I recently had the pleasure of attending SXSW Interactive in Austin Texas. This is one of the geek meccas where the techies all gather together in one city for 5 days. SXSW has always had several user experience panels, and (as that is my focus and passion) I obviously checked those out, as well as attended other panels that struck my fancy. Here’s a quick view of my highlights and (some) lowlights:
Highlights
The 10 Commandments of User Experience
This panel from Nick FInke and Raina Van Cleave was fantastic, with a great presentation that… well, here, view it yourself:
Building a Bulletproof Personal-Finance System
The panel, from the writer of the book I Will Teach You to be Rich Ramit Sethi was rich with information and advice for any age (though his speech was targeted at Gen Y). Here’s his site.
Gaming the Crowd: Turning Work into play
A great fun panel about how users are often motivated by the achievements they earn in the games rather than the games themselves. This panel game me a LOT of design ideas I am busily working on right now… Here’s the Twitter feed of people who went to the panel and their reaction in real-time.
Persuasive Design: Encouraging your users to do what you want them to do
This panel from Andy Budd was great, rich with information and his unique character made it very entertaining. Here’s the slides and some video from the event:
The parties
This is one of the great benefits of SXSW – the opportunity to meet, chat and network with like-minded individuals while consuming copious amounts of free booze. Highly recommended (and my favorite party was ServerBeach’ GeekyBeach Party, where I danced my hindquarters off).
The host of the Wine Library TV podcast, entrepreneur, and author of the book Crush It!, Gary V was a potent force of nature that pumped up, inspired and promoted engagement and following your dreams. Here’s some video (caution: language):
DEVO, The Internet, and You
Yes, DEVO was at SXSW and they talked about how they are using the Internet to do focus groups and changing their band to reflect the wisdom of the crowd. While a lot of it was really tongue-in-cheek performance art, they do look to be doing some interesting research into today’s audience. I also got to ask a question that made DEVO laugh, which I understand earned me 10 Awesome Points. Here’s their website, which has video from the session. And here is the presentation from this panel:
Lowlights
Long Distance UX panel
A panel of smart people who talk about how they use teleconferencing and regular meetings to do long-distance UX. Wow. I also understand that they use this new-fangled thing called The Internet….
Entry-level UX panels
I walked into the panels on user experience expecting a lot… and, in most cases, I was disappointed. While this is obviously not a “core” user experience and design conference, I expected some advanced stuff than I got (and I wasn’t aone – I chatted with a couple of UX’ers that had the same reaction). So after the second day I ended up focusing more on some of the “outside the box” panels that were more focused on innovations and technology and got more out of it.
“Not enough time, Michael…”
There is SO MANY things going on at SXSW Interactive. If you try and do everything you will be a thin husk of a human by the time the conference is over. Because I wanted to take it easy after some recent crushing deadlines, I was not as aggressive this year in my efforts to see everything I wanted to, and I kinda regret that… but not too much (and especially when we have websites like Slideshare and Youtube that allows me to “catch” something I may have missed, as you may note above).
The Austin Convention Center
MC Escher designed this building, I swear. There are three floors, and the building is designed to host two conferences simultaneously. Well, SXSW is so big that it uses up the whole space, and if you have to go from one panel to another that is on opposite ends of the building, good luck. My legs were screaming at me by the time I got home (the aforementioned dancing didn’t help matters, either).
In Closing…
SXSW Interactive is a must-do event in the tech community, and I can’t wait to attend again. Next time, though, I will spend more time planning the sessions I attend to get the most out of it… and hopefully won’t bail on as many panels next year as I did this year.