I went to this year’s South By Southwest Interactive conference and returned from Austin with my brain buzzing like a flock of mopeds. As with any conference experience, the value of SXSW is as much about what you experience as it is about what you learn. Months, and even years, after a good conference your experiences there will trigger useful connections and marvelous epiphanies.
To make sense of the whole of SXSW, I’ve written two different blog posts. This one is a review of the mostly tactical information I took in on while trying to maximize the return on my employer’s expenditure in sending me there. For the MCDM program’s “Flip the Media” blog, I hearkened back to the sort of writing I used to do for the late Mr. Showbiz Web site and reported on the SXSW experience in full-on gossip column style: My Employer Sent Me to SXSW and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.
Keynotes
I made it to two of the keynotes: danah boyd’s “Privacy and Publicity” opening remarks, and the interview of Twitter co-founder Evan Williams by Umair Haque. A lot of the concerns in boyd’s address go back to the early days of the Internet, but they impacts of them keep growing. It’s my belief that someday we’re all going to want some of the privacy back that we’ve been giving away, either willingly or unknowingly, and the work that boyd has done in documenting how these changes in technology and communication has changed us will be important.
On the other hand, the Evan Williams keynote addressed nothing on a societal level beyond a vague company motto to “be a force for good.” The keynote was widely vilified over the real-time Twitter backchannel for being astoundingly boring, and most press coverage reflected this. Sadly, I have to agree. Twitter’s success as a medium is nearly impossible to translate into success as a business. Although Twitter isn’t an open protocol, it is treated similarly. It’s as if Marshall Rose had tried to make money off having chaired the IETF groups that produced email’s underlying SMTP and POP protocols: If they had been monetized, no one would have used them. Caught in this trap Twitter remains, as I tweeted during the keynote “…more interesting to use than talk about.”
Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity
- danah boyd @zephoria http://www.danah.org/
Evan Williams Keynote Interview
- Evan Williams @ev http://twitter.com/
- Umair Haque @umAirh http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/
Content Strategy
The basic ideas behind content strategy are not new to me – we didn’t know it, but in retrospect we were practicing them back in ’96 at Starwave – but I hadn’t heard of the Content Strategy Consortium which apparently formed at last year’s IA Summit. All in all, after attending four sessions on content strategy I applaud the idea of it emerging as a discipline. The value isn’t in the ideas themselves, but in being able to present them to decision makers, stakeholders, and project managers who’ve never been exposed to them.
The more time I’ve spent at companies that don’t produce interactive media as their primary product, the weaker my ingrained opposition to bringing in outside consultants or using buzzwords to my advantage has gotten. It’s often not that the knowledge of the consultants isn’t available in-house, but that there is no way to get the organization to stop doing business as usual and let the knowledge be applied. If your manager doesn’t know enough to look at a design mockup spotted with text like “Heading 1,” “Content goes here,” or the ever-popular “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” and ask “Does the design work with real content too?” then being able to pull a content strategist, or at least some good content strategy information, out of your back pocket might be in order. Content strategy can help head off implementing something that doesn’t work well and will suck away resources without delivering a good experience for years to come.
Of course, content isn’t just the big chunks of text – anyone who’s done significant work on IA understands that labeling for usability is hugely important, and the emerging content strategy discipline addresses this as well. Uber-content strategist Kristina Halvorson unintentionally set off an epiphany for me when she used REI.com’s “Expert Advice” section as an example of effective brand-appropriate content.
Having put a lot of time into Expert Advice, consulting with writers and designers, setting standards for technical producers to follow, etc., I have a deep appreciation of Expert Advice. But what I realized while sitting there is that while EA was an easy sell at REI because what it does aligns with traditional brand thinking, the tougher parts of content strategy, like useful navigation labels, remain much harder sells due to that same traditional brand thinking. Sitting in a usability study and seeing the subject baffled by the task “Find information about trips offered by REI” because the navigation label is the brand-appropriate “REI Adventures” instead of the user-friendly “Travel” makes lost opportunities clear. What was less clear was my ability to articulate this thought coherently when I spoke to @halvorson after her presentation, but at that point my head cold had so clogged my thinking tubes that I couldn’t even manage to order coffee clearly that day.
All in all, anything that makes it easier to convince traditionally-minded organizations that there are clear standards of practice for Interactive content and just giving marketing copy to a Webmaster who sits in the IT department doesn’t cut it is good. @halvorson called her presentation “Content Strategy FTW” and it definitely delivered on that promise.
Content Strategy: What’s in it for You? #cswiify
- Margot Bloomstein: @mbloomstein http://appropriateinc.com/
Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For
- Rachel Lovinger: @rlovinger http://blog.rachellovinger.com/ http://www.razorfish.com/
- Karen McGrane: @karenmcgrane http://karenmcgrane.com/
Content Strategy FTW #csftw
- Kristina Halvorson @halvorson http://www.braintraffic.com/
Wireframing and Prototyping
Continuing in the IA/UX vein, a problem related to content strategy and planning that I’ve run into at non-tech/media companies is management that doesn’t understand the role of wireframes in the typical Web site design process. It’s a common experience to explain that what you are about to show is deliberately stripped of all branding and style so everyone can focus on the navigation path and user experience, and then have the highest titled person present respond to the very first wireframe by saying “You aren’t using the right font.”
I attended several sessions on wireframing and prototyping, looking for practical advice I could take to my current job, where I am the entirety of the user experience team. I can own as much of the presentation as I want, from IA to UX to graphic design. My challenge so far has been in understanding how to break this down into manageable, and explainable, chunks. Sessions with titles like “The Right Way to Wireframe” gave me some useful tips. “Product Prototyping with Customers – Rapid Experiments” was a fantastic hands-on experience involving interviewing other audience members about their needs. But even these sessions didn’t set off the fireworks in my brain I was hoping for.
When I do a site as a solo side project, I don’t wireframe. In fact, I don’t really design. I just jump into the code and build the design and interaction live in HTML. I can get away with this because I have no one to communicate my ideas to except myself and my client, and the more process I strip away the better it works for both of us. Sure, it leads to to rework in the HTML, but I’m comfortable enough in markup and presentation that this is no huge chore. In a more formal approach, that same time spent on rework would just be happening in Photoshop or Visio anyway.
So it was a relief when the fireworks did go off in my brain at the last session on prototyping I went to. It was made even better than it was presented by two guys from Google validating something halfway between how I prototype for myself and how I prototype in organizations. Called “Prototyping Web Apps – Nobody Loves a Wireframe” the presentation demonstrated real examples of new Gmail features being prototyped by layering interactivity on top of pixel-perfect design comp image files. As well as sidestepping the problem of stakeholders not quite getting the experience from wireframes, it also speeds up development by encouraging simultaneous design and interaction feedback.
The audience was generally wowed, myself included. The presenters have promised to post some scripts and other tools developed in-house at Google to speed the process, and I’m hoping when they do I’ll be able to use to them to create a widely-understood and repeatable process for feature development at work.
Re-Inventing the Wheel: Sketching your own IA Process #reinvent
- Christopher Fahey @chrisfahey http://www.graphpaper.com/
The Right Way to Wireframe, Part 1 #rwtw
- Todd Zaki Warfel @zakiwarfel http://zakiwarfel.com/
- Russ Unger @russu http://userglue.com/
UX Process Improved: Integrating User Insight #uxsxsw
- Steve Portigal @steveportigal http://www.portigal.com/
- Aviva Rosenstein @uxresearch http://www.interactionresearch.com/
Product Prototyping with Customers – Rapid Experiments #prototypingwithcustomers
- Vidya Dinamani @vdinamani http://www.intuit.com/
Games
Two sessions on game development attracted my interest. The first was a panel discussion entitled “ANYONE Can Create a Video Game!” which featured representatives from four different companies making lightweight video game authoring systems. It was a little disappointing to discover the one that sounded most intriguing when described, GameSalad, only creates standalone Mac and iPhone games, making it unlikely to meet any needs I have at work.
The other game session I attended was less technical, and more content focused: “Games for Good.” What was most interesting was the audience reactions to two approaches to socially-aware game development: Some audience members were amused by PETA’s heavily satirical approach, but at least as many were turned off. By contrast, no one expressed any reservations about Impact Games’ “Peacemaker” in which players choose to play either the role of Israeli Prime Minister or the head of the Palestinian Authority and the goal is to bring about a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
ANYONE Can Create a Video Game! #anyonecancreate
- Michael Agustin @lexander http://gamesalad.com/
- Dustin Clingman @dclingman http://www.fullsail.edu/
- Adam Saltsman http://flixel.org/
- Shanna Tellerman @ShannaWP http://wildpockets.com/
- Dave Werner
http://www.atmosphir.com/
Games For Good
- Joel Bartlett @joelrama http://www.peta2.com/superchicksisters/index.asp
- Noah Cooper @Noah _Cooper
http://omgwtfinternet.blogspot.com/ - Asi Burak @aburak http://www.impactgames.com/
- Raphael Colantonio Arkane Studios
A Couple of Sessions that I didn’t have Much to Say About
Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web #beyondalgorithms
- Nova Spivack @NovaSpivack http://www.novaspivack.com/
- Carla Thompson @Carlat http://guidewiregroup.com/
- Gil Elbaz @gilelbaz http://www.factual.com/
- Dag Kittlaus http://siri.com/
- Barak Berkowitz
http://www.wolframalpha.com/ - Will Hunsinger
http://www.evri.com/ - Barney Pell @BarneyP http://www.barneypell.com/
- Danny Sullivan @DannySullivan http://searchengineland.com/
Multiplatform Storytelling: A Master Class with Tim Kring
- Brian Seth Hurst
- Tim Kring
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