Fresh

Although I was sadly not able enough to attend An Event Apart Seattle this year, I was able to live vicariously through those that did attend, using a handy dandy Twitter feed tool created for the event: A Feed Apart. Clicking on the “Sessions” tab gives you all the Tweets tagged with “aea” that were sent out during each of the event’s sessions – which gives you a pretty good idea of what the highlights were.  One session that seemed particularly interesting to me was “Mobile First!”, presented by Luke Wroblewski. During the session Luke W. convinced attendees of the importance of designing the mobile version of a site or app FIRST, before the “desktop” version.

How did he do that? I’ve decided to pick out some highlight Tweets from the session sent out by audience members, and then try to compile more information and resources to those points. Conveniently, Luke W. also wrote a blog post on this same topic last year, so I have a good place to start from. So even though I wasn’t there in person, I’m hoping to be able to come up with a good overview of his topic.  So let’s go!

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While at SXSW, I was bombarded with concepts, names, and countless tidbits of knowledge throughout the panels, presentations and keynotes I attended. Christina Wodtke gave an informative presentation on Information Architecture. UX Team of One presented by Leah Buley of Adaptive Path and Design for the Wisdom of Crowds with Derek Powazek were terrific presentations covered on Fresh here and here respectively. The topics that I enjoyed the most involved user experience design concepts, human computer interaction and how cognitive sciences influence it all.

Some of the most popular web applications exist to satisfy basic human needs. Organizing and sharing information. Symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships within groups. These are well researched patterns of human behavior. Technology is a chaotic, constantly evolving mess but behind all the innovation is our own innate desires that bring it all about. Where technology is fleeting, trendy, and a futile struggle with obsolescence, designing for human interaction with technology can be timeless. Interaction designers and developers are conduits for translating human behavior into effective uses of communications technology. In order to craft experiences that influence behavior we can employ aspects of psychology, anthropology, computer science, graphic design, industrial design and cognitive science.

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One of the best panels I saw at SXSW was “UX Team of One”, presented by Leah Buley of Adaptive Path. Buley delivered a fast paced, info-packed presentation on how to deliver kick-ass UX design with limited resources.  While a lot of panels at SXSW are more esoteric and high-level, “UX Team of One” was all about being in the trenches and getting design work done.  Throughout the whole talk I was furiously scribbling notes on practical tools and techniques for generating ideas quickly and efficiently.  But you won’t need to read my chicken scratch notes, she has all the resources, worksheets, slides and inspiration collected on her website.  Best of all you can see a video of her whole presentation, recorded by an audience member.  Sync it up with the Slideshare slides and it’ll feel like you were there.

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This panel at SXSW was really interesting for a couple reasons. Jared Spool from UIE is such an engaging presenter! He had us all laughing; I was thoroughly engrossed the whole time. Also, the panel was really awesome because it challenged a few ideas that I generally don’t think twice about.

One of the primary points from the panel was that there is no evidence that user centered design has ever worked. I was really surprised to hear this! One of the anecdotes that he used was based on Apple and Microsoft. Spool claimed that apple hardly does any usability tests, while Microsoft does them constantly. (and we all know whose designs are better!) He didn’t have any numbers behind this, so I’m not sure of the validity. But really interesting none-the-less!

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After an inspiring trip to Austin for SXSW, I’m finally getting a chance to look back at all of the notes and ideas from throughout the week. One of the standout panels for me, was the talk entitled “Design for the Wisdom of Crowds”. The speaker, Derek Powazek began his talk by referencing several social experiments such as the one conducted by Francis Galton, in which a crowd was asked to guess the weight of the cow. Everyone guessed wrong, but the average of the guesses was very close. Similar results were found when applying this to a change jar. So the question he poses is: How can we, as the creators of the web, allow for this wisdom to take place in our communities online? In his panel he discussed some simple ways to think about tweaking interfaces to facilitate better user experiences online.

Some basic rules for making this happen.

1. Diversity - Organize a group of diverse individuals with a wide range of opinions

2. Independence – Encourage the group to contribute for their own selfish reasons

3. Decentralization - There’s nobody in charge

4. Aggregation - Tallying the results and doing something with it

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