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The SxSW Interactive Festival is full of interesting speakers from throughout the technology spectrum. SxSW fans like you can choose who you want to hear from using a Panel Picker. Fortunately for me, I was able to speak to the man behind the picker himself, Lindsey Simon. |
MICHELLE:
So I hear you work for some company called Google. How is that going for you?
LINDSEY:
It’s been a really eye-opening experience in lots of ways. I’m actually working as a front-end engineer inside of the User Experience team, and that has been a great opportunity to learn from folks with extensive experience in doing user-centered research and design. It’s a very different approach than what most startups go with, and also I bet why many of them don’t succeed. It is often amazing to me how sometimes even a little bit of well done research can make some substantial improvements to, or sometimes justify the killing of, a project’s direction and interface.
MICHELLE:
You created the South by Southwest Interactive Panel Picker. Please explain what this is and why it is so cool.
LINDSEY:
The SXSW Panel Picker was Hugh and Shawn at SXSW’s idea, and I’ve glued it together for two years now. Both times, their goal has been to try to get more feedback from the community about what kinds of panels and ideas they most wanted to see at the upcoming SXSW. Pretty ballsy for an already successful conference. If you’ve ever submitted panel ideas to most other conferences, you know the drill - maybe you get a form letter back (if you’re lucky) and then probably a form rejection letter - everything in between is a total black hole. This is at least something different and draws on the momentum that BarCamps all over the country have evidenced exists - conferences should be about group participation and not wholly one-way expert-to-masses sorts of things. That experience is more fun for everyone.
This year’s particular take on the panel picker was kind of funny for a few reasons. When the SXSW folks told me that they wanted to go all out with comments, star-voting, and login/registration for the picker it was like, okay, this fun little project a year ago is going to be a full-on webapp this time. Having recently made my Google transition and consequently become a pretty happy Gmail user, I started thinking how similar the two things are in a few ways. Comments are like email threads, Gmail has stars, etc.. So I just started using the Gmail design as a frame for the development of the
panel picker. It made loads of decisions about visual design way easier than the year before. It’s not like this kind of application needs to be in any way revolutionary, so once it was all done, we just left the Gmail skin on it as kind of a bit of an inside joke but mainly as an homage.
MICHELLE:
Your speech this year is called “Filching Design.” What do you mean by this, and why would a design decide to pilfer or make off with the belongings of other designers (sorry, had to look it up)?
LINDSEY:
This idea came directly out of the making of the SXSW Panel Picker this past year, but there’s some history to it as well. When I was originally developing Dishola, we started with all of the html, css, and layout graphics from digg and built the site into that already-beautiful ui. Of course we knew all along we’d go back and redo the design for Dishola, but for a few months, it made it both easy on the eyes and in many ways easier to develop. We didn’t waste any time haggling about typography, colors, look and feel, etc.. We had a pretty well-functioning prototype that we could get feedback on. It’s not like the social networking premise of Dishola was revolutionary, and the UI didn’t need to be. I was focused on the idea - a site which revolves around dishes instead of locations (restaurants). That is the thing that makes Dishola different from yelp, citysearch, zagat, etc… And by developing it in digg’s UI framework we were able to give our testers, many of whom had never heard of digg anyhow, an immediate impression that we were building a “professional” looking site. As such, their comments were much more useful and on-topic I believe than if we’d solicited feedback with it running in wireframes.
So when I found myself using the same approach for the Panel Picker this year it seemed like it would be fun to talk about the good and bad of this idea at SXSW. I suspect lots of web developers do this sort of thing from time to time. It’s not really about stealing design, but borrowing UI instead of thinking about it from scratch when appropriate. Luke Wroblewski’s going to be talking about some of his research on form design, and I think this plays right into the idea. “Don’t think about the visual design of your form, think about what it’s designed for” - and pick the visual design that most aptly suits this - and it doesn’t hurt that it is based on loads of his lab research.
It’s worth noting that there are most certainly times where this approach can be inappropriate and it can (rightly) be argued that it boxes you into some paradigms before you should.
MICHELLE:
Is there anything in particular that you are looking forward to at SxSW Interactive, or in Austin?
LINDSEY:
Camilla’s fish taco at Polvo’s, visiting with my Austin amigos, and drinking some Fireman’s 4 from a tap.
MICHELLE:
Do you have any shameless plugs you would like to promote here? Go ahead. We don’t mind.
LINDSEY:
I’m always trying to spread the word about Dishola.
