Panels that I'm supporting for SXSW 2011
The Blurring of Industrial and User Interface Design
In today's world of design, we can no longer ignore the blurring lines of industrial design and user interface design. While the two disciplines have their own methodologies and processes, they now share a responsibility for creating a seamless experience -- between screens and hardware. This panel will discuss the convergence of these two disciplines and share various perspectives on how we can all work together.
Why Green Data Center Design Matters
Yahoo! has been a leader in designing and building environmentally sustainable data centers, and has invested millions in creating the most energy efficient data centers possible. Yahoo! Scott Noteboom, head of global data center infrastructure at Yahoo!, will address the evolution of Yahoo! data centers and how the company is getting more for less through facilities with lower costs, higher performance and accelerated construction.
Urban Technology on the Dark Side
Urban computing isn't just fun, games and mapping. There's a dark side to urban technology, with surveillance and subversion in operation and in opposition. It shouldn’t be a surprise: most technologies we use were originally developed in the military before making their way to the civilian side. But mostly, when we talk about urban computing, we tend to focus on its optimistic and entertaining uses. This panel confronts the relationship of cities to technology. Some things it will discuss: how soldiers literally cut holes in walls to through houses in urban wars; how the government creates geographically dark spaces on the map and launches secret satellites; and the role of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in giving rise to urban technologies we use today – to name a few. In balance, we’ll look at the ways that artists, activists, designers, architects and hackers reveal and challenge these shadowy-seeming technologies in their work.
Customer Service for Web Apps: Bringing the Wow
Great design and development is not enough to create a great customer experience. Find out how small support teams can make a huge impact on thousands of customers through simple tools and techniques, learning from people who've done it personally. We'll cover support as a marketing tool, choosing support methods, setting expectations and how to deal with dickheads and many more topics from us and from you. Don't let crappy customer service sink your web app!
Remote UX Research
The secret and unpublicized force behind her co-workers' recently completed book, Remote Research, this panel will tell you all the secrets the authors were too scared to put in the book. Then the authors can do their best to defend themselves, since they'll be on the panel, too. As the publishers of http://remoteusability.com, Cyd, Nate, and Brynn can tell you what the latest UX research tools are and how to use them. This can help designers and developers do better research. Remote user experience studies allow you to recruit subjects quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their own environment. The panel will cover recent examples from Habbo games, Intuit, and Sony and give people an idea how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a laptop. Actually, nothing more.
Conserve Code: Storyboard Experiences with Customers First
Changes to design, direction, UI can be costly if you are already in the development cycle. It is easier, faster, and cheaper to course correct on paper. Storyboarding your ideas allows you to rapidly think through the customer experience, pinpoint what’s really important to the customer, and scrap the ideas that won’t work. At Intuit, we use storyboards to rapidly test our ideas with customers multiple times before spending time developing code. This enables us to define concepts that will delight our customers, so they buy our products and tell their friends. Storyboard development and testing is a method anyone can do—it doesn’t take an artist or researcher to get great feedback from customers. In this hands-on workshop you will learn how to express your ideas in a story that will elicit valuable feedback from your customers. You will be able to iterate on ideas with lightning speed to uncover what works, what doesn’t, and unearth what will truly delight them (which is often not your first idea!). We will use frameworks to help you define what’s most important to your customer so you know you are focusing on the right things by the time you start to develop.
Wink & Nudge: Cognitive Insights for Awesome CSS3 Transitions
As CSS3 gains more and more foothold across the Web, it's giving us animation superpowers in the browser. Will you use CSS3 transitions for good or for awesome? At their worst, animations and transitions can be gratuitous, distracting, and downright annoying. But they can also add meaning and delight – a nicely designed and timed movement can catch attention, give a sense of continuity, mimic something familiar from real life, or show users how slippery things in the ether relate to each other. In the real world, events are connected by transitions and animations, and our cognitive system has evolved to pick up meanings from them
Lost in Translation: Designing Across Mobi, iOS4, Android
Yeah, there is an app for that…in the past few years we have seen the mobile landscape take shape and increasingly become part of our consumption habits. More clients are recognizing the potential of mobile platforms. Now clients are asking for it, “Give us a mobile web site, iphone app, and a android app.” Now what? Join us for some real-world lessons learned and good overall UX design recommendations.
OpenStack – Unlocking the Cloud
The cloud computing market has exploded and reached hyper-fragmentation with dozens of IaaS vendors, yet the majority of offerings are proprietary, closed platforms. As a result, many technology companies and cloud consumers are rallying around an open source alternative, OpenStack, which has the potential to drive open cloud standards. This panel will explore the state of open cloud standards, relevant players, and benefit to end users, including the acceleration of cloud technologies and the ability to freely move workloads from private to public clouds, or among different service providers.
3D Interfaces: A Primer on Stereoscopic Interaction Design
As 3D screens and content burgeon, what are the implications for interactive design? This talk will cover the basics of what the interaction designer needs to know about 3D to prepare for designing stereoscopic interfaces, including: controlling parallax; 3D encoding and presentation technologies; the challenges of mixed environments of 3rd-party 3D video and 3D interface; setting up a 3D design workflow; and the new creative opportunities presented by 3D displays.
Open Source and Corporations
Not invented here syndrom is rampant in many companies but few consider open sourcing the technology. Be it form a convincing management to releasing the technology to ensuring that community contributions are maintained. The panel will consist of open source contributors from larger companies and discuss the problems they have doing it and the benefits that are received from the open sourcing.
Rapid Experimentation In the Wild, On The Cheap
You want to make sure that your customer will think that your idea is awesome, so you need to get their views FAST. You don’t need to pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars to do research for you. Heck, you don’t have any cash to spare. Besides, customer focus groups and surveys are dead. (And frankly we didn’t think they ever worked). You don’t need to have a fancy lab or even a fancy working prototype to test. All you need is a little bit of time, a place with the kind of people you think will want to use your idea, and a little bit of guts. You’ve gotta be in the customer’s natural habitat with prototypes to get the intel you need to refine that money-making idea. We’ll show you how. Learn how to design and execute rapid experiments with customers.Stuff we’ll cover includes: Figuring out what you need to find out, putting in the minimum effort to get great feedback on your ideas, how to approach a customer, what to ask, what to listen for, and what to do about it.
Streamlining the Redesign of Yahoo! Mail and Messenger
Ever wonder what it takes to redesign products that are already being used by millions of people around the globe everyday? This panel will give you a glimpse into product cycle using the latest technologies and the challenges for multiple platforms that a project of this scale encountered.
