SXSW Interactive 2009 Notes
I had a wonderful time this year at the 2009 SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. I met lots of great people and absorbed the passion that people have for their work, clients and creativity. I am sharing my notes from SXSW in hopes that others will do the same with me. There are so many panels and events at SXSW that it is impossible to see everything.
Posted under: Creative: Show the Path, Not the Destination
Jim Coudal, Brendan Dawes
The Search for a more Social Web
Dave Morin, Facebook
Tony Hsieh – Zappos.com
At Zappos.com, Tony Hsieh has fostered a culture where extraordinary customer service is the norm. Hear him talk about how good deeds can help you leverage the power of your audience to massively extend your brand.
The Future Of Social Networks
Charlene Li – Altimeter Group
Journey to the center of design – Sunday Panel 11:30
Jared Spool – User Interface Engineering
User-centered Design
- For the most part has always been a failure
- How do the best teams create great designs?
- Analogies: cooking, government inefficiencies
Process – does not have to be repeated
Methodology – formulate to make it repeatable
Dogma – belief systems ex: TSA (311)
Techniques – building blocks of the process
Tricks
The Goal of User Research: To Inform Design
Measuring Brand Management
- Loyalty, confidence, integrity, pride, passion
- Experiment done with 40 people who filled out a questionairre
- Results: starbucks-consistent, customer satisfaction, mcdonalds-majority didn’t like, apple-very best, microsoft-bad
Measuring enagement while buying electronics
amazon (6.2>5.5) circuit city (4.5>4.3) dell (3.0>1.4)
The Three Core UX Attributes
- Vision: Questions: Can everyone on team describe UX of using the design 5 years from now?
- Feedback: Questions: In last 6 weeks have you spent 2 hours or more watching someone use the design?
- Culture: Questions: Have you rewarded a team member for a design failure?
How Social Networks are killing the revolution – Social networking sites today do as much for real world action as paint on the walls does for the structural integrity of your home. Come discuss how we are creating a false majority-view mentality and how to overcome this to achieve large scale change in the world.
- Why doesn’t it translate?
- False-majority view (sampling bias)
- Bigger silos (validating groups)
- Noise! = Action (anonymous)
- Can we do better?
- Feedback
- Redefine social network retro
- Mobile
- Making the message actionable
Sidebar conversations on privacy, open standards and sharing information across social networks. e.g. facebook used to manage events and information cannot be shared. PETA – strong base on social networks to create change.
Open Source Art
Graffiti Research Lab
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/
- Open source, contagious media, and the bored at work network.
- LED throwies
- Laser projected graffiti
- openFrameworks processing used for software
- FatLab – creative technology for the public domain
Conversations with GRL
- Discusses detainment after 2008 Summer Olympics – MC Yan, performed laser
- tag across Hong Kong harbor
- Synthetic Times
- Laser, adapter and stencil projector (handheld, parts bought at WalMart)
Interpretations: breaks visual taboos and spaces, tricksters (see: RESearch Studios book on pranksters), analogy to the myth of Hermes
Using Social Media to Accelerate Sustainability
- Dissection of sustainability and social media and how they work together (Lebkowsky, speaker)
- Social media facilitates knowledge production, processing and distribution.
- Knowledge production and sharing
- Robust advocacy of sustainability around social media (ex: austin350.org – reducing carbon emissions)
- Crowdsourced knowledge (popular in wiki formats, BrightGreenLiving)
- Communities of efficiency (myherefordshire.com, communities aggregating their carbon footprint
- Shared computational cycles (network CPU for R&D)
- Guerilla R&D (DIY, Green Fab Labs – Sustainable South Bronx)
- Who is Max Gladwell (Reed, speaker) – A Heroic Ideal
- Merged Social Media with Green Living entities (50/50) – entrepreneurship combining social media and green living to create solutions to environmental issues and sustainability.
Develop Super Senses: Tools to know your users
- Remote Testing
- Debates as to isolated user group testing
- Engage users in the experience to get feedback
- Share data with the team
