2 More Days at SXSW

Some post-Salt Lick recovery was required today and I'm refusing to carry around my lenovo T61p. Not only is my laptop huge, but I'm a dork among dorks - at least everyone else has sweet MacBooks.

The Seven Rules for Great Application Design

In this lively and interactive session, Robert Hoekman, Jr., the author of 'Designing the Obvious' and 'Designing the Moment', uses the audience to reveal the 7 essential design principles for achieving great application design and the psychology behind them. And he does it all without a single bullet point (gasp!).
Panelist(s): Robert Hoekman Jr (CEO/Principal Experience Designer, Miskeeto LLC)

• People are bad at predicting their own behavior - ask users what they want, then ignore them. 
• 7 Factors: 

1. Understand users, then ignore them. Understand how users actually behave.
2. Build only what's necessary.
3. Support user's mental model. Eg. Squidoo calls pages "lenses" - users don't know what that is.  
4. Turn beginner users into intermediate users ASAP. Eg. Get users registered and contributing ASAP. 
5. Prevent errors. Eg. Don't throw random, unintelligible error messages at users. Just prevent it altogether and fail gracefully. 
6. Design for uniformity, consistency, meaning. Make navigation/ layout, as consistent as possible
7. Reduce, reduce, reduce (refine).

Emerging Trends in Mobile

Panelist(s): Rob Gonda (Dir of Mktg Strategy & Analysis, Sapient), Juan-Carlos Morales (Creative Dir, Sapient Interactive)

• Nothing too insightful - some really amazing video footage of augmented reality. 
  
• Some rehasing of Apple Appstore app download stats: 15k apps, 500m downloads, $1bn in revenue, 93% have apps, $25bn in mobile content downloads. 
  
• Monkeyball is taking $15k/ mo
• Allegedly, there's some announcement from MIT where they charge batteries in less than 7 seconds
• Update (3/16): Good live stream here

Zappos - Tony Hsieh, CEO Zappos

I have to say, I'm not big on "corporate culture" but this guy really has it down to a science. Zappos has some pretty radical practices: pays new hires $2000 to walk away (to test commitment) and they publish an annual employee contributed "culture of Zappos". If you're ever in Vegas, they'll pick you up from the airport and will give you a company tour - these guys are serious about culture. 

His basic premise: brand identity comes when you get the culture right. 6 criteria for developing a healthy culture. 

1. Decide if you want to build a long term brand
2. Figure out your values and culture
3. Vision, what you're thinking, and think bigger. Chase vision, not money. 
4. Build relationships, not networks.
5. Build your team: hire slowly, fire quickly
6. Think long term. How people remain happy/ engaged: perceived happiness, progress, connectedness, vision. 

He got a little philosophical - models of happiness: 

• Please -> engagement -> meaning
• Job -> career -> calling

SXSW (Twitter) Tools

Twitterati indeed - it's almost comical. People are Twitter-crazy here here at SXSW.  There's so much data, I'm having difficult making something meaningful from the stream. That said, lot's of really interesting tools people are using. 

Twhirl (http://www.twhirl.org/): A Twitter Air client for your desktop. Looking around at people on their laptops, this seems to be the client of choice. The first question from the first session was "what's the hash for this session?". Twhirl allows you to "search" for hashes (eg. #swsw) and it automatially feeds the stream - really great during the sessions. 

Peoplebrowsr (http://www.peoplebrowsr.com). A very feature-rich web-based twitter client. What I really like about it is that you can "search" for and watch multiple streams concurrenting (eg I was watching #sxsw, #austin, #sxswi all at once today - it was pretty crazy). 

Outside.in (http://outside.in) This came up during Steve Johnson's (co-creator of outside.in) panel. It's actually primarily to be a crowd-sourced local-news site, but they have a clever mashup that overlays tweets, "story maps", containing geo-data on a map (ie. if you tweet "sxswguide: Heading of to Six Lounge for the Social Media Group party. sxswi (@hametner) MARCH 13" it will put "Six Lounge" on the map). 

Other tools people seem to be using: 

Sched.org - The SXSW schedule site sucks really bad. Even the printed schedule is unusable this year (I think last year it showed the sessions in order, with a brief summary - this year, not so much). Sched.org is a really usable web-based, SXSW-dedicated, calendar that lets you filter by show (interactive, film, etc) as well provide high-level summary of the sessions. It let's you find free booze and food, and let's you merge calendars with your fellow-attendees. 

happyhour.org - SXSW-dedicated party schedules. The sanctioned-sxsw schedule is better this year (it actually shows some of the parties), but this online tool is definitely more complete.

Social Engineering: Scam Your Way Into Anything or From Anybody

Brian Brushwood   Host,   Revision3/Scam School

Interesting, albeit comedic, session by Brian. He's the host of an InternetTV show hosted by Revision3. His session was basically a summary of his show: using influence concepts for magicshow-like entertainment (eg pick a card, choose a word and he guesses it). It was definitely entertaining. 

Check out the most recent show - he does a bar trick where he charges a straw and pretends he possesses telekenisis. 

That said, and he even referrenced it later in his session, a lot of the concepts are captured in the book Influence by Robert Cialdini (which I highly recommend). It was also somewhat similar to the concepts contained in Josh Porter's "Designing for the Social Web". 

The Ecosystem of News

Steve Johnson from outside.in is the author of "everything bad is good for you" and "the invention of air". 

News = "old growth media" 

Back story:

•  going to the magazine store 3-4x / day to get new issue of mac world in the 80's. 
  
• Moved to nyc, joined compuserve for mac week. 
• '93 - wired magazine launched.
• macintouch '
• salon - scott rosenberg

Now: engadget, 'technica, gruber, norman, pogue, mossberg, macrumors. 

Mcclewan vs wilson (now).

Blogging is inherently "parasitic" (bloggers link to traditoinal news articles) 

New growth: depth and surface

Outsidein - geo-twitter

Jeff jarvis - "do what you do best, and link to the rest".

Newspapers "paper" readership has gone down, but online has increased. There's still a market for "authoritative"/ "editorialized" content that newspapers bring. 

Ecosystem: professional, prof bloggers, non-profit journalists, amateur bloggers, diret events (eg obama race speech), public data/ apis -> commentary: pundits, bloggers, scholars ->curation: social media, professional/editors, aggregations, group filters -> Distribution: traditional, aggregators, viral world of mouth

Q's: someone needs to get paid to do this effectively. Business model? 

A's: no answers

Lots of interesting techs: 

sched.org

peoplebrowsr.com

outside.in

User Generated Content: State of the Union

In general - this panel wasn't so great. They didn't mention monetization models.

Moderator: Chris Tolles Ceo, TopixDean Mccall   Founder,   IdeaGin 

Stephen Newman   Chief Exec Officer,   Mouth Watering Media 
Todd Morrey  Mosso: The Rackspace Cloud 
Wes Wilson   Pres,   IncSpring (crowd souced brands/ logo)
Chris Tolles   Ceo,   Topix 

Incredible - the first question asked was "what's the twitter hash for this panel?" It was #UGC. 

Why UCG matters: In 1998 only geocities was UGC, now, 3 of top 10 (fox, wiki, facebook)

Good examples now: 

• Wes: YouTube (based on ads), 
• Todd:Twitter (tho no money!). Seems like an auction-like model seems to work - eg. Ebay. 
• Newman: TV - think reality tv, america's funniest home videos. Etsy
• Wilson: Linkedin ($4M in ad revenue), Threadless (people can upload content, and people can buy the crowd-created designs).

?Gracenote - part of itunes for track listing. 

We cheered to beat the room next door. 

Money off the back of the masses? How fair is that?

• As a user, when you're not paying for a service - it's expected.
• But future models will allow users and company to profit. 
• There's more to it than $ - derivative products?
• Facebook Ts&Cs - eg crowdsourcing terms.

How to prevent the riff-raff from destroying site? 

• No programatic way.

Other descriptions for UGC - "community curated works"? No one knows what CCW is!

Slashdot (karma). 

Hierarchical - moderators can nominate other moderators. Wikipedia can see everything that's going. The more transparent, the less easy to game system. 

Craigslist - $100m/ year. $8M on digg in 3 quarters last year. 

Monetization is easier when closer to "the sale". Ie further down the purchase decision cycle. 

Granovetter thresholds mentioned on twitter - on wikipedia

Blog catelogue - bloggers unite - ralley around a topic. 

Not sure what any of this had to do with monetization of UGC.

SXSWi 2009 - Party Time, Don't Tell the Guys at RIM

First things first - I haven't written on this blog since Oct 2008. It's interesting how getting sucked into the corporate machine prevents that. I'll be at SXSW today to next Friday - hopefully I'll catch some interesting sessions and some cool music (J Tillman on Thursday night!). 

The lines are looking crazy for registration. I'd read that the "economic conditions" will result in reduced attendance. I'm sure the poeple waiting in the mile-long lines aren't feeling that way right now. I got here early, registered, and ate BBQ. 

Today's agenda: 

• User Generated Content: State of the Union
  
• The Ecosystem of News
• Plan B: Can an Ad Guy Bring Bike Sharing to America?
  
• Brave New Dating

Not sure there's any party-time tonight, but everyone is talking about happyhour.org - a party listing iphone app, from what i can see. I'll check it out now.

The Psychology of Waiting in Lines

I was poking around the Experientia blog, they had an interesting reference to Don Norman's forthcoming book. One of the chapters on "They Psychology of Waiting Lines" is available for preview - it's awesome (albeit poorly edited). Ironically, coming back from Ottawa a few weekends ago with my family, I was furious about the "line design" and actually said out loud "this would be interesting to study" (they were using a multi-line, multi-cashier model - it was awful).

Here's the Cole's notes: Eight Design Principles for (Designing) Waiting Lines:

1. Emotions Dominate - People believe "Attractive Things Work Better"
   
2. Eliminate Confusion: Provide a Conceptual Model, Feedback and Explanation - Ever wait in a long line, just to find out it's the wrong one?
   
3. The Wait Must Be Appropriate - People accept waits, but it needs to be perceived as appropriate. Tell your workers that customers take priority over counter cleaning!
   
4. Set Expectations, Then Meet or Exceed Them - Tell people how long the line is.
   
5. Keep People Occupied: Filled Time Passes More Quickly Than Unfilled Time - The idea of a "double buffer" for lines: have a staging area to entertain people before they wait in line.
   
6. Be Fair - The optimal "fairness" line is a single line, with multiple cashiers. Interesting note re: multi-line, multi-cashier scenarios: people tend to notice when their lines move slower more than they notice when it's moving faster.
   
7. End Strong, Start Strong - People will even perceive longer lines "better" than shorter ones if the longer line has a "positive" period.
   
8. Memory of an Event Is More Important Than the Experience - Eg. Giving pictures after a roller-coaster.
   

Many of these "waiting line" design principles apply to "designing experiences in general", but specifically to mobile (for the first 4 anyway):

1. Emotions Dominate - Think iPhone, Apple Store experience.
   
2. Eliminate Confusion: Tivo and Ikea have awesome "out of box experiences" with fold out maps.
   
3. The Wait Must Be Appropriate - People expect some work to get their phone up and running, just make it match their expectations.
   
4. Set Expectations, Then Meet or Exceed Them - Apple's getting hammered due to their over-promise of 3G network speeds.