The team at Tuitive was fortunate enough to attend the 2010 South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference in Austin, Texas. This was the first time going for each of us, and we learned a lot, had a ton of fun and met with some great people. Here’s a smattering of insights and recommendations from my time there…

Watch Passionate Presenters

One tip I can pass along from attending panels is to seek out people with personality and passion. It almost doesn’t matter what they are talking about but if they are passionate and knowledgeable you are guaranteed to take home something useful. I saw a number of great speakers, my faves from the week being Ze Frank, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark Cuban, David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried from 37signals, and designer Daniel Burka.

Geolocation is the Next Big Thing

The most noticeable technology trend that people at SXSW were excited about was geolocation, or using a mobile device to announce where you’re at, be it a store, landmark, etc. Think of it as a Twitter or Facebook status update containing information about where you’re at physically.

There are a couple of foreseeable use cases for this, for example to tell your friends what bar you’re at on a Friday night, or to “check in” to a store and receive a discount or free gift.

Two companies have emerged in this space, Foursquare and Gowalla, and both seemed to be used heavily at SXSW. The latest reports show both running neck-and-neck in terms of usage. Expect to hear a lot more from this field in the coming months.

Prototypes vs Wireframes

A noticeable theme from the design panels was the emphasis on building interactive prototypes for web applications rather than spending time building traditional annotated wireframes. A prototype allows you to see a feature “in action” and close to its finished environment. Using HTML and in-browser prototypes is one of my favorite design techniques, so I was pleased to see its usage spreading. Every designer I saw did heartily recommend sketching before anything else, and I believe for a lot of designers this has become their “wireframing” phase.

Usability Has Been Swallowed By UX

Usability wasn’t brought up very often and not once did I hear the term “user-centered design”. I think at this point usability and user research are a foregone conclusion, and people on the forefront of design and technology are assuming that this is an integral part of the process. Now I think designers are concentrating more on how to improve the overall user experience, including motivations users have for wanting to engage with products.

Random Highlights

Live Diggnation, sake bombs, crushins, free t-shirts, long lines, big escalators, varying degrees of comfortable seating, those things that destroy your tires when you drive over them, musical note pillows, trying to sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, pocket guides, and crawfish. See you next year!

I accidentally deleted my Twitter account last week.  Yes, yes, I know—that’s like accidentally driving one’s car off the road or misplacing one’s pants.  So how did I do it?  Glad you asked.

Like many folks, I manage more than one Twitter account.  For example, I have my personal Twitter account, a business account for Tuitive, and then a couple extra accounts related to some side projects.  I mistakenly thought I was logged in as one of these extra accounts when I made my way to Twitter’s account deactivation screen, as shown here:

Notice anything telling in the above screenshot?  I didn’t either, and that’s the problem!  While this screen does a great job of describing the dire, irreversible nature of deactivating a Twitter account, there is no indication anywhere as to which account I am logged into and about to deactivate.  I assumed incorrectly and pushed the button.

I was pretty shocked when I realized I had deactivated my personal Twitter account.  To add insult to injury, Twitter would not let me create a new account using my previous username or email address, meaning it wasn’t really deleted.  It was just caught in some sort of Twitter purgatory, stuck between the world of the active account and that of the deleted damned.

Fortunately after a few days of pleading-via-email, Twitter support had mercy on me and restored my account. (It came with a polite admonition, however, that this was a one-time favor.)

So, happy ending.  Crisis averted.  Problem solved.  But what a waste of time and energy, both on my part and that of Charles at Twitter support. Here’s a super simple usability tweak to the HTML on the Twitter account deactivation screen that I’m sure would have prevented this issue from happening in the first place:

The best part is, in the time it has taken for you to read this, a Twitter developer could have implemented this and perhaps prevented another careless fool like me from making a similar mistake.

Like many usability tweaks, simple changes have huge impacts that can prevent a lot of heartache.  And we all know that an ounce of prevention is worth pounds of tech support.

I recently ran across this video again, and there is no clearer example of who you should really be thinking about when you are building a website or web-based software. Watch the video and we will catch-up after.

I know, right! Granted this is a Google Chrome advertisement, but it is a very real look at very real users. These people are not web designers, or developers. However, they are everyday people who use computers all the time and still have a hard time understanding the concept of a browser. When designing a product that is easy to use, you must make design decisions base on more of these types of users than any other kind. So keep these users in your mind, your heart, and keep this video around for inspiration in the future.

Now I need to find that big E to post this to the Internets through my AOL broadband…