There’s no doubt that being at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference is intimidating – surrounded by experts, standing in endless lines, trying to find seats – but it’s also by far one of the most exciting events I’ve been a part of in my career. I went to loads of wonderful seminars, and learned a lot, but the thing I found most amazing about the whole experience was the level of diversity among session topics. All the major experts were there to speak on what they were most passionate about, which made for a very inspiring 6 days!

One of my favorite session was The History of the Button, presented by Bill DeRouchey. He explained how the evolution of human–machine interaction started with the lever and progressed through to the button, which introduced a concept of interaction here and reaction there. This complex interaction between the action and the result is commonplace to us these days, but its invention was extremely revolutionary and is often overlooked as one of the technological turning points for the human race. It was truly fascinating to see how the human brain has caused the button to evolve from a flashlight switch to a icon on a computer.

Another impressive session was AI 2010: Wall–e or Rise of the Machines, which covered the evolution of artificial intelligence and the role it is able to fill or fall short of in our lives. For example, search engines, as far as they have come, still lack the ability to answer questions such as "Is the space needle taller than the Eiffel tower?" or "Who was president when Obama was born?" Google and Yahoo will return articles about the Space needle or President Obama but are unable to understand the question and return a concise answer. While technology has not yet reached a point where search engines can fully understand us, it has achieved a soccer–playing humanoid robot that can make action decisions based on the position of its teammates and the ball. According to this SXSW session, in our quest to achieve Artificial Intelligence, the gap between humans and computers will blur.

The final lesson I took away from SXSW this year was geo–location. Prior to this conference geo–location was just a buzzword to me; I had encountered it before in the office but never had a real need for it. But in Austin, TX – an extremely diverse city with a rich selection of places to eat, clubs and bars to visit, knick knack shops, and tourism attractions – finding things to do or places to eat can be overwhelming without a personal tour guide and using a yellow pages or travel book to help you … Pphhhssstt! Whatever, that is so 4 years ago. Enter from stage left: AroundMe and Google Places. Both of these programs can zero in on a location, then gives an approximate distance to a point of interest (POI) selected by the user from a list of categories (ie: ATM, Food, Hotel, Bar, Bus stops, Banks). They even offer the choice of travel method (bicycle, bus, car, or foot) as well as providing contact information. Thanks to geo–location, I was able to find places to eat and get back to the conference without missing any seminars…as well as just looking cool by joining the crowds spending hours starting at our phones.

Some parting words of advice for all those who attend conferences such as SXSW, the early bird gets the worm, or in this case a seat, and bring a pedometer because you will be doing a lot of walking. There may be a half hour between each session, but in that time, you will need all that time to walk from Ballroom F to Exhibition Hall B while fighting the masses (all looking at their phones) to arrive early enough to get seated. In addition, the location where you stay during the conference will greatly impact your overall experience of the conference. While you may get to chat with a few people between sessions, the real networking and "interactive" part of the conference comes after the convention center is closed for the day, and the after–parties and social gatherings get started.

Looking ahead to next year, I can’t wait to see what tidbits of technology will bring us closer to the city, the conference, and the experience that makes SXSW so much fun to attend. I am looking forward to next year and the whole new round of topics and new ideas presented to us, hope to see everyone there!

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.

As those of you on our e-mailing list know, Tuitive is embarking on a campaign to become sought-after public speakers.  While presenting in front of a large group scares the daylights out of most people, for some reason our motley crew is really excited by the chance to get out and share our expertise with the world. 

So in order to prepare for this adventure, we’ve each been developing presentations on our area of expertise as they relate to Tuitive’s core mission – then giving the presentations to each other.  I spoke at my high school graduation and I’ve taught dozens of courses all over this lovely country, but this little group made me more nervous than most.  Something about the fact that they all know my strengths and weaknesses, I'm sure.

I'd worked diligently on my presentation (with the thrilling title “Your Client’s User Experience”), including talking extensively to Jon (our boss), digging up relatable stories, writing notes, rewriting notes, rehearsing, and even learning Prezi (new-fangled presentation software for those unfamiliar).  I put several weeks into it.  But no matter how much thought I put into it, no matter how many hours, I was still bored by the damned thing.  And that boredom came across when I presented to the Tuitive team. 

We have a policy of being brutally honest with each other about our performances.  Not cruel, mind you, but honest.  Our philosophy is (1) it’s better to hear it from a teammate than go out in the world looking like an idiot, and (2) what each of us does in the name of Tuitive reflects on us all.  So they let me have it: it felt rushed, there wasn’t enough audience involvement, there weren’t enough images, and so on.  They were all 100% right.  And I could have handed everyone a list before I even turned on the projector telling them exactly the same things. 

My disinterest in my presentation came through.  It’s not that I didn’t believe what I was saying, but it all seemed so elementary and common sense – like something you could find easily in 20 different business self-help books at Border’s.  It didn’t feel useful and therefore I had no passion for it.

A couple months back, however, I had given a presentation to the team that I was passionate about: grammar.  No laughing – I love grammar.  Perhaps it’s because it’s been hammered into me since I was old enough to talk, but I have a passion for it, and it makes me absolutely insane to hear the English language butchered regularly. 

You might assume that a presentation on grammar would be far more boring to the audience than one about creating a positive client experience, right?  But no, the team really liked the grammar presentation – we spent well over 2 hours going through it and discussing it, and it’s definitely changed everyone’s writing and speaking styles.  Although we still have the same technical skill sets we had before the grammar lesson, we all now sound more intelligent and competent in our writing and speech.  

So why did this presentation have more impact than the one about client experience?  Because I was able to put myself into it.  I'm passionate about educating others on this subject.  (I'm passionate about client experience, too, just not about educating everyone on the subject!)  My enthusiasm was infectious, the audience got involved, they remembered what they’d been taught.

The irony of the poor user experience I'd created for the attendees of my presentation on improving client user experience was not lost on me.  So I'm keeping that client user experience presentation, working on improving its content, getting the audience more involved, slowing down, and finding my passion for educating on that subject as well.  But for the moment, the grammar presentation is out front with me, ready to educate the world about the difference between “that” and “who.”  

Amanda is available for speaking engagements, and would be thrilled to give her presentation “Grammar: Common Pitfalls and Mistakes (Or ‘How I’s Be Larnin’ to Rite Good’).”  Contact her at amanda@tuitivegroup.com for more information.

Last time on the Tuitive blog, I talked about doing one thing well. Today I am going to expand on that. New technologies, especially on the web, have to play well with other programs.
The days of proprietary formats, and disconnected applications are numbered. As more and more applications begin to move to the web, being able to share information and users is becoming vital to success. The idea of making user stick to one tool or another is starting to backfire.
Users want freedom.
“I want to be able to update my tumblr blog with photos from my Flickr account, and then tweet about my new photos and update my Facebook page. Oh, and I want to be able to do it from my cell phone…”

This sounds ridiculous when you type it out (but it is nicely illustrated above), but many of us are doing it every day. I will not take the time to update each of my accounts across all my cyber hangouts. Instead, I want the systems to do it automatically.
Users want to be able to choose their own tools and services online, and they want these tools to work together with services they already have chosen to use. Users want to know what other services will work with a specific service. This interaction with existing services is no longer a luxury feature - it is a necessity. I am not going to sign up for a new online tool if it will not work with my existing Facebook page, personal blog, Twitter account, and my cell phone.
Users also want the ability to move to a new tool whenever they want, without loosing their existing content or the time they have put into that service.
The use of open API’s has helped users weave their preferred services together. The best web services are beating their users to the punch. Flickr, for example, has a blog-ready photo widget you can create and then paste into our blog. When you update Flickr, your latest photos are now on your blog.
In order for a web service to survive, it has to be able to play well with others.

Until next time, keep it usable, Internets.

I’m sure you’ll all be excited when I reveal that my husband gave me a humidifier for Christmas. It’s not a sexy gift, but I was genuinely happy to get it (my static-laden cats were happier than me– in theory, at least). The humidifier is lovely – tall and thin, and fits subtly into any room. It keeps the upper floor of our house nicely humidified (to the cats’ delight), and only goes through a tank of water per day. Despite all these wonderful features, I discovered a huge usability flaw the first time I went to fill the tank.

It has a lovely handle on top, as you can see:

But when I removed the tank to fill it, my user experience became a lot less delightful. The bottom handle is actually the lid to the opening for filling:

When I remove the lid to fill the tank, where do I grip it? Instead of a convenient handle to hold while I fill the tank, I’m left with a few less-than-ideal options. I can hold it by the water-delivery stem, and pray that it won’t get wet and slip – or become overly stressed by the weight and snap off. I can set it in the bathtub to fill, resulting in a great deal of overspray (to the cats’ dismay). Or I can hold it by the lip of the opening (which is kind of sharp). I generally opt for the later, resulting in less mess than option 2 and less danger than option 1. (That’s not entirely true - I generally opt to have my husband fill it, but that really is how he holds the tank.)

Perhaps the humidifier’s designers believed all their users would set this tall tank in kitchen sinks to fill. Nice idea, but I’d have to carry the tank downstairs every day to fill it. And like most consumers, I’m inherently lazy; an extra trip down the stairs every day isn’t appealing. That leaves me to choose between a deep bathtub and a shallow bathroom sink.

Grumble.

So aside from being irritated daily, what can I take away from this humidifier lesson? Requirements.

If a project team doesn’t fully flesh out requirements in the early stages of a project, and doesn’t keep revisiting requirements as the project progresses, that team will end up with an unfillable humidifier.

Or an unusable website.

When starting a project, it’s imperative to take the time to fully consider requirements. Most project teams are eager to get a project rolling – to jump right in and start seeing results. That’s great; we all love results. More importantly, though, we love successful results. Without fully identifying the objectives, scope, and end users, any project’s risk of failing to meet the project’s goals skyrockets. The impact of missed requirements can be huge, and that impact only increases as the project moves through its lifecycle.

That’s why it’s key to hold a team kickoff meeting. To document objectives, scope, personas, and site architecture. To review every deliverable with the team. And to test the product with end users. Because without knowing requirements, how can any project team accurately build any product for anyone?