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I first became acquainted with David Neff, the local director of Web, film and interactive strategies for the American Cancer Society, through the his participation in the Social Media Club of Austin. David has both a background in programming and public relations. At SXSW08, David a panel called The Future of Volunteers: Adapt or Die. Now that the dust has settled from SXSW08, I caught up with David to find out about his latest project: |
Lynn Bender: Tell us about SharingHope.TV
David Neff: SharingHope.TV is one of the first User Gernerated Content Communities built by a non-profit. On the community anyone can share video, audio, photos and artwork about their cancer experience.
Bender: The first? That is surprising. CMSs have been around for almost a decade.
Neff: Ahh but not one’s around User Generated Content — at least not video, photos and artwork.
Bender: Did you build the system from the ground up, or did you start with an existing framework — like drupal or jive? How many developers were involved, and how long did it take to complete the project?
Neff: We had 3 developers involved and they were all local Austin talent. The site was completed in around 6 months which was a record turnaround for us!
Bender: I find it hard to believe that the site was the work of three guys. It’s an incredible site.
Neff: The entire site was built in PHP5 on the ZenD framework while our entire registration system was built on Ruby. The API for the flash encoding and player as well as other calls was purchased off the shelf from a company called VMIX. Ian Mouton was the php programmer and Tom Brown our OpenID and Ruby expert. If you need a Rails person here in town check out Tom Brown. Our web designer was Nicole DeZalia who works for us here at the American Cancer Society, I was just the brainchild and project manager. We are running SharingHope.TV on Slicehost and on Ubuntu Gusty. Slicehost has been an amazing provider.
Bender: Did you start with more or less a complete set of specifications, or did you modify the specs as you were building out the site?
Neff: Oh we modified the heck out of it. We knew we wanted certain things such as categories to group media, openID support, Creative Common licensing of materials, etc but it was very fluid. We are totally in love with OpenID.
BenderCan you tell me a bit about the pros and cons of OpenID? I’ve heard mostly praise, but a little grumbling as well. It seems that adoption by service provider is growing much faster than adoption by the user base.
Neff: Although I am not an OpenID expert I know that the average user is really tired of signing up for u/p u/p u/p again and again. Even here at the American Cancer Society you had to have diff logins for all our Web properties. From one message board to another, etc. OpenID really helps us solve that problem for the avg user. Now it’s up to us to educate them. We plan to implement it on all our Web properties in the next year and half.
Bender: If you had to start the project again from scratch, is there anything you would have done differently? What advice do you have for folks considering similar projects?
Neff: yes I hope we can at least get our employees and volunteers on board to help that adoption. I would say that if you have to invest in one form of “Web 2.0″ technology (and I do hate that term) it should be user generated content. Listening to your constituents and what they have to say is one of the most important things any non-profit for for-profit can do. We have built a community for people to share their cancer experiences in digital form and that will give other hope.
Bender: A couple of questions regarding non-profits. Several houston-based social media experts, like Erica O’Grady and Ed Schipel, say that Austin is a huge center for non-profit activity. Do you find this to be the case as well, and if so, to what do you attribute that?
Neff: I would say that would be true to an extent. I think it has to do a lot with our “Social Good” attitude in Austin. We are a very caring and friendly city. Also being near the capital has a lot of advocacy benefits when it comes to influencing laws. I do wish more people came to the 501 Tech Club here in town. Imagine Geeks and Non-profits folks (I’m both) meeting and sharing ideas.
Bender: Tell me more about the 501 club in Austin. Is that similar to NetSquared?
Neff: yes very similar except I think we have livlier discussions.
Bender: A few of my friends who do fund raising often tell me that it is easier to ask for $10,000 than $100. However, looking at the campaigns of Barack Obama and Ron Paul, I’m not sure that is still the case. With respect to cancer research, organizations like the Susan Komen Foundation seem to be proving that to be no longer the case as well. Are the new tools we have at our disposal changing the non-profits in fundamental ways?
Neff: Oh yeah we totally see the rise the the micro-donation and the micro-volunteer. We have people donating in Linden Dollars in Second Life. So, yes we see the rise of the micro-donation to be very important. In fact every video on SharingHope.TV has donations tied into it. We think that is a first to tie online video into donations. Will it work only time will tell?
Bender: Can you tell me something about the role of the Creative Commons in sharinghope.tv? You seem to have given it prominent mention.
Neff: Yes we really really want to honor the wishes of the media creators on www.sharinghope.tv. — meaning that we give them 4 options to license their materials. We also found a bunch of local bands and bands from San Diego that have licenesed their music for people to use in their videos on the site. The options we give people are listed here: http://www.sharinghope.tv/creative-commons and the music we offer them to use (so we don’t get sued like YouTube) is can be found here: http://www.sharinghope.tv/music.php.
Bender: What kind of opportunities are their for folks who may not have money to donate, but would be willing to code for a good cause? I remember that the League of Technical Voters codeathon attracted over 50 coders who devoted a weekend.
Neff: I know I was very jealous! We have a host of “Dream projects” that we need help on from updating old asp pages to helping us implement new API’s on SharingHope.TV
Bender: Do you have any specs online for these unfinished projects?
Neff: no but I could do that or have people contact me if they are interested. There is a views API and a plays API that we need to put on SharingHope.TV but would love to find a coder to volunteer to do that. We are also looking for someone to just help us make minor php tweaks
Bender: Well, if you put up a specs page, I’m sure that quite a few of us would be happy to link to it.
Neff: Consider that done. I know the VMIX API has a dev wiki as well. Also I am just looking for coders to blog about it in general for publicity and to let people know about the site — to show off all our tech….non profits can do cutting edge technical work as well!
Bender: you mentioned that you were the project manager. I’m finding more and more that the key skills to have are no longer having a knowledge of data structures and algorithms but rather a knowledge of scoping and managing projects. How does this compare with your experience?
Neff: What you are saying is very true. I can’t code PHP worh a crap but I can read it and help people stay on track. Scoping is a skill all int itself today. Currently I am the Director of Web, Film and Interactive Strategy. So I come from a Web Development and Communications background. Which is nice to be able to understand and write code and talk about it.
Bender: You spoke at SXSWi this year. How was your panel experience at SXSW?
Neff: Oh I love SXSW. Hugh and the folks do such a good job. We did a panel on the Future of Volunteers and where we need to be in 5 years to recruit them and keep them interested. As you might imagine that will involve a ton of digital outreach. Check out the video here: http://www.fispace.org/home/2008/03/adapt-or-die-th.html
Bender: Our audience is pretty geeky. Any new projects in the works that you can tell us about?
Neff: Oh I know your audience is geeky! That’s why I read it and I love the happy hours. I recommend them and 501 tech club all the time. As far as new things we are swamped right now coding out all the specs on SharingHope.tv and just telling people about it. If you know anyone with cancer please point them our way. We are here to help!
Bender: David. Thanks for your time.
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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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If you ever wanted to have a free 5 day drunk, this is the year for it. I have never seen so much corporate money poured into sxsw since 2000. Hey, remember 2000? It was right before 2001. |
If you can resist the free corporate booze that is going to be thrust in your direction every night, you’ll be witness to the largest SXSW Interactive Austin has ever seen. There are so many evening events, both official and unofficial, many of my friends are already resigned to the frustration that there is no way to be all the places they want to be. Imagine having a ticket to disneyland, and only an afternoon to visit. Aside from everything going on in the daytime, just look at all the parties.
(10:46:44 AM)linearb@gmail.com/Home: I was thinking of tagging all the corp parties at SXSWi “corp booze”
(10:46:57 AM) linearb@gmail.com/Home: then linking to the tag in GA
(10:47:08 AM) linearb@gmail.com/Home: but then thought nahhh, bad idea
(10:47:21 AM) whurley: rofl
(10:47:23 AM) whurley: you’re so back :D
Many of the parties will require SXSWi admission. For everyone who has bitched about the price of SXSWi admission, check out the cost of other similar tech events O’Reilly’s ETech is a couple thou — and the big cherry TED conference is about ten thou (if you’re lucky enough to get an invite). Think how much liquor you will be pouring down every night at SXSW. Yes You. Now imagine if you had to pay for that liquor. Now, look at me with a straight face and bitch about the price of admission.
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SXSW is featuring Mark Zuckerberg as a keynote speaker. Whenever the subject of Facebook and Zuckerberg in particular comes up in everyday geek conversation, the words “punk” and “lucky” tend to come up quite a bit. Perhaps I have a different perspective, because a.) I have never coded anything, so there’s not much for me to be jealous of and b.) Zuckerberg still manages to remind me of a nice geeky guy I would bum physics notes from in high school, so I cut him some slack. |
Let’s evaluate why the average hard working geek would want to jump Mark Zuckerberg:
1.) Wired speculated that his net worth was somewhere around 1.5 billion dollars. Granted, this number came out in July before the whole Microsoft/Facebook media blitzkrieg, but this still puts his salary at 22,727 times the median salary for developers in this area. Zuckerberg is all of 23, in case you didn’t catch the “6o Minutes” special.
2.) We’ve all Googled ourselves. We all want backlinks. When Zuckerberg looks at Facebook’s backlinks, he can see that there are approximately 452, 000 to date. Who wouldn’t want all the delicious press associated with 452,000 backlinks?
3.) That whole “Hey, you jacked our idea and are now making stupid money” ordeal that’s still going on.
4.) Who honestly wants to be zombified or turned into a pirate?
Pimpin’ Facebook Ain’t Easy
Although it seems like Facebook can do no wrong with their incredible developer network, there is an unfortunate side effect of starting a site where people just want to unassumingly keep up with their friends. It’s hard to make money with it. With Beacon still in need of a major overhaul and all eyes on him for an IPO date, it looks like Zuckerberg has his hands full with Facebook.
Can SXSW goers learn by watching Zuckerberg speak? I sure hope so. Just leave the eggs and various projectiles at home.
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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.
