Monday, March 16, 2009
Change Your World in 50 Minutes: Making Breakthroughs Happen
Monday, March 16th at 03:30 PM
PRESENTERS
* Kathy Sierra - CreatingPassionateUsers
DESCRIPTION
Gain real-world ideas for markedly improved productivity from an industry expert and passionate speaker who always inspires SXSW audiences.
MONIQUE’S NOTES
There’s you. There’s your goal.
Between in the brick wall.
Incremental vs. Breakthrough
Today is about when incremental stuff doesn’t work. You need to do something drastic.
Incremental = Arms Race
Sometimes you’re in a quality arms race, or a features arms race.
Google pages are an example of the marketing, whuffie, etc. race.
So how do you get past that wall?
Breakthroughs:
ideas
performance
Your users need breakthroughs. In order for you to breakthrough, you might have to find ways to let your users make breakthroughs.
[how to be an expert graph]
WOM vs. WOO
Word of Mouth vs. Word of Obvious
You could sit at home, quietly kicking ass. But someone kicking ass is better than someone who says they are.
Are your users tuck in “P” mode? i.e., how many people have SLRs, and how many people are stuck in program mode, they don’t know how to do it.
Sometimes you’re stuck in program mode not because you don’t know how to get out of that mode but because they don’t know why they want to.
Sometimes you’re stuck in program mode because you don’t want to upgrade. You don’t want to suck again.
Anyone can compete
Sometimes you don’t have to change the product, you have to help people kick ass better than your competitors.
But we have to get to know each other first.
1) iPod Playlist and ... [your real playlist!]
2) Pick one of these Flight vs. Invisibility
If the person next to you also has this superpower, you need to find someone with the other. Sell them on the superior superpower.
What superpower do we give our users?
What are we giving them as a superpower? What do you provide for them as a superpower? And how does this change what you do?
Picture it on the suit. What would you put there?
Pivot-table Man
Auto-correct Spelling Man: This is not a superpower.
Think about super-hero action figures. Would it work?
My First Scoble.
Twitter Man?
Doesn’t look like a superpower. But it is.
Motivating ... because it’s good for you ... Productivity Man? Lamest thing to say.
VCs say “what problem do you solve” and we think about increasing productivity. People want something better than that. Productivity is the broccoli.
What superpower do I give? What do I put on the suit?
2. Superset Game
If it’s you (little dot) vs. competitor (bigger dot), then think about the bigger thing that is inclusive of both. Taking on the bigger thing is more motivating. What cooler thing is my thing a part of?
i.e., I sell kitchen appliances. The cool thing is people are cooking, not this utensil is cool. If you blog about your company, that’s likely not the coolest thing you could be writing about. Users want to hear about cooking.
10,000 hours
Intimidating? It really takes 10,000 hours to be amazingly good. It takes years. That’s not acceptable if you’re in your 50s. LOL. How do you shrink that? How do you see the patterns and take short cuts?
1. Learn the patterns
2. Shorten the duration
Reduce to 1,000.
[Chess grandmaster can recall one graph vs. the other because one is from a real game. This is pattern knowledge. How can you capture it?]
4. Deliberate Practice
Kicking ass in
< 1,000 hours can happen if you do deliberate hours of practice.
After 1-2 years, experience is a poor predictor of performance/expertise. (10 years vs. 1 year repeated 10 times)
What do experts do?
Tiger Woods pop quiz: how much practice time on weaknesses vs. strengths?
He works on his strengths.
Help your users deliberately practice. Offer exercises, games, contests, tutorials that support deliberate practice of the Right Things.
How do you construct this? Where there's an education field, you can find the answer.
Where is the sell-by-date of "solutions"? The first pages that come up can be soooo last month. These things might not work anymore. When you organize bits of knowledge, guess at the sell-by-date. Or at least make someone be responsible for smelling the milk.
5. Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard
Think about this.
Make it easier for users to have a breakthrough than to stay where they are.
Treadmill gathering cobwebs? It’s not in the corner because you don’t use it, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner.
If the exercise bike is in the corner, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner. Put it in the middle of the room. Remove the comfy seats and leave the bike.
6. Get better gear (and offer it)
Sometimes spending the extra money is required to make it good. It works better in a profound way. WOO.
“The tablet changes lives.” Drawing with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap.
Find, make, offer higher-end gear that bumps them to a new level.
7. Ignore standard limitations
The Cluetrain Manifesto and the Clueless Manifesto.
Don’t be limited by limitations. Learn. What would it be like if I didn’t know what it’s supposed to be?
8. Total Immersion Jams
16 hours over 2 days vs. 16 hours over 2 months
Concentration, processing, down time. Ad Lib Game Development Society is a group of people (game developers) who program games over a weekend.
Always
Be
Closing
You had to come out with 3 songs. The goal is not to be good. The goal is to get something done. You have to ship.
The Shoot Out: 24 Hours Film Making Festival
Right before the shoot, you have to pick 5 things from a list and 1 thing has to be within the first 30 seconds.
“The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it.”
Less *Camp, More *Jam
Sometimes if we want a breakthrough, we have to go do stuff. Look at the Jam model and it’s development. Get people together to build something.
Change Your Perspective
Don’t make a better [x], make a better [user of x]
What will make them better? What changes affect that ecosystem positively?
Really think about whatever your product or service is.
What movie are your users in?
The user’s journey: call to action, refusal, enter special world, allies and mentors, enemies and bad things, more bad things, the hero’s reward.
Who are the mentors?
Is tech support Yoda or
Your company is to your user as ___ is to Frodo.
Think about what movie are your users in?
What movie do they want to be in?
(and don’t forget the soundtrack)
If you can figure out what the movie is, then you have the narrative of your journey.
Indiana Jones model?
ThemeSong AIR App. Every time you walk into a room, it plays your theme song.
Want incremental improvements? Ask your users.
If you want to make breakthroughs? Ignore everybody.
Hugh MacLeod’s next book “Ignore Everybody.”
Listening to users: what they say vs. what they REALLY want
Individuals vs. consensus
The Featuritis Curve: You can pass over the peak without noticing in an attempt to satisfy everyone.
You can ask other people’s users. At some meta level, this thing looks like that thing.
12. Be Brave
Concept car. Actual model. What happened to the fantastic idea? Fear takes us to the actual. Someone’s risk aversion is what leads to the actual model.
Another way we screw up is that we are too afraid. The ease-of-use police step in and give us easy to use, i.e., squeaky toys instead of the German Shepard. Hey, sometimes things are hard to use.
Ford: if I asked my users, they would have wanted faster horses vs. cars.
The assumption of that is it’s lame to have faster horses. But hey, look at the dead pool. The recreation horse industry in the US is worth $40 Billion annually.
Etsy.com the theory here is that these crafts are obsolete. Make magazine becomes one of the best things O’Reilly is publishing.
Can obsolete be refashioned in a new way?
14. Change the EQ
Price, Number of Features, Quality, Service, Performance.
See each as a slider. Here’s how products compete. This is the incremental competitor game.
Don’t just do the mixer. Add new sliders that normally aren’t considered. Meta-cognitive, Pain, Engaging
[In Vancouver, the art gallery, salsa dance room, cafe. Experience beyond the standard.]
i.e., picking a dentist. If you have dental fear, look for “cosmetic dentistry”. Because you don’t have to go there, they actually make the office look nice. Like a spa vs. an institution. Learn from this.
What did Gary do?
Episode418.mov
Gary Vaynerchuk, what new sliders were added here?
Action figures
Personality
Fun
Break the model
Look at people who’ve had a breakthrough. What’s on those sliders that no body had? What are the new labels to add?
15. Don’t mistake narrow for shallow
LOLCats + translation, 52,000 google pages
LOLCats translates the Bible. People take things that are ridiculously narrow and it’s not shallow.
PassiveAggressiveNotes.com is a favourite.
Literally, A Web Log
All these people looking for misused quotations.
Think of the sites you killing yourself laughing over. Think about what matters. Those things matter.
16. Be Amazed
Conan amazing video.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Saturday, March 14th at 01:00 PM
PRESENTERS
* Christina Wodtke - Boxes and Arrows
DESCRIPTION
Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, Second Edition introduces the core concepts of information architecture: organizing web site content so that it can be found, designing website interaction so that it’s pleasant to use, and creating an interface that is easy to understand. This book helps designers, project managers, programmers, and other information architecture practitioners avoid costly mistakes by teaching the skills of information architecture swiftly and clearly.
Behavior is a function of the person and his or her environment
b=f(P,E)
The social web is all about attention. Is anyone loving me up?
Gene Smith
http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Use usernames. Taking a username means that you invest in it.
Own your words. You are responsible.
Social systems work on building reputation, esteem ... You need the username to have an identity.
Think about the default avatar and how you can coax stuff out of people. George W Bush avatar is a good thing to change.
If my website was a room, what kind of room is it. Let context drive the questions.
Presence
We don’t want to feel alone. Signs of life on a site are important: last uploaded, basecamp uses collective guilt by showing the last time logged in.
Reputation
Reputation systems can be offensive to a small group. BoxesandArrows.com initially tried this and in a small system where people are recognizable, then you don’t need this. In a sample like eBay, this can make more sense. Digg had a leaderboard of top diggers: anytime you have this type of “competition” then people will start to abuse the system.
Cost to Join
That “cost” can be simply filling out the registration form. Yes, I want to join the group = yes, I’m likely to do the next thing too.
Norms & Caretakers
If you think about your IA don’t forget the human beings who are going to be in this space. The group decides on the norms. Every group creates their own cultural rules and you need humans to help support or discourage positive/negative norms. You have to get humans participating. For example, if you go through “food” on Flickr, you can see the veneration and vilification that occurs in social networks.
Relationships
In small groups, it’s easy to interact. Think about going for lunch with a couple of friends vs. going to lunch with everyone in the room. How do you dial down/up the noise, how do you decide who you want to pay attention to. On the web you need to find ways to do this too. Flickr users have flipped Family for Friends. Friends are the family who you restrict viewing to but Family is the friend who have full access and can see exactly what you’re doing. Admins give labels.
People needs stuff to do, but sharing (gifting) is different. Non-profits send mailing lables because of the obligation of a return gift. This occurs in social sites. If I share a story, you feel obligated to return it. (MT: I think this is why the 25 Things Meme worked.)
Question: When you’re designing a social space, how can you integrate all the various groups, i.e., tween site and you hope the moms will join.
Answer: If you’re designing a social space for a variety of people, imagine it as a party. If the tweens are at a party, are they hanging out in the same room as the moms? Unlikely. Go into the psychology of these groups. Look for the real-world equivalent and see if you can create a site that mimics that behaviour.
Dana Boyd
Saturday, March 14th at 11:30 AM
PRESENTERS
* Jen Bekman - Jen Bekman Projects | 20x200
* Paddy Johnson - Art Fag City
* Nion McEvoy - Chronicle Books
* Dustin Hostetler - skinnyCorp
* Gina Trapani - Lifehacker.com
DESCRIPTION
With all the stuff we weed through online, good filters are crucial. Who’s best-suited to determine what’s best, curators or the crowd? People have their religion about one or the other, however this panel will focus on the overlap, the grey areas and how curating and crowd-sourcing enrich each other.
Nion on crowd-sourcing for book publishres
The internet is the greatest library of all.
People with a shared interest working with people who want to help share those intersts.
Spin Earth: music = 1000 journals project (published excerpts)
Moleskine illustrations uploaded to the Chronicle site.
Serious communities in cooking, humour ... in the lines that Chronicle publishes.
Art priced from $20 to $2000. Jen Bekman.
http://www.20x200.com/
Gina Trapani - Lifehacker.com
Be careful that you’re not homogenizing by curating the most popular stuff.
Paddy Johnson - Art Fag City
Sometimes you can try to crowd-source something that is just too small.
Dustin Hostetler - skinnyCorp
Curating is about rewarding the crowd. Inspiring the crowd and encouraging the crowd involves helping them step up.
Gina Trapani on going from Lifehacker.com to personal blog
3000 visitors a day is nice and intimate. Being able to bring over members of the crowd makes for a nice, small room.
Nion McEvoy on Facebook and developing an audience vs. developing friends
Jen’s question is about how do you join Facebook as the CEO of Chronicle, where are the public and private lines? Nion says, I tend to favour the personal and promote other people’s stuff as much as aI promote our own. The balance is interesting so Nion looks at other CEO like Tim O’Reilly. The business and personal merge. It seems like you can’t understand social media unless you are genuinely using it.
Monique’s wandering mind ...
RedRoom.com
... founder and CEO of the book-oriented social media site Red Room, claims her startup combines the consumer popularity of sites like Facebook, with a focused “author-centric” mission and an infrastructure that can be used as a marketing—and even a retail—platform by publishers who want to connect fans to established and emerging authors.
I got here because I’m curious about Nion and Chronicle and how you can sell books in a social networked world.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Boxcar Marketing is in Austin for SXSW.
02:00 PM Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong
* Dan Willis - Sapient
DESCRIPTION
Just as early filmmakers struggled to break free from the conventions of live theater, after 10+ years Web designers are still trapped in the structures of the past. Forget pages, linear text and other archaic vestiges of design’s print ancestry; the separation of content from presentation has already changed everything.
Warner Bros Harry Potter Site
Just another dead tree.
Isolated in the top: we are here (web native stuff)
Everything else is print in disguise
Washington Post
Print in disguise. Little web native content hidden in right column.
Left nav is = to newspaper sections
Everything is headline oriented.
Amazing video and journalism content.
Benjamin Hotel in NY
Wonderful, subtle typography
Subtle job with flash
Print in disguise
Standard hotel site
Reservation info but otherwise shiny print brochure
Everything we know about web design is from what we know about print.
Web is a unique medium. In 1888 single-lens camera produced the first movie sequence. Took 30 years for people to take that somewhere. To give us the movies that lead to what we have today.
In 1915, we get Birth of a Nation. First time the camera shots came from various angles. There was a cohesive narrative with multiple storylines.
No new technology was created. What was created was a grammar for film: cross-cutting, close-up, bird’s eye view being a few of the terms.
Transcendent web design is still to come but it’s worth talking about the elements
random voyeurism, self-aware, user-created, ambient awareness, experimental content
Random Voyeurism
Flickr Vision: Flickr images as posted and they are mapped geographically.
Found magazine: Artifacts found that are shortcuts to the mind, activities or random others
Self-Aware (but Uncontrollable) Content
Metadata is content that knows itself better than we do.
User-Created Content
Context matters.
Online publishers want to control that. It’s not what’s happening online.
The web is about a single user and the choices they make.
They control the content.
Fighting the user for control is useless. Companies exploit their control.
Monetize. Eek.
Ambient Awareness
A single dot is a dot. Dots stitched together give meaning. Pointillism.
Some other profound communication is going on.
Experiential Content
Sold, built or bought a content management system.
What is your content: text, images, video, audio
21st century content will not be about chunks of content. There’s something else going on. The experience is the content. It’s the new roller coaster.
Go back to the Benjamin hotel site. The hotel industry has invested in print in disguise solutions.
The Experience Economy book
If you click on the Benjamin “experience”, it’s a blog of text. What about webcams in the lobby. Wouldn’t you get ambient awareness? Trivial information leads to understanding the hotel.
The Benjamin takes sleep seriously. You get a menu of pillows and some aromatherapy. Why are we concentrating on pillows? What about detailed info related to the variations of the products related to the Benjamin. What about user experience with the pillows that is pulled from users online around the world?
The sleep concierge. What if that was the “tease”? You have a human being interacting with people who are interested in staying at the hotel, then you have experience.
None of this is radical, but you put it together in the grammar of web design and you get something else.
Washington Post.
Headlines are commodities. You have web native stuff that should be the central focus.
Newsroom is no longer about distribution, it’s about content. How can the article be sliced and diced. Where are the nuggets? Suck out the relevant pieces and use metadata to connect it to other stuff.
MT: I like NowPublic who’s doing some of this.
Elegant and beautiful failures can win awards. But it’s still an aware for print in disguise.
Design solves problems. Designers have to be the leader in defining a problem. Design needs to do this to help web transcend it’s print history.
James quoted to me yesterday, “innovation doesn’t exist without imitation.” Now’s the time to push the innovation side.
Apparently this starts with tv dinners.
Change is disturbing.
Apparently we made sure the peas didn’t touch the turkey. The same thing happened in design. We separated visual from informational architecture but interactive ...
We needed to separate in order to understand the value. But we haven’t left these little spaces.
The New Model is Jambalaya. More ingredients than you can list. Variations of pepper. You can identify each individual item in the mix, but the thing that comes out is life-changing. It’s like perfume. It’s not a blend, a perfume becomes it’s own thing. It stands alone as a new thing.
How do we get there?
Small teams
Users are not everyone, they are someone
Identify specific needs of individuals
Embrace ignorance
Begin nad end with users
Don’t be distracted by technology
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