Mashable Party
The Mashable Party was at Buffalo Billiards, a pretty cool, dual level sports bar. I think the nice foosball tables would make a few people in the office jealous. ;)
Sunday, March 14, 2010
SXSW: Gmail: Behind the Scenes
Jonathan Perlow - Set out to make an email client that he would want to use: never have to delete mail, make the UI feel as sleek as desktop app.
Arielle Reinstein - leads the gmail blog, the public relations of gmail.
Edward Ho - Buzz lead, sense/strength/quality of team more important than the quality of the code. Have often code reviews to make sure people are executing as well as ideateing. The team sat unnaturally close to each other so that im & meetings were unnecessary. Also, there was less confusion, because everyone is aware of everything and able to contribute to decisions.
Todd Jackson - Google Gmail/Buzz project manager. Leads the group through consensus. Shit funnel vs. shit umbrella. "You have to be the shit umbrella."
Braden Kowitz - User experience at Google Ventues.
Google is a company of do. When someone has an idea, they do it (prototype, mock-up, etc.) Good example is the gmail un-send. That was a large internal debate and an engineer who wasn't even part of the core team implemented the feature into labs.
Google has on-demand build/deployment so they can test a full build of gmail with their real user accounts.
Latency is a critical issue. All new features go through testing to make sure latency isn't added along with the feature. Added latency can kill a new feature.
Listening to all the feedback from all the users is a challenge. Everyone on the Gmail team uses reader feeds to keep a pulse of the conversation about Gmail.
90%+ unit tested.
"We have this amazing technology called 'work really, really hard'".
Really extensive summary of the seminar:
SXSW:Experimental Design: Your User Interface Is Your Laboratory
When I heard that Kent Brewster was going to basically have a redo of last year's "Kick-Ass Mash-Ups", I decided to head to this panel on test driven design iterations. I'd hoped for some higher level discussions, but it kinda turned out to be an A/B Testing 101.
Example:
Do screenshots convert better than video?
A/B test for a couple days and results showed that screenshots converted better.
Interesting concept put forth by the FreshBooks and Google rep: The goal of all the testing is to keep more people in the funnel through out the process...basically to plug the holes in the bottom of the funnel. Google wants websites to have higher conversions (make more money from each entry to the funnel) so that they can get more ad business.
The moral of the story is to use funnel analysis to determine where you should do the A/B testing. Then, taking into account the user cycle, perform the test for at least one cycle. Also, testing is just a single component of the testing (personas, interviews, etc.)
I should have just stayed in Kick-Ass Mash-Ups.
http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/497
SXSW: Sunday Keynote - Valerie Casey
The Sunday keynote was a talk about the interactive community's role in sustainability. I figure I'll put up these notes and come back time permitting.
Why does a salad cost more than a big mac? NYTimes.com
Iraq burn pits
The Designers Accord:
personal accountability
collective accountability
FastCompany.com
a system is more than the sum of it's parts
feedback delays + bounded rationality = design traps
no such thing as a side effect
creating the right measurements of success
selecting the correct lever for change
enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between structure and behavior
Issue attention cycles: degree of awareness is inversly correlated to the degree of production action
Cannot get a new bahavior from a system without changing it's structure slinky vs. box
The Hub - place for social entrepenuers to collaborate
A system is a colleciton of elements and interconnections that are highly organized to achieve an overall goal or purpose
every profession bears the responsbility of understanding the circumstances that enabled it's existance
www.valcasey.com
SXSW: What If Your Phone Had Five Senses?
We're accustomed to a phone having the sense of touch, sight, sound, and location...temperature, voice?
Sleep cycle app, nearness nearfield.org
microvision: laser displays. Averch
Biddulph: the technologies that will takeoff are the ones with interfaces that are most familiar to us. Something foreign to human interaction isn't going to take off overnight.
http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/717
SXSW: Augmenting Maps with Reality
It was tough to get up this morning to make it to this session, but it was worth it. This is why I come to SXSW. Before the session started, I was browsing and found a few interesting sites for metro mapping:
Laura Diaz of Navteq: The base map is established, but as more geotagged content is shared the map begins to become a spacial
How about another axis? The z-axis? Z is unlikely to be elevation. It's more likely to be inside buildings or time.
Dennis Crowley of FourSquare: Indoor mapping is the next challenge, but likely most compelling: malls, stadiums, convention centers.
Kellen Elliott-McCrea of Flickr: We try to keep the map interface visual.
Ryan Sarver of Twitter: Difficult to represent non-specific or non-point data. Polygon is messy to render on a map. Pub vs. Yankee Stadium.
A challenge is to keep the map real-time. It's difficult to pull all the data together to get it into a public map.
The idea of dropping virtual things into actual space was a founding idea behind FourSquare. At SXSW, the ah-ha moment was to have the crowd shift embedded in a map. All the data is there, but the presentation layer could use a re-imagining.
There's so much temporal data, but it's typically not shown because it gets messy for an app to manage.
Considering the spotty accuracy of user generated geo-location data, at what point would maps become untrustworthy. For driving, this is important. In most cases, the mapping systems have nailed accuracy. For most other applications, the temporal information is more important. 8-bit Google maps.
Place data should be free. Place data is public data and in the public domain. Great Maps + great data should equal great social tools.
trendsmap.com
hot potato
Flook
app that'll remind you of something you wanted to do. Say it's 1pm. The app knows you haven't checked in for lunch yet and your phone knows you're active because of the accelerometer. It can remind you that there's a lunch place around the corner that you want to go to.
Geo fences. When you or a friend enter a space, the app can alert you.
Other links that came up on Twitter at the end of the panel:
http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/7270
Saturday, March 13, 2010
SXSW: Doing it Wrong: Recently Possible Technology
NYC Resistor & Garage Geeks:
Guitar Heronoid
Dove shitting Dove
#twittershiters
mp3 player grenades
breathing books
real need for speed console
sudo make me a sandwich
http://hackerspaces.org/
There were a lot of slides which I'll try to get a link to. This was an awesome unwind to the day.
SXSW: Playing with Place: Location-Based Games and Services
I got to this late...
Scvngr - Provides digital location based games for enterprises. Examples are the Smithsonian (take pictures in front of the shuttle, count teeth on a dinosaur, etc.) and the DARPA Balloon Challenge.
There were a few interesting ideas, but nothing really earth shattering. I pulled this summary from Twitter which gives more information than what I got: http://www.gearlive.com/news/article/q110-sxsw-2010-location-aware-games/
SXSW: Web Framework Battle Royale
http://seaside.st/ (SmallTalk)
http://www.sinatrarb.com/ (Ruby)
http://heroku.com/ (Ruby)
http://www.zope.org/ (Python)
This is pretty low level. I'm going to bail for Location Based Games and Services.
SXSW: CMS Admin UX
Steve Fisher. Success is when the technology blends into the background.
A site dedicated to the UX of Drupal 7: http://www.d7ux.org/.
Designing in the open vs. Just doing it.
Jane Wells. Works for Automatic contributing to WordPress admin UX.
http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/843
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