-table man spreadsheets, photoshop channels guy, twitter man). Would it work as an action figure? What problem do you solve? Productivity doesn’t work (broccli)

14 Ways (just bout):

2. Superset game – you vs. competitor. take on search vs. google. Ask yourself which bigger thing are all these things a part of? There is something bigger, what is it? What cooler is my thing a part of?

3. Shortcuts to a breakthrough – 10k hours to be amazing at something. 2 ways to shrink the 10k hours: learn the patterns and shorten the duration.

4. Deliberate Practice – kicking ass in < 1000 hours if they deliberately practice. Not just doing it. After 1-2 years, experience is a poor predictor of performance/expertise (10 yrs vs. 1 yr repeated 10 times). Offer exercises, games, contests, tutorials that support deliberate practice of the right things.

5. Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard. Make it easier for users to have a breakthrough than to stay where they are. It’s not in the corner because you don’t use it, ou dn’t use it because it’s in the corner.

6. Get better gear (and offer it). Help them justify the better gear. Find, make offer gear to keep users moving forward

7. Ignore standard limitations. Be stupid sometimes and just jump in ignoring the people who tell you that you can’t

8. Total Immersion Jams. How often you get your users to do something matters. 16 hours over 2 days vs. 16 hours over 2 months. Motto: “Always be closing.” 24 hour film festival forces you in to go quickly.” Less Camp, more Jam.

9. Change your perspective – don’t make a better X make a better use of X. Make your *thing* the best it can be.

10. What movie are your users in? What is their journey? What movie do your users WANT to be in? What role do you play in your user’s lives? Your company is to your users as ______ is to Frodo.

11. Don’t ask your users. If you want incremental improvements, don’t ask – if you want a breakthrough, ignore everyone. What they say is different than what they REALLY want. You can end up passing over the happy medium and having too many features. Ask other people’s users, and not your own. Look at something else, and ask about the bigger experience.

12. Be brave – Concept car moving towards actual model. Moving from the fantastic idea to the real thing, fear works its way in and the final product changes. We’re so concerned about our users we oversimpify. Henry Ford said, “if I asked my users what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Look at things people think are dead or obsolete and see if it still has utility of some sort.

14. Change the EQ – Move the sliders, price, number of features, quality, service, performance. Add new sliders that aren’t normally part of a particular product to make breakthroughs. Dethe Elza made a slider generator. What did Gary do?

Gary Vaynerchuk in WineLibrary.tv. Talked about wine from the heart. There was a severe lack of wine self esteem.

15. Don’t mistake narrow for shallow – lolcats+translation = 52,000 google hits.

16. Be amazed!

Who is awesome? You are awesome!

More notes from this panel available here:
Blogs.utexes
Fastwonderblog.com

Monday, March 16th at 11:30 AM
Presenters:
Arun Ranganathan – Mozilla
Chris Wilson – Microsoft
Brendan Eich – Mozilla Foundation
Charles McCathieNevile – Opera Software
Darin Fisher – Google

Exciting year – 20th anniversary of the web this year (celebrated last Fri in Switzerland)

There is no Apple on this panel, but there is a representative from Webkit. Google Chrome is the new guy on this panel this year. Mozilla, Google, Opera, Microsoft represented.

What’s in it for Google in the browser game? Explain…

Google started to help make Firefox more successful, they just wanted to make browsers better. They see competition as a way to improve the browser marketplace. Chose Webkit because they didn’t want to create another rendering engine – wanted open source. You’re left with Gecko and Webkit – looked at both. Webkit was very fast at laying out pages, but the JS engine wasn’t as fast. Mobile were using Webkit in many areas, and ultimately went that route. They also didn’t want the full platform (like gecko), just wanted a rendering engine. Google cooperates with Apple on the code (involved in the Webkit community).

With IE 6 disappearing, and potentially being replaced with IE 7/8, there is no single majority browser – how do we work together? Standards! Silverlight has a huge presence here – many of the features are in HTML 5. What’s going on with Silverlight?

Chris doesn’t work on the Silverlight team. There are a set of scenarios where it makes sense, and Chris does what he can to move the standards-based platform forward, which is what IE tries to do outside of non-standard software (flash, silverlight).

You can try to get a standards-based platform, but there will always be theses separate marketplaces and platforms. These provide competition, or something to aim for that can be done with standards. It is a lot of companies competing in a marketplace to do the same thing. They push each other. In the end (hopefully) the standards win.

People still build websites, but many still pull out their hair because of browser differences.

The web is likely to move in a direction where you won’t be able to tell between silverlight and flash from the standards based web. There won’t be stable landscape (IE 7/8, Webkit, Moazilla engines).

How are standards actually made?

“Like sausages… you don’t want to know!”
HTML 5 has many more extended elements for multimedia content. How is the actual spec licensed? The actual spec should/could be Open source. Could a company take the spec and change it and use it? The HTML 5 spec discussions are about HTML spec being too restrictive previously. Can you say, “do what ever you want with it, including forking?” Or is it better if a group looking at everything (property rights) handle this better? Ultimately it doesn’t matter because people will use the spec however they want, or implement it however they want. A license won’t solve this.

If there is competition or a war, it’s about javascript. JS performance, and how standards are set is a possible issue. It is no longer a toy language on the web, and is moving into a performance wars.

Many people are using different techniques and performance techniques to build/use tools in JS. It has moved faster than thought – the important thing is moving the spec forward, and ignoring the politics.

What can IE 8 developers expect in JS?

We are absolutely taking JS seriously! IE 8 focuses not just on JS performance, but also holistic (navigation) performance. The real-world performance is more important to get right at the moment. We still need to move JS as a language forward.

Are the JS tests for performance fair?

Some people set some benchmarks, but they may not be the entire story – but benchmarks are necessary. They are valuable tools, and we need more of them. We need applications that really take advantage of the newer JS engines. The response to Chrome’s JS engine has been great, and has encouraged others to do the same.

Opera has always had a fast JS engine, but for a long time nobody cared. Now they are starting to care, which is good. It’s getting better and faster across the board, and that is good for everyone. In the mobile world it’s even more important (battery life). Being in a world where we’re taking that seriously is great in taking the web as a platform forward.

Security: If there is no single browser with dominance, we can take it more seriously. IE 8 has certain measures, and it’s totaly on their own… why?

When looking at security in general, cross-domain requests or clickjacking, you need to respond very quickly. It is on the set of users you have. Users ignore the auto-update box. Clickjacking became a real problem, and IE couldn’t wait for another product cycle to address the issues.

Chrome – 2 parts, web security (between websites), and protecting the user’s operating system. Sandbox the rendering engine.

Audience Questions:

HTML 5 will be great, all of this was in Java applets 10 years ago. Why did they fail, and why has it taken this long for browsers to catch up?

Class loading took too long, and you had to be a top level programmer to get it to compile correctly. Didn’t grow like the web. It was a way different model. The ecosystem has changed – many factors.

Web Developers like to hijack browsers, as a user it is very annoying, can this be solved at the browser level?

It’s an escalating battle, and a cat and mouse game. There is a definite tradeoff for features and security.

Mobile Devices – How are companies are moving desktop class browsing to mobile devices?

User experience has come a long way, but the full desktop experience may not be totally what you want (size/power/etc). Giving users that experience in a way that developers can take advantage of that experience is what we want. There shouldn’t be two paths for developers mobile vs. desktop. It is very interesting what the iPhone has done, and people are trying to find ways to get web on a small screen usable.

IE 8 vs. Corporate using IE 6 and ActiveX – Consumers also using. As 6 dwindles, IE 7 is more likely to get replaced by 8 (since those folks get the roll-outs) How does MS handle this?

MS can’t do anything about the folks who don’t get things pushed. These people using 6 can’t necessarily be forced out of it but encouraged to IE 8.

W3C Widget Standards – Besides Opera, what are the plans from the other groups?

Widgets are  fairly low priority at the moment (more important things to focus on). MS has a similar story. Many things would probably show up above widgets in priority.

CSS Support of font-face rights vs. image rights. Is it the job of a browser maker to protect business models (font IP)?

Image/sound scenario vs font – the image folks give you rights for those images. The problem with font files is there is a limited set of fonts that allow you to do this, or rights to allow you to put it up on a server.

More notes from this session at:
Jeffreybarke.net
Torgo.com
Socialgraphpaper.com

Monday, 16 March 2009 at 11:30AM
Panel:

Monday, 16 March 2009 at 10:00AM
Presenters:

Monday, March 16th at 10:00 AM
Presenters:
Marshall Kirkpatrick – ReadWriteWeb
Louis Gray – louisgray.com
Gabe Rivera – Techmeme
Melanie Baker – AideRSS Inc
Micah Baldwin – Lijit Networks Inc

Favorite methods and strategies for finding the best content or the best technology/tools for finding content.

Louis:

Information anywhere you look on the web. You can find info anywhere! Helpful to limit your sources. Google Reader as a starting point to pull in all RSS feeds. Read fast, share fast, decide fast, click fast. Share it, but know where it’s going (out to friendfeed, facebook etc).

Gabe:

Techmeme is driven by automation, showing the most important events/pieces in tech news. Relies much on link (one blog going to another going to another = newsworthy). It looks for situation where many articles are talking about the same thing over short period of time. A few months back an editing process was entered into techmeme, headlines can be tweaked/removed/moved around on the front page.

Melanie:

ReadWriteWeb editor – works on both human and algorithm side. Finding articles and then seeing how people react to it. Who are the influential people and topics, making sure their content moves in. Blogs can be chosen, and run through postrank to find the top content.

Micah:

The starting point is a trusted source. Ligit aggregates trusted sources. It all starts with trust. By hand trust relationships are replicated online. The key to what’s beyond aggregation is tying it back to real life, and finding the key to trust.

Marshall

ReadWriteWeb – finding the weirdest stuff on the web. Delicious, postrank, yahoo pipes, feedburner used to find interesting sources. Look up links (good?) on delicious to see how most people describe certain sources? Find blog/culture sites on delicious, and ran the feeds through filter, then ran them through yahoo pipes to slices them together, then ran them through feedburner. You end up with a feed of just the best culture/weird blogs.

For those looking to be found, you’ll hear – content is king, write, people will find you, you’ll soon be rich and famous. Truth is, if nobody knows who you are, nobody will find you. The space beyond aggregation provides many sites that take popular and run it through some sort of filter adding a human element to bring out the best (not just the most popular). If you go too much to the human, it’s all about personal opinion, but going too much to the computer side, you get generic results. Combining these two gets you a unique cross-section of the best – you get the wisdom of the crowd w/out just getting what is favorite today. Friendfeed is very useful for picking topics, and drilling down to the best of the day.

The next techmeme-like topic could be a business/finance site, brining together stories/topics in that area.

Macblips.com – Stories get votes to raise most popular in news topics (not just tech).

The interlinked communities aren’t only in the tech space (they just may know how to use the system better). There are still quite a few communities for many other topics.

It isn’t easy to build lists of the top bloggers, but many people (check google) have done this. Think on the people level, to find who you can trust.

Are you looking to find interesting people, or are you looking for topics to blog about yourself? Things you find the old fashion way is probably better. Many of the "popular" things out there are popular because they’ve already been found. Look at lolcatz – they track memes. You need to find more voices than just your own – find new blogs you’ve never heard of before. That list should grow every day, and grow over time. This will drive you deeper into many things.

sonofatweet.com – tracks memes on twitter
Twitter search in google greasemonkey script brings twitter results into your google searches.
Drag and drop zones let you drop your search on many search engines (custom or otherwise)

Questions:

• The focus is largely on blogs, and tech content – what about tools that search across other areas (Mahalo etc.)  for consumers or mainstream users?
  -There are plenty of tools out there every day, but the normal users will come to us and start using our tools instead of going easier and going from bottom up. It’s ultimately what their goal is – they’re looking for News of the day, many of them use the more generic sites (MSN starting page or MyYahoo).
• Many times the top list sites (digg etc) start to grow and get worse as the community grows – how do these sites deal with this growth?
  -We’re seeing more sites with promote/burry features, and dealing with this growth.
• What is this activity called (the whittling down of content/aggregation?
  -Intent-based Curation

Secrets:

• http://rssmeme.com
• One group took a look at popular links, then followed them back to when they were first added to del.icio.us, and started a list of the names that showed up repeatedly, then started following the blogs of those people. There were many similar names, and they continually provide good content.

Sunday, 15 March 2009 at 5:00PM
Presenters:

Sunday, 15 March 2009 at 3:30PM
Moderators:

Sunday, March 15th at 03:30 PM
Presenter:
Brad Ward – Butler University
Dylan Wilbanks – University of Washington School of Public Health

Many times there are usually just a small collection of people from higher education at conferences. The room for this session was overflowing with folks from higher ed.

This discussion is about ways we’re different and ways we’re the same. We’re a special group when compared to corporate environments. The audience is different, and the audience is different. We’re mainly focusing our communications on a very particular demographic (high school/college age). Education is much more open than corporate – sharing is more prevalent.

It was recently discussed that universities in Australia get more money based on the number of students in your school.

What are the downsides of Education?

• There is less money (similar to a startup) with the negative hierarchy of a corporate environment.
• There is a large age gap between the audience and the folks delivering content
  -Students want all content online
  -Professors don’t want all content online
• Many things are done in small teams for low money (there are a lot of generalists)
• Forced to look for cheaper solutions (open source, ning, etc.), but we get a massive return on investment for small things
  • Small teams CAN do great things
  • Don’t be scared of risks of cheap solutions (social media).
  • Always be present and willing to be there to help.

Discussions

Marketing and/or Communications teams seem to do better (?)

Development or design by committee is generally bad

Where does your “web team” sit? IT or Marketing or Instructional? – All over

Faculty don’t always know what’s out there in tech (they are very busy) – Young facult dont’ always know about or are required to know what’s out there (tech not built into tenure)

What is the biggest problem now?
-Get faculty to use the learning management system
-Make human side of relationship easier and more easy to manage (prof office hours)

Facebook:

• UF – looking at Facebook for recruiting and outreach
• UCLA – it is a good connection with students in open forum – answer questions and also poll users (two way conversations)
• Walden University (Internet only school) – Recruit students and market all events and communicate with students
• DePaul – 3500 FB users – alumni said they want email and provided input and evidence to the alumni office via Facebook
• Western – engage alumni for get togethers through FB – they are now pulling record numbers by using Facebook.
• UF Law School – pages or groups? Pages: top level Groups: more niche HowardKang.com has good breakdown

Discussions

Software vs. Service offered by school or outside school. Sometimes it’s easier and cheaper to go outside based on internal charge-back.

Standards accessibility – are they important? YES (most). Multimedia accessibility is done on request (508). Enterprise tools to test across an entire site for accessibility  – IBM Radional Quality Tester or WorldSpace

Universities have brilliant people and sharing is a plus – it is helpful to set up groups to discuss various things – web or social media working groups.

Communication is successful when they know and trust you – open 2-way communications are important  (blog?)

“We wish challenges were technical and not political!”
http://cuwebd.ning.com

Video of Presentation: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1257227

Sunday, March 15th at 11:30 AM
Presenter: Jared Spool – User Interface Engineering

The talk started with the single ladies dance from Beyonce – good start!

Celebrity Death-Match: 37 Signals vs. Don Norman

Wired magazine – Keep It Simple, Stupid! Talking about 37 signals and their approach. "We’re not designing for others… we’re designing for ourselves."

Don Norman on 37 signals: They design for how they want to use it – self design. I’ve tried their products and although they have admirable qualities they have never quite met my needs: Close is not good enough. I understand why: the developers are arrogant and completely unsympathetic to the people who use their products."

Where did user-centered design come from?
IBM 360 mainframe – released in 1962. This thing was THE computer. It is the size of a room. The big red button shut it down. Computing at this time was developed for engineers by engineers. The people using/building were highly skilled and highly trained. They didn’t care what was running, they just kept it running. It only ran the tool.

80’s brought in IBM Displaywriter – a computer for office workers. They weren’t skilled in the tool, and might not have been trained with the tool. They only cared about the data, and didn’t care about the operation of the device.

There was a large shift from one to the other.
User-centered design was born from this shift – putting users at the center of the design process.

There is no evidence that user-centered design has never worked. There is NO documentation proving it works.

Apple does very little usability. Microsoft does 15,000 usability tests a year. Is MS more usable?

How do the best teams create great designs?
How does work get done? The middle of the spectrum is process – the steps you use to get things done (the steps followed). Process isn’t necessarily a repeated thing. It can be different every time. Methodology is the formalization of process to make them repeatable.

Example: TSA – entire organization runs on dogma. 3-1-1 = 3oz bottles in 1 plastic bag. Without the plastic bag, it is NOT safe. Dogma. When you have an unquestioned faith in something. It’s against the rules to even test the logic behind it.

Techniques – the building blocks of the process (how you get something done). You master the technique by constant practice.

Tricks – what you do when the right technique is hard to do. Improperly used techniques that get the job done anyway.

What did the research find?
The best teams didn’t have methodology or dogma they followed. (tricks and techniques)
The struggling companies often followed methodology, without success.

It’s time to replace he user-centered design dogma.

It is not about process or dogma, it is about working as teams. You could make a recipe with the important steps. If everyone works towards the same goal, it’s better if everyone complains. You must do better than the placebo (60%).

The goal of user research: To Inform Design
Usability problems happen when someone doesn’t know something they’re supposed to know. Inform the process.

What gets measured gets done.
What gets rewarded gets done well.

Measuring Brand Engagement
Loyalty, Confidence, Integrity, Pride, Passion

Measuring Engagement While Buying Electronics (start to finish buying experience)
Amazon: 6.2 to 5.5
Circuit City: 4.5 to 4.3
Dell: 3.0 to 1.4
HP: 1.4 to -1
Wal-mart: 0.5 to 1.1 (exceeding expectations by lowering standards)

We need to be careful of the techniques

• Many voodoo techniques: eye-tracking interpretations – it can be interpreted however you want
• analytics – what do they mean? user interested or lost? – again can be interpreted however you want.

What does work?

• Have a good vision
• Good feedback loop
• Great culture

Three questions determine your group:

1. Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design five years from now? (experience vision)
2. In the last six weeks, have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your design or a competitor’s design? (feedback)
3. In the last six weeks have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure? (celebrate making mistakes and learning from it). The culture has to accept mistakes.

It’s time to retire the dogma of user-centered design
We should focus on Informed Design – build a reward system based on informed measures
Focus on 3 core UX attributes – vision, feed back, culture