• 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?

• 4. Understand Your Audience

Sales People In/Outside the Conference – Understand your audience and adjust your strategy. When I’m running between standing room sessions or in the bathroom I really don’t want to hear about “the next facebook/twitter geo location mobile flash killer virtual reality iphone app” but I’m sure it’s cool. Also, a big special WTF to Greenpeace – you have a wonderful cause that I believe in but I really don’t want to hear “HEY GUY, YOU LOOK LIKE YOU CARE” as you shove your save the whale/rainbows clipboard in my chest…. five times in one day. Hand me some info, if I’m interested I’ll get involved. Getting in my face just makes me hate you. Sorry about that.

• 3. Road Warrior

City of Austin – Our roads and transportation system already suck – we know this. Yet out of any time of the year you could pick, during SXSW you went ahead and tore up a few blocks of Cesar Chavez right by the convention center for a double impact of causing all sorts of traffic nightmares while simultaneously welcoming our out of town guests with a various collection of barricades, cones, and broken asphalt. Strangely I have no problem with those cranes and bulldozers though. Maybe just line those up on the street and show how awesome they are and hold off on the actual work till after the conference. We do have that train now though, I’m sure next years attendees will love the ride out to Leander! Chooo Chooo!

• 2. Questions Disguised As Product Plugs

Attendees – I’m all for asking questions. No really I am, and this is a bit elementary, but if you are going to get up in front of the crowd when it’s time for questions (if there is any) please actually ask a question. Duh! I’m sure the project you are working on at your business is really great, but plugging whatever it is you do and how awesome you are really makes you look like a complete tool. Save that stuff for after the session in the 15 thousand other networking events and let the line of people with actual questions ask them. Thanks.

• 1. Fashion Smashion

Attendees – Attire. You are in Austin, TX. Pretty much all of our nice restaurants allow people in if they are wearing jeans and if they don’t you probably don’t want to go there. Jot that one down. You are going to be walking a lot so I suggest focusing a little bit more on comfort and a little less on fashion – but that tiny tie with the wool blazer with the matching skull cap and scarf is looking fierce, but it’s damn near 80 degrees out so I know you are also burning up. Follow this and you can free yourself to actually learn at this conference instead of focusing on what’s a hot trend. Doing that is completely lame. Whoever does that should be ashamed of themselves. Shame Shame.

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…

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?

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  _________.

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

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/

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/

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

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!!!!

• 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