This week the local Dallas UPA held a Big Design Preview event, where 40+ people got to hear 10 minute previews on some of the great upcoming talks here at the GameStop office.

There was a large turnout – and as always, the Dallas UPA is a great place to meet new people, get introduced to the local User Experience community, and hear from peers on new methods, books, resources, and more.

After the opening mixer, we heard from:

@BrianKSullivan
Designing for Awareness

@digitalcandy
Remove the Suck: Lessons in Product Differentiation

@mattdonovan
Defending Creative Designs

@marcelosomers
Use the Force To Build Your Strategy

@suredoc
Narrate This: How You Can Own Your Own Story

@schubox
Critical Thinking for Creatives: How to Make Decisions Faster

@AdamtheIA
Innovation: Ideas are Just the Beginning

Be sure to check out all the great speakers at this year’s Big Design: http://bigdesignevents.com/speakers

I also previewed my talk:

Game On: Everything you need to know about how games are saving changing the world

Gaming is at a tipping point, never before have games effected our day-to-day lives in such a substantial way. From entertaining yourself on the subway with Angry Birds, to solving the world’s greatest problems – gaming is quickly becoming a mainstream way to explore, communicate, connect, and work.

With “Game On” Jeremy Johnson will take you on a tour of gaming trends – which includes everyone’s favorite gaming buzz words: gamification, gameful, game layer, gamestorming, game mechanics, gameplay, game theory and good old video games. How’s that for a extra helping of games? Let’s top it off with a Call of Duty deathmatch – who’s game?

Along with the preview I handed out a list of books that will go well with this talk:

(Download PDF)

Big Design is this month! Get you’re tickets, and get ready for the biggest meetup of Designers, coders, technologists, and social media gurus in the DFW area!

What’s great about starting with a brand new group is that you get to introduce the world of design, usability, and user experience to a fresh group of developers, project managers, and business analysts. And we did just that.

Four years later, and a re-org from technology to marketing, everyone from the marketing managers down to the developers ask for, talk about, and request our help and guidance. We’ve gone from “let make this functional”, to “how can we make this better for our users”. And that’s a great thing.

Over the past four years, I’ve also fully enjoyed the people and culture at $largecompany. I’ve been apart of UX weeks, Hack Days, Dev Houses, speaker series, intern programs, World Usability Days, and more. They truly work to make $largecompany a great place to be employed.

Add to that all the great people I’ve met over the years – I’ve never worked anywhere where I’ve had so few “political” office issues. Which is a good thing – it leaves you to focus on doing great work.

With that, there was an opportunity too big to pass up. A traditionally brick-and-mortar company in the area, looking to compete and win in the digital space.

GameStop based in Grapevine, TX has over 6,000 retail locations worldwide and over the last 12 months, they’ve had over 9 billion in sales. That’s a lot of video games (of which I’ve purchased my fare share).

Here’s what’s going on at GameStop:

• Thanks to Kongregate’s traffic (which they just acquired) , GameStop now has another 10 million unique visitors a month to its already-popular web site. (link)
• TIME Magazine Selects Kongregate as One of the Best US Websites of 2010 (link)
• The new store is a model for how GameStop will marry online games with packaged goods. It has downloadable and Flash-based games on a web-connected PC. It has reward program kiosks, big displays for watching demos, and all sorts of other technology. (link)
• Based on the used inventory and trade in comp improvements seen over the last few weeks, we project that the used products category will increase between 7% and 9% in the third quarter. (http://seekingalpha.com/article/221383-gamestop-ceo-discusses-q2-2010-results-earnings-call-transcript?source=thestreet)
• During Q3, we will begin rolling out a buy online, pickup in store program, fully implement our royalty program on the web, incorporate the sale of Microsoft and Sony Digital add on content including STOA, full game downloads and launch our enhanced user social commerce features. (link)
• …we are seeing a tremendous participation. We called out the number of transactions that include a PowerUp number. That gives us great visibility when over 50% of the transactions have a PowerUp number associated with them. So we can look at that consumer behavior pretty well. (link)
• …In the last few weeks alone (8/2009), the company opened up a casual games digital storefront to enhance its PC games online storefront, appointed a new head of digital media, and claimed that it would become the world’s biggest digital aggregator. (link)
• total market cap of all public games companies globally had reached $105 billion (link)

GameStop is a publicly traded company (GME), and also owns http://gameinformer.com/

A lot is going on at GameStop, as well as the gaming industry in general.

My new role will be Director of User Experience at GameStop, and I’m excited to be involved many of the things mentioned above – as both a UX Designer, and a lifelong gamer.

I have to mention, GameStop is close to my heart – I actually worked at Software ETC (which eventually became GameStop) while in college, and have held gaming as a hobby since playing games on my dad’s Atari.

From a professional standpoint, moving to a consumer site is also something I’ve wanted to do for awhile. In my recent past, I’ve been working on “expert” productivity applications – and had a buffer between me and the final product. GameStop puts me much closer to having a strong positive impact on the final product.

Last in the formula, …recruitment! Are you interested in any of the above? Do you want to work with some of the greatest video game brands in the world? A new team is currently being formed, and you could be part of it!

We’re going to be working on a mix of design, user experience, e-commerce, social networking, user generated content, gaming… just about everything! We’re helping to shape the future of a great brand.

Check out the job posting:
http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=1071759

And if you’re a GameStop fan, don’t hesitate let me know if you feel something is broken, I just might be able to fix it ;-)

Last, if you’re interested in gaming – check out my new gamer news twitter account @gamerposts.

Not that I knew it at the time, but going into User Experience turned out to be a great career move. I’ve always thought there would be job security with the number of new technologies and devices that will need designing – think of everything that will have a “screen” in the future. Who’s designing for these screens? Who’s creating the interactions, workflows, graphics? That would be us!

I often use an example of an interactive cereal box. What other aisle in the grocery store tries to communicate with you more! Let’s mix up a couple new technologies – like e-paper, RFID, and wireless power – and you have a talking, interactive cereal box. “Thanks for choosing Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, did you know we’re the #1 cereal for vitamin A?”, “Touch here to learn more”. We’re all set for years!

One of my first jobs was at an Ad Agency that had been around since the 1970′s and at one time had 70+ people working for it. WIth production conveniences, like desktop publishing, digital photography, etc… the number of people needed had been cut over the years. You didn’t need someone to run to the photo studio to check out the day’s photo shoot. You didn’t need multiple people hand setting an ad, etc…

I wonder if these jobs are now starting to come back. Not the same jobs obviously, but the number of jobs in the Design space. Where everything is getting an interface of some kind. Phones are more advanced, kiosks are more prevalent, having a screen is cheaper than having actual hardware buttons in some cases, and with that there is more work today for User Experience professionals then there has been in a long time.

UPA just released the 2009 salary survey – and the average salary of a UX professional is $85k, and it’s steadily climbing. These are people doing things like user research, heuristic reviews, interaction design, creating prototypes, usability testing, etc… There are many things that go into today’s interfaces. It’s not just a developer adding some fields and buttons on a screen anymore. People are taking User Experience seriously – and that means following the processes, doing the leg work, and going further than we’ve gone in the past.

Speaking of jobs ;-) – the company I work for currently has nine open UX related positions right now. And that says a lot, they’ve been very conservative about hiring in this economic climate, but they understand the need for User Experience across our organization.

If you’re interesting in working with me, or at the $largecompany I work for – let me know, here’s what they currently have posted:

User Experience Designer / Information Architect
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 0071X
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130840

User Experience Developer / Front-End Developer
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 0071Z
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130841

Web Design Team Lead
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Sep 2, 2009-Job Number 0072M
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=131240

Principal GUI Developer
United States
Job Posting:Sep 2, 2009-Job Number 0072I
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=131180

Application Designer (User Experience)- Team Lead
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 006VD
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=127080

Senior IA
United Kingdom
Job Posting:Sep 1, 2009-Job Number 0071F
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130560

Senior UI Developer
United States
Job Posting:Aug 25, 2009-Job Number 0071Q
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130740

Web Design Senior – Senior
GB-England-London
Job Posting:Aug 24, 2009-Job Number 006P6
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=123120

Web Developer
US-MD-Bethesda
Job Posting:Aug 5, 2009-Job Number 006J1
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=119000

And if my company isn’t for you, check out my older post on “Hiring on the Fringe” where you can find a list of sites that post UX type jobs.

(Above infographic by: http://www.good.is/)

Last week me and Stephen Thomas presented to our company’s UXC Luncheon. This is a quarterly event open to all the different User Experience groups in the company. Our topic was upcoming trends in Design and technology. This is actually the fifth time I’ve presented a presentation like this one, starting back in 2005. While some trends are still developing, there are some new and interesting things that will shape the years to come.

This year we hit on 23 different topics – ranging from the less practical interactive holograms, to something we’re enjoying today – location based gaming.

Due to the nature of many of these new technologies, we included a lot of videos this year – I tried to include a link to most of them.

So here it is – 2010 and Beyond:

Some notes – one of the biggest trends which I missed until this year was Augmented Reality and all it’s many flavors. This seemed to be one of the biggest trends coming in the next year. Once Apple releases it’s 3.1 update for the iPhone we should see a flood of these types of apps hit the app store, and quickly gain wide adoption.

Some topics like the command line, twitter, and location were back with updates for 2009. And although RFID has been around for a while, this is the first time the phrase “Internet of Things” appeared in my presentations.

We had a longer list then the 23 we got to – this took us about 1 1/2 hours to get through – we’ll save those for next time!

Please comment if you feel we left something out – or thought something shouldn’t have been included. See you next time!

User Experience Groups within a large organization are all a little different. We have multiple UX groups here were I work, and I’ve either read about or talked to people from a wide assortment of large companies. This has the disadvantage of diluting the idea of a UX Group to the outside world. What do you do? How do you work? What tasks does your group perform? To help everyone understand In-house UX Groups better, I’ve broken down the 7 areas of focus – where I see every group having varying degrees of commonality.

First, what determines the make up of your group? In my opinion these are some of the factors that determine what kind of group you have:

• Why was the group originally created? What problems were they addressing?
• How high up is a true User Experience advocate in the org chart?
• How many people are in your group?
• Are you under Technology, Marketing, or are you your own “pillar” of the company?
• How long has your group been around?

In my case we’re: not high up in the org chart, very small, NOT our own pillar, and are relativity new.

This makes my 7 areas of focus different from others. So let’s talk about the different areas:

Consulting:
Spread yourself across multiple projects. Help get everything going, check in at defined intervals. Also fight fires as they arise.

This is where my group spends a large portion of its time. We’re small, and have a large development group that needs direction and help ASAP! We help set direction, create wireframes, etc… We check in and continue to consult as the project moves on. We try to make sure the development team is following our direction, and help them when they go astray ;-)

Innovation:
Prototype, design, explore new ideas and workflows. Ideas that do not exist today, and are not typically on any product plan. Iterate and improve those ideas.

While I’d say this is the most fun, and really what I believe most UX professionals would like to do, you need to be in a special place to solely focus on innovation. With our groups positioning, we don’t have the time, money, or pull to explore, to prototype “unfunded” ideas. Although, innovation can be defined in many different ways, and we do insert things I would describe as innovative into our daily consulting work, but as a group this is not our current focus.

Governance:
Produce materials that will govern UX across the organization. This includes Style Guides, Design Patterns, and Personas.

With our high developer to designer ratio we do spend a good amount of time trying to setup a governance process that works for our extended group. To me the three main areas (which I mentioned above) are: Style Guides, Design Patterns, and Personas. This helps a developer know what “widget” to use in a specific case, how it should look, and what are the needs of the person using it. Not very exciting ;-)

Evangelizing:
Spread the benefits and ideas of User Experience to the different areas of the organization. Present and socialize ideas and concepts that tell the story of “why UX matters” and why organizations should focus on it’s users needs.

This has been a passion of mine, and it fit’s right in with our new group. I have a entire group of developers, BDAs, and PMs who have not been exposed to UX and what UX means for them. As you’ve maybe seen on this blog, I really enjoy getting people interested in User Centered Design, new technologies, and modern interaction patterns. This could of been called “education” – educating co-workers on Usability, UX, UCD, etc…

Research & Discovery:
This helps you to really get to “know” your users, using Design Research methods. This can help create insights that can feed new products, features, and ideas.

This I have little experience with. Some UX groups have Design Research specialists that get them the data needed to do their jobs. They go out and shadow users, watch for patterns, and help make sure we’re designing the right things for the right people. They are the front-lines to our users.

Facilitating:
Facilitate workshops, using UX tools and practices like Design Studio sessions to bring collaboration to the Design process.

I’ve never seen a group of people hate meetings so much, but can never get enough workshops :-) This is a big topic in the UX community – what tools to use, what methods, what kind of workshops, etc… I’ve facilitated a couple of these here, and I do agree, it helps to: get things done, create alignment, saturate the design space, and produce usable materials that feed the design process.

Arbitration:
Bridging together different parts of the organization, using user data to help make decisions regarding product design and development.

Occasionally we’re brought in when multiple people or groups have conflicting ideas on how a feature should be implemented, or how a interaction should work. We provide two things that others can not 1) what the users would want, and 2) what are the “standard” practices. Remember we’re the voice of the people using the products that are being built.

Marketing:
The “8th” area… I don’t really think this should be a focus for a UX Group, but I’ve seen it happen, so here it is. Using the UX Design resources to create presentations, “slideware” targeted at customers, and other tasks better suited to a Creative Marketing or Corporate Communication Group.

While User Experience Professionals typically have the skills to fill these needs, more often you’re not really doing anything for the user. You’re positioning materials for customers, PR, and internal stakeholders.

Now if your materials come from a true User Center Design process, or through innovation – then yes, you should work with Marketing to communicate these successful ideas. Use this communication to get funding, alignment, even “innovation capital” (like the recent Microsoft 2019 spot) for you customers.

Here’s where my current’s groups focus is (view larger PDF):

(Here’s the Keynote if your interested in making your own…)

Good? Bad? I don’t know. I’m not sure if there is a gold standard for UX Groups and what they should be doing – it really seems like you need to be the right UX Group for your part of an organization.

…or to be the UX Group they need, not the UX Group they want (bad Batman reference ;-)

What does your UX group look like?

I personally think prototyping is the way to go when creating a new software product (or any product really). You get to “blueprint” out how something is going to work, how the pieces fit together, and how it will really work once launched. I think most people are sold on the concept, so it’s a matter of how to build this close-to-real product that you can test with your user base. Do you use paper? Mock-ups? Tools like iRise and Axure, or get real and build a non-functioning ready to reuse front-end?

The first step is defining what you’re going to use this prototype for. Is it to drum out business requirements? Demo to clients before they write the big check? Or get something as close as possible to the real thing, so you can start the User Centered Design process and test your ideas on actual people that will be using your product.

Obviously I enjoy prototyping for the latter, getting real feedback that our team’s ideas were dead on, or widely off-base (never!). To do this, you really want to build the prototype in the technology you’re going to create the finished product in (usually HTML or Flex for web based software). This solves two problems: one, this truly is as close to the real thing as you can get. By using the actual UI technology you’ll be creating the final product in, you’ll know what can and can’t be done, users will get a real feeling for the responsiveness, animations, and interactions. It’s real, sans the months of backend development needed to power this prototype. And two, you can pass this finished front-end code off to the development team, taking pressure off backend developers who may not be well versed in front-end development.

Microsoft when working on Office 2007 did this very thing:

“if you’re trying to build a prototype that you want use as a blueprint, it should exist in the same medium as the final product.”

In the past when I’ve run prototyping projects, the teams usually consist of just one designer/IA, one developer, and a small amount of a backend developers time (to get some fake system data up and running). Depending on the maturity of your front-end development group, you may have sets of UI widgets and code ready to go, this will help speed up the overall process.

Dave Cronin from Cooper recently wrote an article titled “Industry trends in prototyping” – which I agree with about everything in the article – he lists out four reasons for creating prototypes: prototypes make your designs better, help facilitate communication, enable user input and usability assessment, and help assess technical feasibility and reduce development time. He’s also a fan of creating “real” prototypes where it makes sense.

I love this comment from Philip Fierlinger:

Prototypes, on the other hand, let people feel the flow and experience the relationships. Building prototypes allows architects and interaction designers to quickly identify broken pathways and iterate quickly to find better flows – by feeling the experience, rather than thinking about it in the abstract. Developers, designers and clients also get a much more tangible sense of what the end product will be.

Again, I can’t stress enough how a “real” prototype will give you the best feedback for the effort. We’ve also used these prototypes to help sell ideas to business groups. Imagine trying to sell an idea for a mobile app by letting your VP access it directly on their phone. This will beat out any PowerPoint presentation.

Garrett wrote on this topic years ago, and the technology is now easier to use than ever before. There are frameworks, open source systems, and reusable icon sets ready to be molded into your own prototype.

Using wireframes or paper for low-fedility prototyping is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe your just testing internally, or you’re limited with your technology skills. There are discussions about what fidelity wireframes should be (both form and function). There are many tools at your disposal for creating wireframes and prototypes, and they’ve really just recently gotten easy to use. No longer are you stuck with Visio – here’s a list of some tools, ranging from very expensive to free with varying sets of features:

• Axure
• Pencil Project
• Balsamiq Mockups
• Adobe Flash Catalyst
• iRise
• OmniGraffle
• Lovely Charts
• Rapidrabb.it
• iplotz.com
• Prototype Composer
• fluidIA
• WireframeSketcher
• MockupScreens

Boxes and Arrows has an article from 2006 written by Scott McDowell, that goes over some of these options, but what’s really interesting are the comments below the article where designers talk from real world experience. And Russell Wilson from Dexo Design compares 16 prototyping tools (2008) and again, the comments are interesting.

I tend to use wireframes to quickly get across ideas and interactions. Something that could possibly be thrown away, or will be changed a number of times. Once the idea seems to stick, I move to high fidelity mock-ups, sometimes merging the mock-ups together in a slide-by-slide presentation showing the page flow with faked interactions.

GUUUI posted some links to videos showing lo-fidelity prototypes in action. Again, this can work to help guide overall concepts, but to get true feedback – you really need to have a higher level of fidelity.

If you’re in a good situation where you’re ahead of the product timeline, prototyping is your next step. Just like how a architect moves to a model, build out your prototype and test, iterate, improve, and in the end launch a successful product!

(additions)
Great post over at Adaptive Path: Rapid Prototyping Tools

Last month I gave a talk here at our Customer Experience University about what I call “Emerging Interface Patterns”. Very often we get buried in day-to-day work and miss out on new experiences, new things that are going on in interaction design just pass us by. This is tragic for those who don’t take the time to stop smell the pixels ;-) Everyone should be paying attention because these new experiences are great creative stimulus for innovative ideas.

In the below presentation I try to run the gamut of what’s new in User Experience, and Interaction Design – scouting ahead for what’s changing the landscape. As someone who is passionate about these topics, I love discovering new interaction patterns, and better ways to do something that was thought adequate before. And by consuming all these new patterns, you can blend them into current projects, and even synthesize something new.

What’s going on in Game Design? What are some of the newest UI trends? How is information design contributing to the interaction design practice? How are we bringing the real world into applications? These are just some of the questions I explore below:

Download PDF

At the end of the presentation I featured the recently revealed Adaptive Path Aurora concept “browser”. I was actually mostly done with this presentation when Aurora was revealed, and thought it was the perfect closing to my presentation. Why? Because it is the product of many of these emerging patterns we see in other areas of product and interaction design. You could say the design is somewhat reminiscent of the Sugar UI in the OLPC computer, or that having things fade away into the distance is bringing the real world into the experience. The way you can quickly type in a search, or the contextual menu that pops-up to reveal more actions. These are all things we’ve seen before, just not together in this new and innovative idea.

While you could of lived in a cave for the past couple of years and had the same ideas, I theorize that by observing these trends you are “building on the shoulders of giants” and can better combine, iterate, test, and innovate.

I did want to mention a combination I’ve had in my head for awhile :-) on page 30 I have a shot of the Prius fuel consumption screen. I think by using game design and comparing this to other drivers (not just Prius, but all cars) people would instinctively want to “win” by having the best gas mileage. If we could get a mandate for all car companies to include a version of this, with a way to transmit “scores” to a central database, I think we could be off foreign oil in no time! The elevator pitch would be “It’s like Nike+ for fuel consumption” ;-)

via: http://flickr.com/photos/88262773@N00/2525850407

Last, things change fast. Since presenting this we’ve seen new patterns in Google’s Chrome browser, and Mozilla’s Ubiquity. Remember to keep up, stay informed, and absorb as much as you can.

Yesterday I got to hear John Maeda speak at Sabre as part of the Wundermind series of speakers. I’ve read John’s book (The Laws of Simplicity), and really enjoyed it. He gave a great presentation – it’s rare to hear someone who really gets both technology and design (and he’s met Paul Rand!).

So when is simple, too simple? A great quote near the beginning of John’s book reads: “Imagine a world in which software companies simplified their programs every year by shipping with 10% fewer features at 10% higher cost due to the expense of simplification.” Maeda uses the iPod as an example of a product that has succeeded with this model. I also see this in the iPhone. As a new iPhone owner, I’ve been able to discover some great ways Apple’s removed features, without diminishing the experience, and simplified the iPhone UI.

As part of a User Experience department that supports products that are 10-20 years old, you can imagine the complexity that has crept into the products over the years (and most of those years were without a Designer’s touch!). Every year new features are “needed” to keep-up with the competition and look good in a comparison matrix. As someone who strives to simplify UIs, and create great experiences, I’ve learned a thing or two from the iPhone.

The iPhone has really delighted me at every turn. I’ve read a lot about what people feel was left out of the iPhone. I’d like to show how in one case removing a feature, actually improved the experience.

Copy & paste. The iPhone does not have any copy & paste functionality. This always shows up on the list of iPhone “wants”. How can a Smartphone work without it! Smartly, Apple reinvented what copy & paste should be on a phone:

1) Phone Number in a SMS

When you get a phone number in a SMS, it’s blue and underlined. This is the standard click (or tap I guess) to call you see on the web. But, what if you don’t want to call the number? Maybe you want to copy it to a contact, or SMS the number. Added to the UI only on lines with a phone number is a little blue arrow that when tapped shows the most common tasks you would do with a phone number: call, SMS, add new contact, add to current contact.

2) Emailing a link to someone

Sharing is built into the phone, no need to copy and paste. When you’re on a page just tap “share” and a email is started for you! In this case – the traditional method would be: copy link, switch to mail app, open new mail, paste link – that’s four steps reduced to one.

3) Emailing a YouTube link

Same as #2, you’re able to share a youtube link as well.

4) Common address information

The iPhone “knows” you. It knows you from your address book, notes and more.

5) Content from Notepad

It even surprised me by autofilling something I had just typed into notepad!

By looking at tasks people perform on a mobile device – Apple has created a “smarter” device. Something small, that hides the complexity and “just works”. Although I’m sure someone will point out – this is really a “forced workflow” leaving out power users. I think it’s a fare trade-off, simplicity is a feature. Tell marketing to add it to the comparison matrix :-)

Also check out Fellow Sabre employee Stephen Anderson’s 7 User Experience Lessons We Can Learn from the iPhone

Awhile back I posted my “Universe of User Experience“, where I wanted to show all the pieces that needed to come together to create a great experience. This was very helpful in educating people on what User Experience was and why all the pieces were necessary. But this did not address the issue of explaining the roles of the people doing this work… So, who feeds these experiences?

Many people still don’t understand the different roles we play as Designers. Some people think “Visual Design”, while others think “HTML Coders”. “Web Designer” is a term that should only be used to describe what you do to your grandparents.

While in the past we’ve had distinct roles, the trend is to move towards “User Experience”, someone who understands many different aspects of the design and development process.

Using the ever so trendy SlideShare, you can view my quick presentation here:

You can download the PDF here.

SXSWi has come and gone again, this was my fourth time to attend and it just keeps getting bigger every year. When I first visited in 2003 (or was it 2002?) Bruce Sterling was still throwing SXSWi parties at his home and FROG Design hosted everyone in their office, unfortunately that doesn’t really scale to the size of the conference today. But, the panels were as diverse and interesting as ever – and I came back with the following brain-dump:

(note to readers, I tend to take notes in bullet-point format, which is reflected below)

Emerging Social and Technology Trends

(More detailed notes here)

• Check out: http://outside.in/
• Check out: http://www.indie911.com/
• The age of sharing your information publicly is here to stay, it’s normal for “kids” – they wonder why you are not blogging what you had for lunch
• Room to add more control, maybe you only connect with people you’ve met with in real life (RFID to Linkedin?)
• In india you can send an email to a post address, and a post to an email address

Getting to Consistency

(More detailed notes here)

• If working on a suite of applications, look for “connection points” – the apps don’t need to be 100% consistent
• You don’t need to be consistent just for legacy sake
• There is room for some discovery within a UI
• Sometimes a clean break is the best way, when upgrading applications
• Remember: Goals no Features!!!
• Integrate what is valuable and saves time
• See when your users evolve. Adobe noticed things like RAW workflow, widescreen monitors, etc… Breaks based on user habits
• Watch out for reusing objects if they don’t provide the same experience
• Design for workflows
• Capture what the user wants to do
• Adobe found users all most always select the advanced mode when given a choice, they feel like they are missing out on something if the don’t
• Pick up on user patterns
• BMW has consistent “signatures” from the MINI Cooper to the top of the line BMW
• All about goals, again – goals not features
• Make it easy for developers and designers to stay consistent with guidelines and toolkits
• Use peer review to pick up on problems in consistency

Stop designing products

(More detailed notes here)

• Design from the outside in
• Check out: http://www.flickr.com/about/

Designing for Convergent Devices

(More detailed notes here)

• 10ft design vs. 2ft design vs. 6in design
• Control, Branding, Standards, Trust
• Check out: http://www.zannel.com/
• Look for the “Golden Pathway”
• Remember the ecosystem (not just your product)
• Support: Environment, Activities, and Device (Display, Input, and Platform)
• Remember things like: Screen, Font and Colors, Input Devices, Focus States, User Feedback, Task Complexity, and User Expectations
• Have the web be a companion for mobile. If possible have users fill out information on the web, then interact with the mobile experience.
• Keep it simple, get only NEEDED data upfront – and continue to fill out a user profile as your “relationship” goes on

Mobile Design

(you can download the full presentation here)

• 60% mobile users access mobile data once a month
• XHTML-MP is WAP 2.0
• Common devices to test for: Nokia S40, RAZR, Treo, “Give-a-ways”
• Check out: http://www.deviceanywhere.com/

Moving Corporations to Accessibility

• Use tools like: Contests, Awards, and Classes
• You need a evangelist within the company
• Have guidelines and resources for your developers
• Check out: http://www.webaim.org/

Get Unstuck

(More detailed notes here)

• Make sure your team feels like they are doing good work, being productive, and fulfilled
• Have an open process, open up to other teams in your organization
• Work with Design towards a goal
• “Just add value”
• Stop too much process
• Find the middle ground between user needs and business goals
• Have one member of your team always focused on the end solution

Mobile Application Design Challenges

(More detailed notes here)

• Check out: http://radar.net/
• Remember to be aware of the number of clicks in the UI
• Check out: http://www.smallsurfaces.com/

Design Patterns

(More detailed notes here)

• Focus on solutions, encourage good behavior, and remember – “reusable…”
• Most of the good design work is done in the “fuzzy middle” (hard to provide guidelines for)

Customer Service is the New Marketing

(More detailed notes here)

• Check out: http://www.zappos.com
• Zappos has a “Culture Book” they put out each year
• A recurring job title I keep seeing from the panelists is “Community Manager”
• Find ways to get closer to the customer, let your call centers talk to design/development
• Admit mistakes
• On one forum 60% of questions are answered by users
• 30boxes – 3 employees, 30,000 users, forum only help – they spend about 4-6hrs a week on customer service

Truth about Mobile

(More detailed notes here)

• Does your mobile strategy substitute, or complement your experience?
• Advertising is not ready yet
• Data usage is almost there (currently 32%), better to be ready sooner then later

SXSW also had a good mix of keynote speakers, with Will Wright’s being my favorite of the bunch.

Overall it was a great experience – I learned a lot, while being inspired to do more.

So there you have it. My brain dump, remember podcasts and vidcasts will be available here in the near future.