At SXSW last month, I presented UX Process Improved: Integrating User Insight with Aviva Rosenstein. I’m posting the slides and audio here.
Listen to audio:
To download the audio Right-Click and Save As… (Windows) or Ctrl-Click (Mac)
Here are Steve’s pictures from a week in Austin for the SXSW conference/festival
See also Cutting Thru Clutter at SXSW
As David Armano writes about SXSW “Hundreds of vendors, brands and companies vie for your attention.” This was certainly one of my big surprises from the recent SXSW event (my first time attending). From the huge attendee bag o’ crap with every kind of sticker, sample beverage, light-up pen, button, pamphlet, coupon, invite, brochure, and screen cleaner imaginable, to the half-dressed-skinny-girls inviting us to try a WiFi cafe, I was struck how by showing up in Austin I was essentially a captive audience to be marketed to. There was free food-and-drink (the Ice Cream Man on 6th street hands ice cream to passerby, with a Nokia napkin; the Sobe people were giving out psych-ward-meds-sized portions), free electricity (via Belkin and Chevy), and on and on.
Pepsi had large area with several zones, including tents for…I guess…video conferencing. I saw people hanging out at the bar drinking small portions of Pepsi, but not many making use of this service.
Bing had a fleet of Town Cars, as well as hostess-y types that would offer you a free ride.
This bus was promoting the new book from Tony Hsieh (of Zappos). I just saw it driving around, or worse, idling. I never saw anyone get on, or off. Was it an eco-nightmare billboard? Or some sort of service? I think it’s kind of creepy!
Sidewalk advertising, of course. Let’s hope they cleaned it up after, or that the city was prepared to fine them. I haven’t checked out this URL, but feel free to and let us know in the comments. Or, really, why bother?
There are three concurrent/adjacent festivals: Interactive, Film, and Music. Each of them serves up an insane range of options, well beyond what we normally encounter in our choice-flooded lives. The net effect (and my theme here) is that content creators are expected to shout louder (or more interestingly) to create awareness for their product. Here are ads for all sorts of things, including a cryptic phrase about a hurting vagina (which turned out to be from a movie).
Those posters don’t go up by themselves. It takes work.
As Austin reached beyond-critical-mass, 6th Street, the live music area, was closed to traffic. People were passing out more pamphlets and flyers promoting their events. And here’s where many of them ended up.
Just because.
Drawing attention to yourself to promote an event.
iPad guy was the triggering noticing event that led to this post. On my second-to-last night I saw this guy walk by, with a cardboard iPad around his neck (yes, kids, this was before the iPad was actually available). I yelled out “Hey, iPad guy!” and he stopped and let me take his picture. We introduced ourselves, and I asked him why he was wearing an iPad around his neck (see, that ethnography experience comes in handy!!!). His answer? So people will talk to him, like I did (turns out he works for a Search Engine Optimization firm, so…). While SXSW is a hyper-condensed environment, it represents some early-adopter aspects of typical daily life, and so I was struck to see the continuum between the promotion of Pepsi, Sobe, Bing, an indie film, an indie band, and an individual.
I’ve had my experience with guerrilla methods of promoting myself (from wearing a giant sombrero when campaigning for student government, with the slogan “the little guy in the big hat” to wearing a very loud SpiderMan tie when interviewing for jobs at a CHI conference long ago…only to be upstaged by the guy with a resume-dispensing-box with an embedded recording of him giving his elevator pitch) but the past seemed quainter, where the extreme needs (getting elected, getting a job) permitted extreme norms. But at SXSW it seems like everything is a promotion for something and I feel just a little bad seeing us take our lessons on how to connect with each other from big brands. Is this an exception or an emergent norm?
My favorite content from SXSW:
Check out more of my SXSW pictures here.
Slides and audio from Integrating User Insight, my presentation with Aviva Rosenstein, are here.
You may also like License to Shill, a FreshMeat column from 2004.
We’ll explore the different cultural challenges that breakthrough products must overcome: emergent usage behaviors that are impossible to predict, a global customer base and cultural barriers inside the corporation that suffocate innovation. We’ll also share best practices for addressing each challenge.
Best practices for user research are not hard to come by, but experience is the ideal way to develop mastery. And with experience inevitably comes failure. Embarrassing, awkward, hilarious failure that gives the gift of self-improvement. We’ll share our own unvarnished examples and what they taught us.
When I buy a physical copy of a book, I feel psychologically more obliged to at least try to get through it. Online I experience a paradox of choice of sort. With hundreds of interesting books available there in front of me, I’m more inclined to excessively multitask, and end up checking out different books while I should still be reading the current one.
(Thanks @onwardparam and @chirag_mehta)
The researchers say the confusion arises because people from different cultural groups observe different parts of the face when interpreting expression.
(via Design-Emotion.com)
You can (with a single download) get 739 mp3s by 739 artists from the SXSW festival. That’s a lot of music. As someone points out
on MetaFilter that’s over 37 hours of music. Someone else bemoans the organizational task that will create (I’m about to do that task myself).
I downloaded about half as many songs last year, and I really enjoyed them, but it’s an intimidating-if-wonderful gift.
Our digital technologies and the massive capabilities they afford us still continue to exceed or at least push the edges of our capacity as consumers. Indeed, the word consume may hold a clue. Do we consume music? Eat it up, digest it, and excrete/delete when we are done, or are we collectors, accumulating more and more? I imagine many of us are in straddle positions, not being ready to delete an MP3, or many MP3s, because we already possess them.
Update: am slowly working through listening to the songs…some real quality control issues with their distribution. One track with a skip in it, and about two dozen that are seriously truncated.
Judd riffs on the SXSW Cabal
They’ve got the throbbing pulse of the masses of young people who are disaffected and just making so much media they don’t know what to do with it. Well, that’s not true – they’re tagging it. All of it.
I can relate to Judd’s frustration, even if I don’t share it currently and specifically where he is. I’ve straddled so many professional communities (various flavors of product design, interaction design, anthropology – and of course those groups break down into too-annoyingly-many-to-list-here sub-cliques/specialties) in my career (as I think Judd continues to do), being accepted by some, rejected by others, tolerated by more. Of course, I’m not unique in doing this, although I’m sure the mix I inhabit is a bit of a fingerprint.
It’s fascinating and stressful to come up against the self-proclaiming power of a new-to-you group and marvel at the self-referntiality and incestuousness. And easy to see the reasons you wouldn’t want to be a part of any group that would have you as a member. And sometimes that has proven right, and sometimes it takes some time to the mutual acceptance/tolerance