SXSW Takeaways

A fast food industry wanted to increase the sales of milkshakes, so they put out a poll as to when and why people buy milkshakes and learned it is in the evening with dinner or thereafter. Then, they went to the sales data and found out that in actuality people buy milkshakes in the morning between 7 and 9am to be more than a snack but an activity as they commute to work.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

As we continue to build out community sites, it’s worth remembering people don’t come to the site to stay, they come to get the information they are seeking and then go about their day. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are not bucking this trend, they simply have so much information to share, that they appear sticky. But they are making the information easily available.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

WordPress was frustrated not getting the new user conversions they wanted. The design consultant team spent about ten minutes fixing the problem: users couldn’t figure out what to do, and they needed something clear like a big button. By the next week, they conversion rate had jumped 25%. Users don’t like feeling like beginnings or noobs, so help them get past that quickly and easily.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

Start your new users off with small simple tasks, like the Outperform or Underperform options on CAPS. There are more fields available for the skilled player, but for the noob all they have to say is up or down, and they are in the game.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

Still, let’s not forget that users are generally selfish, and won’t even make that simple vote if there is nothing in it for them. Look at Flickr tags, which this is a differentiator for Flickr; it is used because it provides a means for users to find their photos again. Threadless gets it’s votes by offering a cash prize to one random winner? What is in it for users to interact with our site?
(inspired by Derek Powazck’s Design for the Wisdom of Crowds panel)

Charlene Li asks why the company and the customer are separated at most companies? She provides this bold org. chart to encourage companies to think about the customer as the center of their organization and everyone, even the CXO positions are there to support.
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

The Fool is a service company with web-based products, but what if we weren’t. What if our premium services had to be packaged and placed on a supermarket shelf right next to competing products. How would we package our services? What would we call out?
(inspired by Leah Buley’s Being a UX Team of One panel)

Back in the days of letterpress, having two typefaces was huge. People made the best of what they had. Now we have thousands of fonts and feel slighted in the web world with only 8-10 solid cross-platform fonts. But instead of lamenting that SIFR or CSS3 aren’t more widely accepted (so we could have a myriad of fonts), we should take on the challenge of doing better typography with our limited font set.
(inspired by Sam Warren’s Web Typography, Quit Your Bitchin’ and Get Your Glyph On panel)

Starting from the top left going down it’s Disney, Jeopardy, Yahoo, Apple, Coca-Cola, Dunkin Donuts, New York Times, ESPN and Grand Theft Auto. How recognizable is our branding?
(inspired by Charlie Sayer’s Brand Noir panel)

What’s the better approach? A consumer-oriented library like YUI or jQuery provide a lot of pre-made widgets and actions, but come at the cost of the larger code base to include that full library. A developer-oriented framework like Prototype provides the shortcuts to be able to build our own widgets and actions faster. On top of the developer-oriented framework we could built our own custom (internal) library.
(inspired by John Resig’s More Secrets of Javascript Libraries panel)

Yes, every site could certainly be faster, and there are plenty of immediate fixes available including using image sprites, combined and minified css and js and proper use of etags. The real question is, what happens when your site runs slower? If you intentionally throttle our bandwidth so we are 500 milli-seconds slower what will happen? Google loses 20% of traffic. What would happen to you?
(inspired by Steve Souders’ Even Faster Web Sites)

Instead of providing polished mocks straight away we should be doing more sketching, which we all know, but now here is some guidance to what the sketching should be. Leah Buley of Adaptive Path encourages us to examine different scenarios like first timer to expert, automated to manual or marketing to community and see how the sites would look different on that axis. The right look and feel is then probably somewhere in between.
(inspired by Leah Buley’s Being a UX Team of One panel)

Design principles are the quiddity of the site, the overarching essence of what the company/product/site is. Google Calendar’s principles include “More than boxes on a screen” and “Easy to share.” TiVo’s principles include “Everything smooth and gentle” and “It’s TV, stupid.” What principles do our sites live by?
(inspired by Leah Buley’s Being a UX Team of One panel)

Twitter is hitting the turn on the hockey stick and becoming mainstream. So many major companies not see Twitter as a competitor and are working to overcome or become more like Twitter. The irony is that Twitter has yet to present a real business model, so all these major companies are trying to be more like a company that has shown no real way to monetize. It’s a crazy time to be in the industry.
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

Sure, they won’t bother reading them, but they could. In 20, 30, 40 years we will have left such a trail of actions and 140 word recordings of our lives, that our grandchildren will with little difficulty be able to piece together everything we’ve ever done.
(inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk’s Video Blogging: Turning Wine into Gold panel)

We have to trust someone, who will it be? In personal interactions it may be Google for your email, calendar, reader and analytics, or perhaps Facebook for your networking or Twitter or Mint for your finance reporting. It’s becoming less and less practical to trust no one, so you will you put your trust in?
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

If Lisa is connected to friends, and Lisa buys these 9 West shoes then shouldn’t Lisa’s friends get an ad for 9 West. The intelligent technology is available; it’s just a matter of making the commitment for smarter advertising.
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

To continue to stay relevant, we need to continue to innovate, which means asking “what if” and following that train of thought to something new and interesting instead of settling on “what is” and being complacent.
(inspired by Charlie Sayer’s Brand Noir panel)

Warning to techies, our friends at 37 Signals say to be wary when you hear a business request that includes the following words “only”, “need”, “can’t”, “easy” and “just”. Any of those are warning signs of scope creep, but them together and the potential scope creep grows exponentially. All five in one sentence, and watch out, you probably just added another quarter’s worth of work to your backlog.
(inspired by Jason Fried’s 10 Things We’ve Learned panel)

Finally, tying this back to Austin, the Congress Street bridge is the home to 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats, and every day they emerge from under the bridge to scavenge for food. Most come out the east side of the bridge away from the setting sun. There is no leader telling them to, they just have all figured it out together. A few still come out the west side and learn quickly to go east next time or fail all together. This is a metaphor for the industry as it is represented at SXSW. There are many of us there, with no clear leaders but through being in close quarters in panels and networking we are learning to move in the industry the same direction. A few will go their own path, but they will eventually come around or be forgotten. In the end, there are no right answers, but there are a lot of people working to go in the right direction and just see where that will lead.

Thanks for checking out these slides.