SXSW 2010 Interactive has already come and gone and I think this year’s conference was a big hit, which is saying a lot because like Russ told my hero Eric Meyer at An Event Apart, “Jeff hates conferences.”  Regardless of this year’s smashing success I put together the following possibly nonsensical unsolicited improvements for next years event while they are still fresh in my mind or what is left of it after four straight days of interactive panel, discussions, etc.

• 10. Skill Levels Please

SXSW Staff – I heard a few people mention this one, so please separate sessions by skill level. Ohhhh, wait the good news on this one is on the 3rd day I actually realized that SXSW Interactive pocket guide already did this. Hoooray, now we are almost there, now go ahead and put this exact same information on the website and iPhone apps that everyone else was using.  It’s called consistency.  Thanks.

• 9. Improve Registration

SXSW Staff – Last I checked, this is an interactive conference, correct? I signed up and even paid online, yet I had to fill out paperwork with the same exact info you already had. Ditto on the picture for the badges, I uploaded one online yet had to take a new picture when I was there. Two for two. I like standing in lines and all, but cutting all this unnecessary what nots like this will speed things up.

• 8. Online Feedback

SXSW Staff – speaking of unnecessary what nots. Again, this is an interactive conference and you are still passing out paper and pencils for feedback? It’s 2010 people, is this the best we can do? We should be zipping around on hover-boards by now and considering the WIFI was actually good this year and the successful integration of twitter hash tags, as well as the rise of online questioning tools like HotPotato, it seems amateur to bust out the paper and pencils as the only solution to provide feedback. Save the trees yall.

• 7. Event Preparation

Presenters – Please be prepared. I picked your session out of all the options available during that time slot and I really don’t want to sit through some presentation you slapped together the night before after some drinks down on 6th street. While you are debugging code that “should” work or discussing with your panel members on what you were talking about and what part of the presentation you are supposed to be in and if it’s OK to tell that one story, I’m the guy getting up and leaving your presentation. I’m not a big fan of practicing, but like maybe pretend you know what’s going on and it’s all part of your dazzling master plan.

• 6. I have Google Too!

Presenters – Here’s a secret tidbit of info: I have Google too. This is only for a small portion of you, but please don’t give your session a really cool title and then regurgitate the exact same thing it takes me 2.4 seconds to find online. You do look cool with that microphone with the name card and hash tag, now talk about something original/interesting/how to immediately address issues in our jobs and people will love you, we will even carry you out of the room on our shoulders, I promise.

• 5. Chairs of Torture

Austin Convention Center – If your overall goal of SXSW interactive is to redistribute my lower lumbar and completely mess up my back with your tiny non cushion metal chairs of torture then you win! May I suggest the Iron Maiden (torture device – not the awesome band) or perhaps the rack torture next year?

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As Jeff mentioned on Friday, most of us are here at the SXSW Interactive Conference.  If you’ve never been, it’s definitely worth a look.  The fact that it is held in our hometown of Austin, Texas every year makes it a no-brainer for us, but I personally find a lot of great takeaways… and I’m not talking about free swag.

One of my favorite sessions so far was “The Right Way to Wireframe”, a 2 part series featuring Tod Zaki Warfel, Russ Unger, Fred Beecher, and Will Evans.  This group of designers and design agencies challenged the big names in UX and UI Design to “show your work”, and subsequently put together a design challenge for themselves.  I won’t go too far into detail, because these AWESOME time-lapsed videos will tell the story better than I can:
The Right Way to Wireframe video series

Also, in the spirit of posting trends, Jeff, Kate, and I have been documenting all of the trends we see popping up here at SXSW.  I started compiling these yesterday and thought they might make an interesting post.
Disclaimer: We don’t necessarily think all of these are good trends, but these are our observations. Enjoy…

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Today was the first day of SXSW Interactive here in lovely Austin, Texas. This year I’m attempting to take notes on my handy to carry yet impossible to type on Dell Mini 9 netbook. In between scrolling the tiny screen, moving the cursor back to where I was typing after accidentally brushing the crappy trackpad, and slowly typing/pen pecking with one hand because my adult sized hands don’t fit the keyboard I was able to get the following list put together from The UX of Mobile panel.

The 3 most important mobile devices:

Kyle Outlaw, Razorfish – iPhone, Android, iPad

Barbara Ballard, Little Springs Design – iPad, what is Nokia n900 doing?, Sony Playstation phone

Scott Jenson, Google - (claimed iPhone and Android is boring so he provided the following) – Where is it going? Better browser and OS integration, clouds of devices, and cheaper devices.

Update:  A good summary of the entire panel has been posted here

Anyone have something else to add?

The fine folks at Class On Demand have provided us a copy of “Designer’s Guide to Illustrator” training DVD featuring Adobe Certified Expert & Instructor Sue Jenkins. Usually these cost $79.95 but we are giving it away for free to one lucky winner, that could be you!

To be eligible to win this DVD, copy and paste the red text below in the comments section of this page and fill in the blanks with whatever word you want Mad Libs style by April 3, 2010. Also please live in the USA.

I find working with Adobe Illustrator to be _________ and I would like to learn more about _________.  Also I want the world to know that Jeff Noble is  _________.

Personas are a vital tool in designing a product or interface that connects with its users. When you don’t have clear personas as your designing guide, other factors get in the way. Ultimately the interaction fails: it gets made for ease of the coder rather than ease of the user, features get added that don’t present a strong benefit to the user, without a single vision everyone ends up compromising and nothing gets accomplished thoroughly. Below are a few key nuggets I took from the sources at the end of this post.

Why personas are effective:
1. Easier design consensus because you have something concrete to refer to
2. Helps people set aside personal opinions and base decisions on the user
3. Makes it more likely to use the persona in decisions
- Easier to recall the persona
- Personalizes otherwise abstract data about customers
4. Helps the team understand the target users
5. Early user validation
6. Helps identify key requirements by going through use cases

What are Ad Hoc Personas?
1. Like data driven personas they are specific detailed descriptions
2. Created in direct collaboration w/ high-level stakeholders
3. Can and should be created before collecting any more data
4. A focus and communication tool first and a product design tool second
5. Prioritized according to business objectives before communicated to rest of the organization

Why use Ad Hoc Personas?
1. Collecting more data is expensive and often not very helpful if you don’t know what you need to collect
2. Personas are there like it or not so get on the same page rather than working with different users in mind
3. The executive team is probably not clear on business objectives and personas can help
4.  Ad Hoc personas are quick and inexpensive
5. Pulling the right kind of data is hard enough and Ad Hoc Personas help in getting organized and on the same page first
6. When everyone has a different user in mind everyone tends to make tiny compromises which end up as tiny holes in product and a big compromise in the end

What Personas should include:
1. Name and picture
2. Demographics (age, education, ethnicity, family status)
3. Job title and major responsibilities
4. Goals, tasks scenarios, interactions
5. Environment (physical, social, technological)
6. A quote that sums up what matters most to the persona with relevance to interaction with the product

How to make Data-driven Personas:
1. Gather information from user Interviews
2. Refine, analyze distill into one or multiple fictitious characters/archetypes
3. Develop one or many Characters in realistic detail
4. One persona should always be the primary focus for the design
5. Use role-playing and QA sessions using the persona to evaluate design solutions

Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design
The Power of Ad Hoc Personas
The Essence of a Successful Persona Project
Usability.gov

If you haven’t heard about HTML5, then I’m both happy that you have awoken from your coma, and sad that you haven’t been following the magic miracle that will finally fix all the browser compatibility problems and give us amazing animation and video without “a buggy/lazy” plugin. While the development of HTML5 is encouraging, and recent developments like YouTube rolling out HTML5 video for the two browsers out now that support it, as well as Apple refusing to put Flash on the iPad and iPhone, it still might be a bit soon to crown HTML5 the king of the web any time soon. I found the following links below that highlight some of the current challenges, I know, shame on me for bringing it up.

Enjoy Time Spent Encoding Videos

“There is no single combination of containers and codecs that works in all HTML5 browsers. To make your video watchable across all of these devices and platforms, you’re going to have to encode your video more than once.”
http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html

Hope You Like Banners

“HTML5 won’t kill Flash banner ads – they’ll just be done in HTML5, but now you can’t ignore them with a Flash-blocker”
http://radleymarx.com/2010/02/five-myths-of-html5-vs-adobe-flash

Just a Reminder, Standards Move Slow

“The de facto standard for the Web in the past decade was IE6.”
http://blog.est.im/archives/830/comment-page-1

A Somewhat Misleading Final Specification Date

“The HTML5 specification is not expected to be finalized until 2022″
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/20-Essential-Things-to-Know-About-the-HTML5-Web-Language-329684/?kc=EWKNLEDP02082010A

Ready or Not?

Is HTML5 Ready? http://ishtml5ready.com/
Is HTML5 Ready Yet? http://ishtml5readyyet.com/

Trend: Javascript Toolkits

It seems Javascript Toolkits have infiltrated every nook and cranny of the internet. And it seems like everybody and their nephew has built one.

So which toolkit is the right one for you?  Well, most of the big names have the same subset of features, such as “drag and drop”, animation capabilities, and XML HTTPRequest functionality.  Maybe you need something a little more, like HTML Generation or the out-of-the-box charting functionality of Dojo.  Or, your deciding factor may be licensing.  You may love the features of GWT, but your company doesn’t gel with the Apache License.

I put together the illustration below from the data available on this wiki article to compare all the big guns in the Javascript Toolkit game.  I know I left off some that you may be using, and didn’t list all of the features, but this should be a good snapshot to get you started.  Please let us know your experience with these or any other Javascript Toolkits.

Another thing we would love to know is will you be using one of these toolkits when HTML5 is “fully supported” in all the major browsers… whenever that may be?

Toolkit sites:
Scriptaculous: http://script.aculo.us/
Dojo: http://dojotoolkit.org/
GWT: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
jQuery: http://jquery.com/
MooTools: http://mootools.net/
midori: http://www.midorijs.com/

Trend: Horizontal Scrolling

Most people try fitting their design to the width of a standard window size to avoid horizontal scrolling. Nielsen even claims that “users hate horizontal scrolling” , and names reasons to stray away from horizontal scrolling. But then, there are those–I dare say most of them are designers–who do it anyway. So are these guys designing without regard to the usability of their sites, do they just not give a fudge about usability, or are they designing for a situation they feel warrants horizontal scrolling?

Click this link for a showcase of horizontal sites The Horizontal Way

The boss has gone crazy!!! Well not really but, the fine folks at Class On Demand have provided us a copy of “Dreamweaver For Designers” training DVD. Usually these cost $199.95 but we are giving it away for free to one lucky winner. Zero, Nada. Gratis.

All you need to do to win this DVD is leave a comment about why you love the UItrends website by February 20th, 2010. Bonus points if you include some areas we can improve, double bonus points to anyone that can spur Sarah Selser to post another big buttons article or tell us what has happened to Chris Farmer.  Sorry but you do have to live in the continental USA.

Congrats to our winner Kim Schaumloffel!!!!

According to my admittedly flawed calculations there are approximately  the same number of articles on website form behaviors as the number of McDonald’s customers served each day.  Speaking of McDonald’s, rather than throwing up a lot of the same info, putting together yet another lame attempt at a top whatever number list, or you wasting your time going through all of these articles, I figured it might just be better to list out some of the best resources I found.  Why? Cause I have nothing better to do and hopefully some of these are helpful or at least inspirational to you.

• Luke Wroblewski - Evidently this guy pretty much is the king of website forms, he gets his own category.
• Inline Validation in Web Forms
• Web Forms for People
• The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign

• Form Examples – Check out collections of website forms.
• 55 Spectacular Login Form Designs
• 100 Outstanding Login Forms
• 25 Stylish Examples of Web Forms
• Login Form Design Showcase

• Tips & Guidelines – Lessons to immediately apply to your website forms.
• Checklist for Better Forms
• 8 Tips for Account Registration
• UX trick: display form data as tabular data
• Web form design guidelines: an eyetracking study
• 190% Improvement In Landing Page Conversions By Removing Content