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GeekAustin: Well, the big news is that Refresh is moving to Buffalo Billiards. I think a lot of folks would prefer a beer or whiskey to an espresso in the evening. I was happy to hear of the change.
Alex Jones: Definitely, we’ve made it a habit to go out for a beer or coffee after each meeting, so this makes it that much easier. A special thanks goes to Leesa who did all of the legwork to find us the new venue
GA: What new things will you be looking to do in this new location? What will moving to Buffalo enable you to do?
Jones: The most important thing will be the ability to fit everyone into the space comfortably. Texpresso, our old venue was a great place to start, but the last few meetings required folks to pack in a little closer than was comfortable. We also hope that it will lead to more post-meeting conversations as we won’t be forced to go to a new venue after 9:00.
GA: Do you know if Buffalo has food as well? pub grub?
Jones: Not only do they have food, but as our meetings are on Tuesday’s we’ll be able to take advantage of half price appetizers and drink specials.
GA: I first heard about Refresh Austin at one of the BarCampAustin parties GeekAustin hosted in 2006. Now days, it seems hardly a day goes by without Refresh coming up in a conversation. I had lunch with someone from Valentine Associates on Tuesday, and Refresh even came up in that conversation. How has the growth of the group been over the last year?
Jones: Tremendous. A lot of good folks have put in a lot of effort to transform Refresh Austin from a loosely-organized collection of events into a smooth running group for Web professionals. We made some decisions early on that have made it easier for people to join and participate, and in that time we’ve more than doubled the amount of people on our mailing list and attendance at our meetings.
GA: There appears to be a core team who manages Refresh Austin. You mentioned Leesa. I’ve met a few of them. Who are the others?
Jones: Leesa, Justin Perkins (who founded the group), Grant Hutchins, Ryan Joy, Paul Menard, Pat Ramsey, Andrew Dupont and Alex Bilstein. These great folks spend a lot of their time moderating the lists, spreading the word, welcoming new members. and ensuring everyone has interesting ideas to talk about.
GA: Most people don’t know that Alex Bilstein ran the Goodwill Computer Museum. I’ve been wanting to interview him.
You mentioned the online list. It seems that the online conversations in the Refresh Austin Google Group cover the gamut: everything from css/javascript to ajax, hosting providers, specking jobs, and how to choose clients. Are you ever concerned that the conversation gets too broad, too general?
Jones: We encourage the broad discussions, as long as they fall somewhere in the realm of Web professionals. Our goal is to foster conversations and ideas across the various areas of interest. Designers benefit when they know more about development, developers gain knowledge when speaking to business folks and business folks will be better at their job if they understand the designers, and of course there are many variants. Ultimately we all participate because we like to share and want to improve. That said, every so often we have to curb conversations that go off topic, which everyone understands and seems to appreciate. Luckily that’s rare.
GA: Many folks don’t know that Refresh is an national…should I say movement? or organization? What kind of interaction does Austin have with other chapters?
Jones: Organization, affiliation or group…they all apply. Every city runs their own group and decides how to go forward. There is a international discussion list, but it tends to be quiet, used to share organizational ideas and questions. Every so often as people move from one city to another, they’re able to migrate between refresh groups, which I think is pretty cool - they’re new to the city, but they already have a foundation of like-minded, friendly colleagues.
For SXSW Interactive 08, Refresh Austin organized a lunch to make it easy for Refreshers from around the world to meet up. It was a great opportunity to meet folks in person and share ideas. Most groups seem to have formed in the same way and discovered the same solutions to the common pitfalls.
Jones: Those interested in learning more about Refreshing Cities, the international glue so to speak, should check out http://refreshingcities.org/
GA: speaking of SXSW, you co-hosted the PhizzPop party with microsoft. How did that work for you? What did you think of the idea of such a design competition? Are you considering similar events for the next SXSW?
Jones: It was a great event for us. We didn’t have anywhere near the resources to throw a bash for SXSW Interactive, much less rent out a place the size of Maggie Mae’s, but we really wanted to get the word out so people could join us if they were interested. Microsoft wanted some local help spreading the word, and were very welcoming. A good time all around. We are definitely planning to do an event next year. We haven’t set any plans yet, but we will.
Jones: I love the idea of a design competition and would love to see more of them pop-up, not just with Silverlight, but other platforms and concepts would be amazing.
GA: Did you catch much flack for co-hosting with Microsoft?
Jones: All of our members were quite happy with the opportunity that Microsoft provided us, and while I caught a bit of flack for teaming up with them, it was from people who aren’t local, who felt we somehow ’sold out’. Our members are varied in their platforms and programs of choice, so we stay balanced. Consequently, we’d be very happy to have Apple and Adobe invite us to co-host parties as well..
GA: Well, I’ll send you the contact info for the Adobe guys. I saw them at PhizzPop. However, they seemed mostly focused on locating the MS guys and talking to them about employment opportunities
GA: Tell me more about SXSW. Compared to previous years, how was SXSW for you this year? Anything you would like to see changed for next year?
Jones: Great question! In fact, that’ll be part of our next meeting, half of which will be a group discussion of this year’s South By. People should come join that conversation instead of reading my thoughts here
GA: Speaking of the April meeting, I see that you have Annette Priest speaking on usability. Is that correct? Can you tell a bit about Annette and what her presentation will cover?
Jones: Indeed we do! Annette brings a great amount of experience workign and managing user experience teams responsible for large Web sites (Dell, IBM Tivoli, SBC and the like) in addition her consulting background. She’ll be sharing practical methods to use analytics and metrics to gain insight into the usability of a Web site.
GA: That sounds really useful. I particularly enjoyed hearing Gordon Montgomery of Neudesic speak about metrics last month, and left his presentation wanting more.
GA: Speaking of usability and related topics, in the last year, we’re seeing UX crop up everywhere. UX UX UX — sort of like U2 but with a little X as well. Can you tell me something about the growth of UX
Jones: UX (User eXperience) isn’t a new concept by any means, but it has certainly been gaining in popularity in our industry. Different people attach slightly different meanings to it, but it comes down to focusing on how the person using your work interacts with it, how he or she can find what they are looking for, and the impression they have of the system. Often times it is attached to designers, but a good experience must be thought about throughout the entire creation process from the business folks through the developers and designers
GA: Usability has certainly been in our minds since the early Apple days. I remember stocking many of the Apple user/interface guidelines in my store in the early 90s. It just seems recently that usability and experience has almost become a cult much in the same way the the concept of social media is becoming a cult.
Jones: Like many parts of the Web, interesting ideas gain notice really quickly. The good practices become ingrained (Web Standards for example) and become a part of our muscle memory.
GA: I hope you don’t mind me going down this path…Have you noticed many new ideas with respect to user experience, or simply a greater interest in the subject matter?
Jones: Both. There are a lot of paths being explored and many experiments. One example is how to best solve the problem of presenting long lists of information. Traditionally on the Web these lists are split over a number of pages, but now people are playing with the concept of appending the next batch of results as the user scrolls to the end of the first batch. So instead of waiting for another page to load, or waiting for a really big page to load initially, you see the results quickly and the keep scrolling to see more.
GA: Thanks for taking the time, Alex. Beyond the April meeting, what’s on the Refresh dance card for this year?
Jones: Big plans for the next year. We look forward to working with other local groups like Geek Austin, the Adobe Users Group, the WordPress group and others.
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GA: Looking forward to it. I’ll be seeing you at the next Refresh meeting.
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Although he used to come to my bookstore, I didn’t meet Christopher St. John until a few years ago. Because he lives in Dallas, we usually only connect in person during conferences. You can follow Christopher’s blog at artofsystems.blogspot.com. |
Lynn Bender: Chris, good to catch up with you. I heard the word Semantics, and got exited. Tell me about what you will be presenting at BarCampAustin III.
Christopher St. John: I’m getting together with Taylor Cowan (from Sabre/Travelocity) and Dan Connolly (from the w3c) to do some outreach for some big-S semantic web technology. Mainly RDFa (a clean way to annotate HTML with semantic data), but probably also GRDDL (a way to extract all sorts of semantic markup, not just RDFa, from web pages). Assuming he survives the bike trip down, Jay Fichialos (also from Sabre/Travelocity) will be helping, too.
Bender: when I first read about RDF I was thinking people were referring to pre-RSS type feeds. (I was still running rdf on GeekAustin until last week).
ckstjohn: Strangely, RDF really was the basis for one branch of the RSS technology tree.
Bender: so we’re talking about the same rdf? I’m just a few generations back?
ckstjohn: The RDF for feeds was one application of the underlying RDF technology.
Bender: Tell me more about GRDDL.
ckstjohn: GRDDL is a way to attach an XSLT stylesheet to a page. Instead of making the page all pretty for presentation, the stylesheet parses out all the semantic markup and formats it for automated processing. It’s sort of a stylesheet for the computer instead of for the user. There are GRDDL stylesheets for the “official” microformats, for RDFa, or you can write your own. It’s a cool technology that helps unify the big-S and little-s semantic web efforts.
Bender: What kind of users will benefit from these semantic efforts?
ckstjohn: The hope is that all of them will, but, the focus of the presentations at BarCampAustinIII is going to be on practical uses for real, working web designers and developers. The goal is to present techniques and tools you can use right away, without having to become an expert in formal logic.
Bender: It looks like that there will be quite a bit of discussion on microformats this year at BCAIII. Can you tell me anything about the other discussions?
ckstjohn: Well, a little hard to tell from the sessions page, but my suspicion is that techniques like microformats for adding semantic data to the web are moving from being novel to being just an accepted part of any new development. At least I hope so. RDFa and the surrounding technologies like GRDDL are more arrows that should be in any good web developer’s quiver.
Bender: What sort of tools are there for embedding semantic data to web docs? And are we all going to have to become ontologists?
ckstjohn: I sure hope not, but to some extent, any good developer already is an ontologist. The normal sort of stuff you do in information architecture (or less formally for any web site) is exactly the sort of thing you do in putting together an ontology. The nomenclature might be different, but the basic work is the same: understanding user needs and the problem domain.
I suspect there will be pre-canned semantics (like microformats) for many common tasks, but one of the points of the we’re going to try to make in the BarCamp session is that RDFa comes with a whole set of tools that make it (relatively) easy for any group of people to put together a shared vocabulary and deploy it to the web. Even if you haven’t got a problem domain amenable to official formalization, you can still get the advantages of semantic markup and data sharing.
Bender: Is there something peculiar to the BarCamp format that helps facilitate these type of presentations/discussions/workshops/ .
ckstjohn: In this case I think the informality and wide mix of people are a big help. Normal conferences tend to attract certain specific sorts of people who show up with a pretty specific focus (SXSWi for web designers and developers, something like Semantic Technology 2008 for the big-S semantic web geeks). BarCampAustin gives both groups a chance to sit down together.
I’m glad Taylor Cowan and Dan Connelly are going to be there. Taylor has spoken before on these topics, and of course Dan is a W3C heavyweight. It ought to be a great session.
Bender: Chris, I really appreciate the time you took giving me some info on this. I will probably be there most of the day soaking it in.
ckstjohn: Cool. Thanks for the opportunity to share, looking forward to it.
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Browsing through the SXSW Panels, I saw that Vignette’s CTO Conleth O’Connell is leading a panel called How Many Clicks to the Center of…? Given that Conleth has been with Vignette since the early days, and Vignette was one of the first companies in the enterprise content management space, I felt the title was a bit of a tease. So I contacted Conleth and asked him to elaborate: |
Lynn Bender: Conleth, thanks for taking the time. Please tell me about Success in 3 Clicks.
Conleth O’Connell: For a packed iPod of 400+ CD’s alone, try finding a specific song to play, it’s a lot of thumb scrolling (or clicks), now that’s on 80 Gigabyte iPods, it won’t be long before we have Terabyte iPods (1000 Gigabytes). Something has to give so we as humans can find what we’re looking for with a simple interface like an iPod. Vignette’s background of personalization and managing and delivering huge quantities of information over the Web sees a new wave coming called Personalization 2.0. We believe Personalization 2.0 will impact those interfaces and take into account the user, their mood, their environment, their patterns and their “persona” to help filter out what’s not relevant so we could actually achieve what the wise owl answered in the Tootsie Pop ad: Three. Success will be when getting to any information is within 3 clicks.
Bender: When choosing how to access their growing library of content, many people are choosing to assign tags to everything, rather than create a folder hierarchy. Clearly, folder tree will never get you everywhere in three clicks. However, unless you use multiple tags with boolean like operations, they don’t seem to be a solution either. How does one get to this three click success?
O’Connell: First of all you’re right. Classification and organization is still a static orientation based on a point in time even when the user is doing it themselves. When new assets come online (never been tagged before) or when older assets go offline, your tagging density changes and that may affect what’s prominent. This is important dimension is the classification and organization of the content. Now the question becomes how does it get used? That’s where the user’s intent must be taken into consideration. The user’s intent is affected not only by their own actions within a point in time, but also what others are doing around them. One of our panel members represents a firm, Baynote, that specializes on using the intent of the user to improve activities like search. We call this social search. Understanding what’s valuable when you search for a term (like a form in turbo tax) goes beyond the raw relevance rankings, it’s where did the crowd find value that matters the next time that query is issued.
Go to www.netapp.com and using their search box, search for storage. Network Appliance is a storage vendor, so you might expect a plethora of results. In the results page, you will see on the order of 250 or so results, and if you scan the results you see they are mostly product types. Now they have a link there that says “Raw results”; select that, and now you can see the difference in action. If you were looking for a storage product (a large segment of visitors do that in their case, probably even competitors), you went from search to finding the product line – 2 clicks. If all they had were the raw relevance rankings. It’s where the crowd finds value that matters the next time that query is issued.
Another example is www.nyc.gov. They realized presenting information how they are organized internally wasn’t working, so they added alternative views: Did you Know and Most Requested sections help bubble up information based on users coming in. Furthermore, they used user segments to organize the site: residents, business, visitors, etc.
Similarly, the state of Michigan (Michigan.gov) uses “How do I” and other task oriented organizations to present information on their site. Three clicks was our measure of success for them.
Bender: Tell me more about Personalization 2.0. It seems to center on providing multi-channel access to content. However, the content you describe would all be delivered from, or pass through a central spoke. How do you address the problem of multiple information silos?
O’Connell: Separating content from presentation is a fundamental tenet of making this work. A centralized hub is used to manage the metadata and the logistics of placing the content into the right environment. However, the delivery application that adds the presentation to that content is where the specific experiences are applied (mobile versus Web browser versus kiosk). There’s a corollary to this separation tenet which is always have a single system of record. By that I mean, edits only take place in one information source. All other uses of that information are then updated (the need for a powerful content management system includes knowing where content has gone). The importance of multichannel is the empowerment to take action by the user. The user is providing the disruption here by taking more control on how to use the technology. Not the technology dictating how to use the content.
For us multichannel includes all of the different ways users communicate and interact, beyond mobile and multi-device. It’s the convenience factor usually associated with mobile devices that clearly demonstrates the impact as can be seen in this Citibank mobile commercial on Youtube. This shows the wife persona-shifting to make a car payment (from passenger to financial caretaker). Rather than pulling into the bank or stopping at a hotspot, she uses her phone to call, but to make the payment using a Web application. Multichannel access allows action to be taken. We manage the content (single source of the truth) across all those different distribution channels. If you go to anytime.sky.com, you can see this in action. Customers can access the same videos available to them at home (set-top box), over the Web or on their mobile phones
Bender: You spoke of Personalization 2.0 as providing a unified login — do you see this utilizing an existing standard such as OpenID, or do you see it requiring a new standard?
O’Connell: I wasn’t presupposing any specific technology. I also don’t expect a unified login to occur as opposed to a “master login.” Between Microsoft’s passport and the Liberty Alliance and now other activities around CROWD and OpenID, I’m sure a solution, if not multiple, will be found and if users gain value out of it, then it will be accepted like wildfire. The overall effect I was trying to portray was that human capacity to ingest information hasn’t changed yet. The Web in its generic sense is growing beyond our capacity to absorb, so it will need to get personal to the point that there is “My Web” which will end up being a virtual representation of what I care about at a point in time, but it will never be static because I’m not static. J
Bender: It seems I see more about Vignette in the European tech news than I see here in the states. Is that my imagination? Does this have anything to do with the advances in the euro telecomm networks?
O’Connell: Our efforts on focusing on the Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment space with the Vignette Digital Services Hub solution began in the European, Middle East and Africa geography. Consumers in those markets are used to being served rich, interactive experiences over their mobile devices, and Vignette has a lot to do with that. We’re working with companies like British Sky Broadcasting, Vodacom and SABC to ensure their content is available to subscribers at any time on any device.
Vignette is well recognized aboard as a leader in content management and delivery for mobile devices. In the U.S., we’re best known as the pioneer of Web Content Management and have received a great deal of recognition for our innovative Web Experience Platform.
Bender: what are you looking forward to seeing/doing this year at SXSW?
O’Connell: I always find it fascinating to see how technology gets used in unexpected ways. We are really focusing on the next wave of experiences and interactivity from a mainstream perspective, so attending and participating in the Interactive festival itself is a great way of seeing a bit into the future.
See Conleth O’Connell’s Panel How Many Clicks to the Center of…? at SXSW Interactive
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I really love C — largely because I learned it at the same time I learned Unix, but my knowledge of C is largely limited to the chunks of Unix source code with which I am familiar. I’d love to learn C++ but I doubt that that will ever happen. Tonight I caught up with Matt Weigel,an old friend who just happens to be the organizer of the Austin C/C++ meetup. I took the opportunity to ask Matt about the Austin C/C++ meetup. |
(10:12:16 PM) Linear: C or C++: Is there more emphasis on one or the other?
(10:13:16 PM) Matthew Weigel: It’s a mix. We have a few Linux kernel developers who come, and a few old-school Unix developers of other stripes who stick to C.
(10:13:18 PM) linearb: Do you have presentations? or are these just meet and greets.
(10:13:24 PM) Matthew Weigel: no presentations as of yet.willing to host one, but so far no one has been chomping at the bit to give one.
(10:14:25 PM) linearb: Do you think that is because of the suitability of the venues, or do you think that the guys are just looking for an opportunity to get together?
(10:14:46 PM) Matthew Weigel: a bit of both? I mean, some people come strictly for the socialization. Any kind of presentation, I’d want to precede it or follow it with meet’n'greet. With B.B. Rovers we have the back room available, which is sufficiently separate and quiet that presentations are a possibility. The capacity is around 30? we usually have about 10-15 people show up. So, we have room to grow.
(10:18:36 PM) linearb: BB’s seems to be rife with geeks.
(10:18:53 PM) Matthew Weigel: indeed. wireless+beer.
(10:20:55 PM) linearb: How many of BB’s beers have you sampled? Any beer reccommendations ?
(10:21:05 PM) Matthew Weigel: 80+%, but not all of them there. Recommendations: Full Sail Session Lager, Fuller’s ESB, Great Divide Titan IPA
(10:23:40 PM) linearb: so, are you more of a C or C++ guy?
(10:23:50 PM) Matthew Weigel: “meh” :-). at this point I’ve probably actually spent more time working in C, but the current job is C++, so that will change before too long. I’m probably more of a C++ guy, but I also miss C’s simplicity
(10:25:11 PM) linearb: There is a real poetry about it. What are your favorite C/C++ books?
(10:26:43 PM) Matthew Weigel: for C, The C Programming Language, and The Practice of Programming, and for C++, Effective C++. The Practice of Programming isn’t really about C, it just uses C to illustrate a lot of points (along with awk, Perl, and Java)… but the C is the best.
(10:28:20 PM) linearb: Effective C++ seemed to spawn a bunch of similar books for other languages.
(10:29:24 PM) Matthew Weigel: the important part about the Effective C++ books (there are at least 3, but I’ve only read one) is that they’re written by Scott Meyers
(10:31:15 PM) linearb: I was thinking about Effective Perl Programming, Effective Java
(10:32:01 PM) Matthew Weigel: hehe, wow
(10:32:16 PM) linearb: and all the other books influenced by Meyer’s books
(10:32:53 PM) linearb: Although I don’t expect to see Effective Haskell anytime soon.
(10:33:06 PM) Matthew Weigel: parse error
(10:34:26 PM) linearb: So back to the meeting, do you find that meetup works for helping coordinate the meetings? Can you get contact info for the members? or does all communication have to be mediated through meetup?
(10:34:39 PM) Matthew Weigel: it works pretty well.Enough people use meetup that there’s a stream of newcomers, and meetup.com provides a mailing list, tools to track who has RSVP’ed and who’s active/inactive
(10:34:40 PM) linearb: So when is the next meeting and what is the linkedin page?
(10:34:54 PM) Matthew Weigel: 3/18 the URL is http://c.meetup.com/48/
(10:35:15 PM) linearb: Hey, thanks for the info.
(11:36:12 PM) linearb: hey, so do you know that joke? : “Two C strings walk into a bar….
(11:03:53 PM) Matthew Weigel: the first one says “I’d like a beer, please098u807g23pdhoenueuth,,.’ and the second one says “you’ll have to excuse my friend, he’s not NULL-terminated”
(11:04:20 PM) linearb: hehe, that’s the one
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Ed Schipul is the CEO and president of Schipul–The Web Marketing Company. Ed will be discussing how to take your non-profit to 11 in his SXSW speech “Pimping My Non-Profit–Real Non-Profits Kicking Ass with Online Technology.” |
MICHELLE:
Your SxSW Interactive Speech is called, “Pimp My Non Profit — Real Non-Profits Kicking Ass with Online Technology.” Does this perhaps involve putting TV screens in head consoles or in car trunks? How does one pimp a non-profit?
ED:
Man, you COMPLETELY nailed it! We have taken the concept of “LCD Screen in headrest”, with obligatory neon green highlights, and extended it into the social sector. People serving food at the soup kitchens will literally have the LCD screens mounted on their backs on neon green harnesses. We predict the level of pimp will be so fresh even the food will be fresher! Perhaps a small segment may go so far as to embed the units surgically, excluding subwoofers, but we will be satisfied if the fresh soup action is worn like typical pimp bling. Word.
OK, seriously though. Social media, and in particular widgets, have truly enabled rapid response at a low cost for non profits online. It is no longer an issue to raise money online as you can add a chipin widget to your blog. Or paypal. Or coordinate your events with moveon or meetup or any number of other services. So great, now we CAN do it, but how exactly? What are the actual best practices so the donor dollar goes to the cause, so the volunteers time and commitment are maximized, so the stress is the lowest and so the return on investment of social media can be returned in the form of bottom line results for non profits.
When we say “pimp your nonprofit” we specifically mean leveraging new media tools to create best of class bottom line results. And keep in mind most non profits have two bottom lines – one for the financials and one for the real goals of the nonprofit; the social issue. This is exciting stuff and our panelists are amazing. Specifically I will be joined by these four amazing social change makers:
Beth Kanter, bethkanter.org
Rachel Weidinger, Strategy for Social Entrepreneurs and on Netsquared here.
Michaela Hackner, Girls with Macs and World Learning.
Erin Denny, Netsquared
Be prepared for our panel to take a stand on recommendations. To look at real world case studies. To speak with candor about what works and what doesn’t. And to listen with humility to the audience who will also likely have some amazing ideas to benefit the group. Did I mention I am excited about this?
MICHELLE:
Speaking of pimping non-profits, what is NetSquared?
ED:
The official mission is to “spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations.” The Houston meetup group has extended this a bit to be an organization at the intersection of social issues and technology. And we have had some success connecting speakers to technologists to affect change. Sometimes it is as simple as SEO consulting for an organization. Other times groups like the Accessibility Internet Rally have joined forces with Netsquared to create complete accessible web sites for non profits.
And frankly it is also nice to meet with a group of people that speak the language and CARE about social issues. So perhaps the greatest success has been in connecting and encouraging dialog on social issues within the tech community. There is more to life than the latest startup. Seeing the success of organizations like http://www.savethecenter.org/ which in combination with a grass roots and a coordinated PR campaign literally saved The Center Serving Persons with Mental Retardation in Houston. That just makes you feel good. Netsquared was only a small part of the effort, but we were able to be a part of the solution.
The winner of last year’s netsquared conference was www.maplight.org which shines a light on money and politics. Another winner was http://www.freecycle.org/ - these are just very exciting and simple ideas that are affecting change. So yes, I am pretty excited about Netsquared!
MICHELLE:
You grew a mustache to help raise money for the Texas Children’s Hospital, but you did not win the contest. What is your strategy for next year, and do you have any potential mustache plans for SxSW?
ED:
Short of changing my genetics, I have little hope of winning this contest next year. So in the spirit of tilting at windmills I am ignoring these odds and moving forward with three courses of action.
When Ed is not acting as a John for various non-profits, he also runs his own internet marketing firm in Houston and speaks on various topics in social media. Are you having a hard time convincing your friends to come to South by Southwest Interactive? Read Ed’s writings on the three motivations of people to learn how to persuade them against being so lame.
*picture of Ed Schipul courtesy of Deneyterrio.
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Design is taking a new direction as websites become less like entertainment and news and more like applications for people to use. At the forefront of this shift is Microsoft’s User Experience Evangelist Chris Bernard, who is speaking this year at South by Southwest Interactive. You can find Chris at the finals of Microsoft’s Phizzpop Challenge at their SxSW after party. |
MICHELLE:
In your blog, http://chrisbernard.blogs.com, you write, “De Stijl, Bauhaus, Futurism. The short history of design is filled with a lexicon of terms and movements that inspire designers of today.” How can GeekAustin designers use the design and cultural cues of the past to improve their work everyday?
CHRIS:
We traditionally think of Web design with a focus on typography and illustration, which are important components of graphic design and are certainly important for the Web. But symbolism and photography and the study of film and motion were an important part of the classic design lexicon too. Take folks the Charles and Ray Eames, they pioneered a lot of the design principles we use in the realm of Web and software design today, but they also were product designers and adept at the use of film and motion as a communications medium too. Symbolism was an important part of their work when you examine both how they lived and how they structured and shaped some of the iconic forms they are known for. Today we see all this disciplines manifesting themselves in the current high-water mark of interaction design, which is the iPhone. When we look at next general platforms such as Surface and gesture-based computing designers that have knowledge of these disciplines will become far more important.
But you don’t need to be inventing the future to embrace these disciplines. Firms like Happy Cog and Coudal partners frequently apply their creative backgrounds in photography, film and motion to their work and in applying how they solve problems.
MICHELLE:
Why will there be blood with Web 3.0?
CHRIS:
The great promise of the Web, which I think has largely been delivered, is a common standards-based way which we can all build against. Nicholas Carr (blog) equates the ubiquity and power of the internet or network to be a breakthrough on the scale of electricity and the electrical grid. If we agree with this I think we can say that the Web browser in this equation is the light bulb. Everyone needs a light bulb, but there are other things they want to plug into platform too, such as phones, televisions, etc. What we’re going to see over time is a complementary merge of open standards, de facto standards and proprietary standards. It’s going to be difficult for enterprises or individuals to firmly ensconce themselves in one camp or the other exclusively I think, but I also don’t think people will pay much attention to it as market dynamics and sovereigns will exert significant presume on providers to optimize experiences. We’re seeing that today with debates about data-portability for example but we’re also seeing it with the browser itself. As marketers play a larger role in subsidizer or creating much of the content we consume in the digital realm there will be a strong urge to optimize across multiple platforms. So for example, if you’re Sony Pictures, you might very well sell DVDs and Blu-Ray disks but you’ll be developing your own digital distribution properties and establishing agreements with proprietary parties that are de facto standards like iTunes.
MICHELLE:
Your SxSW Interactive speech is called “Hollywood and Design and Literature: Just Who is Inspiring Who?” So, who is inspiring who?
CHRIS:
Blade Runner just celebrated its 25th anniversary this last November. Talk to anyone in advertising or interaction design and it’s hard not to find folks that draw inspiration from movies like that or literature from the likes of William Gibson or Neal Stephenson. More recently we’ve seen concepts that are real today (gesture-based computing and multi-touch interfaces) shown in movies like Minority Report, The Island and Children of men become reality. In fact some of the more notable artists that create these visions, artists like Mark Coleran for example, actual transcend both mediums, working in special effects and in software design. In Microsoft’s Surface team for example we recruit very heavily from creative disciplines that focus on animation, composition and motion design and it you look at the new APIs that Windows users for UI, WPF, I think we’ll eventually see the value of those disciplines start to be applied tom more mundane uses.
MICHELLE:
What are you looking forward to most at South by Southwest Interactive?
CHRIS:
The thing I’m most looking forward to at South by Southwest is a discussion around the massive convergence we’re seeing in marketing, social media and (although it’s not quite there yet) what I would call rich internet or rich interactive experiences. I’ve also got a personal interest in what the convergence of the media and internet means for film distribution, main independent film. SxSW is always a good place to chat with folks about that.
MICHELLE:
GeekAustin is looking to do a site redesign. Any suggestions?
CHRIS:
Hmmm, where to start. I think working a bit on the contrast might be a good a good start. One of my favorite sites in terms of design and approachability is www.designobserver.com. It’s simple, clean and the design doesn’t step on the
content. I think Web sites that work best are those that don’t get in the way of the content. Much like a museum doesn’t get in the way of the artifacts it’s designed to represent.
MICHELLE:
Please insert not so shameless plug here.
CHRIS:
One of the things that I’m very excited about is that we get to continue an event we started last year called the PhizzPop Design Challenge. In this event we structured a bit of a design
‘grand challenge’ (albeit a very short one) in which we got 36 design firms from around the country (San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Austin, LA and Boston) to compete against each other solving a variety of technology oriented design problems that ranged from designing a hotel concierge system, to a better social media platform and even an online independent film festival. All of the winners from those events will be competing against each other at SxSW for the PhizzPop 2008 championship. For GeekAustin folks that will be at SxSW, the PhizzPop Design Challenge will be a great event to check out on Monday night, March 11th at Maggie Mae’s.
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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.
