Add an eventSessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 of type Solo about User Experience
Friday 11th March 2011
-
App, Shmapp, Tell Me What Works Across Platforms!
by Aaron Forth
The mobile market is flooded with fun, useful and engaging applications. These apps are
becoming increasingly important to a company’s success but many companies are simply
recreating their product for mobile without giving adequate consideration to the differences in
mobile and Web based usage patterns. Additionally, specific benefits that the Apple, Android or
BlackBerry platforms offer are commonly not fully leveraged.During this session, Aaron Forth, director of product design at Intuit’s Mint.com, will discuss
how companies can analyze customer usage patterns to develop the best possible mobile
application and mold the app to harness the advantages of each platform.LEVEL: Advanced
Saturday 12th March 2011
-
How Progress Bars Change the Way We Live
by Evan Jones
Once upon a time slow connections begat the Progress Bar - bloated sites would taunt us with '15% loaded' screens. High-speed promised to kill the beast and free us from their tyranny but yet it lives! Progress bars are being used MORE lately to direct user actions. Look to Farmville and LinkedIn which push their users to collect 100% of their personal information. Incomplete progress bars are an itch that needs to be scratched. They carry the implicit language that declares 'You are here' but more importantly 'The end is in sight'. Game design motivates us through incremental, measurable progress towards a tangible goal but is this the way real life works? Is the progress bar's ubiquity in technology starting to affect the way we measure progress in meatspace? This panel will reach far across time and space to look at the story of progress bars, why they hypnotize us and what we need to do - slay the beast once and for all, or throw ourselves into its partially-complete embrace...
LEVEL: Beginner
-
iPad Design Headaches (Take 2 Tablets, Call Me in the Morning)
by Josh Clark
The iPad and its entourage of Android tablets have introduced a new style of computing, confronting designers with unfamiliar aches and pains. Learn the symptoms (and fixes) for a range of new-to-the-world iPad interface ailments, including Greedy Pixel Syndrome, the dreaded Frankeninterface, and the "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" bait and switch. Explore practical techniques and eye-opening gotchas of tablet interface design, all grounded in the ergonomics, context, psychology, and nascent culture of these new devices (both iOS and Android). The presentation inoculates you against common problems with close-up looks at successful iPad apps from early sketches to final design. Genial bedside manner is administered by Josh Clark, author of the O'Reilly books "Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps" and "Best iPhone Apps: A Guide for Discriminating Downloaders."
LEVEL: Advanced
-
It's About Time: Visualizing Temporality
by Joanna Wiebe
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. I agree about the banana, but I'm not so sure about the arrow. What is the shape of time? Our online calendars, clocks and other models of time often are designed with the understanding that time is a forward-moving arrow. This sounds logical to the Western, English-speaking scientific mind. However, not everyone conceptualizes time as a relentless hurtling forward. Some cultures understand time as a fractal, a spiral, a mandala, a cycle. And a child, playing with the same toy over and over again, lives in a single seamless moment from dawn to dusk. Visualizing temporality is a fundamental issue in interaction design today. For example, we are looking at a future where our work must be useful for both Eastern and Western audiences, who differ in time-oriented cultural traits such as long-term vs. short-term orientation. We also need to be able to provide tools to differentiate the personal, bodily-felt experience of time from clock time. We may want to expand our customers' perception of time, to invite them to stay in the Deep Present. Our beliefs about time and its passage profoundly affect the design of software and interactive media. It's time for interaction designers to understand deeply how our customers know time, whether as an arrow, a spiral or a squiggle. How people slice and dice nature into concepts is fundamental to designing tools people can use to successfully live on the earth, for a long time.
LEVEL: Advanced
-
Dear Miss Manners: WTF with the Social Web?
The social web is now a teenager –awkward, arrogant, snarky, fearless, experimental and open. She is shaking things up and having a major impact on our culture, social dynamics and etiquette. What are the new social dynamics and cultural impacts of all these tools and technologies?
This session will explore the emerging etiquette issues of our participatory hyper-connected world. What are the new rules? How are our relationships, culture and business assumptions changing? Do we understand the impact of this new relationship persistance?
- Do I have to ask before I post a photo of a friend online? Who has editorial approval?
- Am I required to respond to every inbound communication I receive or is “ignoring” an accepted response?
- Where is the line between encouraging participation and being just plain annoying?
- What are you doing mucking up my activity stream?
- What the heck is a “friend” anyway?
How do we design, build and manage these new spaces? What are the new rules of the online commons and the associated appropriate etiquette? This participatory session will ask attendees to contribute their own real world examples and will lay out a new framework for a new social contract. It’s our job to decide what we want our web teenager to be when she is all grown-up.
LEVEL: Intermediate
-
Designing for Silence: Using Email for Good
Every service you use bombards you with email. Status updates, notifications, nudges. Whether you call it spam, bac'n, or even just effective, it's certainly annoying. We can do better, though. We can create web apps that get more valuable, not less, when users don't visit every single day, and we can use email in more valuable ways to greater effect.
This session will explore a few product and interaction design strategies to embrace this silence between your product and the user. We'll also look at how business models can adapt to value mindshare over visits, and how to surgically use email to it's best effect.
LEVEL: Intermediate
-
Metrics-Driven Design
For every design change you make affecting your user’s experience, do you know if you’re having a positive or negative impact? Are you adding to your organization’s bottom line or eroding it? Are you sure? Or, are you like most design teams who release work through a ramshackle process made up of politics, prayer, and paralysis?
The health of the business must be the highest priority for designers. With a plethora of fast and cheap analytics tools available that bring us the ability to measure almost anything, we have no excuse not to be measuring every design change we make. From a/b testing small interface tweaks to measuring time-on-site for new users to measuring user satisfaction over long time periods, we can know more about the people who use our software than ever before.
In this talk, Joshua Porter will provide you with a simple, easy framework for metrics-driven design. By using a combination of research methods as well as powerful new tracking tools, Josh will show you how to align your design priorities with what keeps you in business. You will come away from this talk with a clear idea of what metrics are most important, which ones to focus on, and which ones to ignore. So don’t drive blindly: use metrics-driven design to make sure the impact you’re having is a positive one.
LEVEL: Intermediate
Sunday 13th March 2011
-
Designing iPad Interfaces - New Navigation Schemas
by Lynn Teo
With every new “form factor” comes a unique set of design conventions and interaction paradigms. The emergence of tablet interfaces such as the iPad marks a new chapter in digital design. How much of web navigation or smartphone conventions persist in this new world? And what are we seeing that's new? Are there specific wayfinding and browsing mechanisms that make for a satisfying and productive iPad user experience? Based on an assessment of 50+ iPad applications that run the gamut from utility/transactional interfaces to comic readers and other publishing apps, this presentation provides a focused analysis and assessment of navigation methods in a distilled format. Navigation schemas will be explored by interaction design themes, supported by examples, and recommendations on when best to employ them.
LEVEL: Intermediate
-
Love Can Pay The Bills
by Phil Libin
Want 1 million people to pay for your product? Get 100 million people to love it. But how do you get there? What's the secret to creating engagement and building value? What makes a successful Freemium business work? Here's a hint: don't be clever. Invest in making a product that brings joy and business success will follow. Best part, you don't need single social feature to do it. We will discuss ways to reach your business goals by focusing on a positive, long-term relationship with your users and fans.
LEVEL: Intermediate
-
Diving Deep: Best Practices For Interviewing Users
While we know, from a very young age, how to ask questions, the skill of getting the right information from users is surprisingly complex and nuanced. This session will focus on getting past the obvious shallow information into the deeper, more subtle, yet crucial, insights. If you are going to the effort to meet with users in order to improve your designs, it's essential that you know how to get the best information and not leave insights behind.
Being great in "field work" involves understanding and accepting your interviewee's world view, and being open to what they need to tell you (in addition to what you already know you want to learn). We'll focus on the importance of rapport-building and listening and look at techniques for both. We will review different types of questions, and why you need to have a range of question types.
This session will explore other contextual research methods that can be built on top of interviewing in a seamless way. We'll also suggest practice exercises for improving your own interviewing skills and how to engage others in your organization successfully in the interviewing experience.
Monday 14th March 2011
-
5 Steps to Bulletproof UX Strategy
Writers from BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, Wired, and even Rolling Stone have all pronounced that design thinking - the process of developing products and services that are both feasible and meet user needs - is the key to successful innovation. And they're right. What they don't tell you is that all the design thinking in the world won't help your company unless your innovations serve a higher purpose. But the vast majority of businesses have no higher purpose. As a result, their products and features are disconnected from their goals. Their marketing is focused on value-adds rather than value propositions. Their message has no message. There's no there there.
That's where experience strategy comes in. Experience strategy is design thinking for your whole business. It tells you which ideas will help and which won't. It tells you if that new product will lead to a unified brand or a disjointed one. It's what turns a shoe store into Zappos, a car company into MINI, and a software company into Apple.
In this session, Robert Hoekman, Jr - author of Designing the Obvious (New Riders) and Designing the Moment (New Riders), and Web Anatomy (New Riders) - presents the essential elements of experience strategy. He reveals the five steps to developing a great UX strategy so you can stop navigating your way through the trees and instead start designing the forest.
LEVEL: Advanced
-
Game On: 7 Design Patterns For User Engagement
How do you drive up user engagement? What game-like design patterns get your users to complete the sign-up, bring friends and come back? This session will expose the design patterns of engagement and incentives, including relevant metrics. Led by Nadya Direkova, Sr. Designer at Google and game designer, it will teach useful techniques that can drive up - and keep - your user base. You will leave with an arsenal of 7 design patterns to: design effective sign-up sessions and tutorials, promote virality, invite return visits, and apply game mechanics beyond points and bagdes. About the speaker: Nadya Direkova is Google’s local search designer and a game mechanics consultant - helping millions of users find knowledge and fun. She comes from the world of game design, having created fun games for Leapfrog and Backbone. She’s taught design at M.I.T. and spoken at IXDA’09 and SXSW’10.
LEVEL: Intermediate
-
Anatomy of a Design Decision
by Jared Spool
What separates a good design from a bad design are the decisions that the designer made. Jared will explore the five styles of design decisions, showing you when gut instinct produces the right results and when designers need to look to more user-focused research. You'll see how informed decisions play out against rule-based techniques, such as guidelines and templates. And Jared will show you the latest research showing how to hire great decision makers and find opportunities that match your style.
Of course, Jared will use his unforgettable presentation style to deliver an extremely entertaining and informative presentation.
LEVEL: Beginner
-
Our Devices: How Smart is too Smart?
We won't quote Moore's Law to you, but we can all agree that technology is evolving at a rapid clip, maybe doubling its efficiency something like every two years (okay we couldn't resist). As these newly-evolved smart devices hit the market, consumers are changing with them. We become more social, more chatty, more plugged in as a result. We have a wealth of information at our fingertips and we're able to access it faster with smaller and smaller devices. How is all of this information, accessibility and speed changing us? Are consumers doubling our intelligence every two years?
As an Intel Fellow and Director of Interaction & Experience Research for Intel Corporation, Genevieve Bell currently leads an R&D team of social scientists, interaction designers, human factors engineers, and a range of technology researchers to create the next generation of compelling user experiences across a range of internet-connected devices, platforms, and services. She will drive user-centered experience and design across the computing continuum.
LEVEL: Intermediate
Tuesday 15th March 2011
-
Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business
by Jeff Gothelf
Traditionally UX has been a deliverables practice. Wireframes, sitemaps, flow diagrams, content inventories, taxonomies etc defined the practice of UX Designers (IxD, UX Design, whatever, etc). While this work has helped define what an UX Designers do and the value the work brings to a business, it has also put us in the deliverables business - measured and compensated for the depth and breadth of their deliverables (instead of the quality and success of the experiences they design). Enter Lean UX. Inspired by Lean Product and Agile development theories, Lean UX is the practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed. This talk will explore how Lean UX manifests in terms of process, communication, documentation and team interaction. In addition, we'll take a look at how this philosophical shift can take root in any environment from large corporation to interactive agencies to startups.
LEVEL: Intermediate
-
Curb Your Experience: Pushing the UX to Extreme
by Jenine Lurie
“You have to start with the most complex, and find a simple solution. Then you have to make it work.” – IM Pei
The critical path to excellent usability design begins with a fundamental understanding of how an application or interface is broken. In a variety of ways, UX designers take their cues from organizations like Consumer Reports which for example, use machines and robotics to repeatedly pound luggage to test for durability with the overall objective to try to make it rip, tear or break. UX engineers persistently attempt to ‘break’ the application, by often pushing it to its most extreme edges in order to find a solution for the fix. This presentation will extend beyond the physical design, Web or digital application interface and venture out into the world of human interactions and interpersonal communications, the original source where all interaction is based and inspired. The presentation will use video clips from the comedic series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry David, the protagonist of the show is shown to persistently test, provoke and extreme push society and conventional behavior to humorously illustrate where human interactions are broken and ways that they can or (why bother?) be fixed.
LEVEL: Beginner
-
Steve Krug Explains It All for You
by Steve Krug
Nowadays, Steve (Don’t Make Me Think) Krug is fixated on getting everyone to do their own usability testing. It’s almost sad, really. Bordering on an obsession. And it *would* be sad, except for the fact that usability testing turns out to be the best thing anyone can do to improve a Web site (or Web app, or desktop app, or iPad app—you get the idea) that they’re working on.
Last year, he boiled down everything you need to know to do your own testing into 162 pages in his second book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy. Now, for people who haven’t got two hours to read a really short book (with lots of illustrations), he’s going to boil it down into a SxSW talk…complete with a live demonstration. You’ll leave the room ready—and eager--to start testing.
Schedule incomplete?
Filter by Day
Filter by Session type
- Solo 17
Filter by coverage
Filter by Topic
Filter by Venue
- ACC 10
- Hilton Downtown 7