Nick Finck

Top User Experience Design Panels for SXSW Interactive 2010
Aug 24th, 2009

Now that SXSW Interactive has opened the panel picker for the 2010 event and seeing how many panels there were to sift through I had a hard time trying to find the gems in the mix.  So, inspired partly by SXSW Design, I decided to create a list of panels that have been submitted that focus specifically on user experience design (i.e. UXD is more than just a bullet point that is covered in the panel, and often is the central focus of the panel).

So here it is, my guide to the top user experience panels for SXSW 2010 I broke the panels out into ten groups, namely User Experience in General, User Experience Careers, Teams & Evangelism, Optimization & Conversion, Analytics, User Research, Usability & User-Centered Design, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Content Strategy, Social Media, and Mobile User Experience.  I felt visual design was pretty well covered on the SXSW Design other site so I left those out of the mix.  If you see a session you like go ahead and click on the thumbs up icon to vote for it.  Voting will help ensure the panel makes it into the SXSW Interactive 2010 program.

User Experience in General

An Introduction to User Experience

Mike Dunn

Some describe it as making things enjoyable and easy to use. Others describe it as all of the elements that impact one’s perception of a product or system. From information architecture, to user research, to user testing, this presentation is about what UX (User Experience) is and why it should be an integral part of every website or application project.

Experience Design: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

Jessica Petersen

We interact with interfaces on a daily basis. Some of the experiences we have are great. Others are shockingly poor. What makes a good experience and why? What makes a bad experience? How do user experience designers identify both? What can we learn from the good experiences to improve the bad ones? This will be an interactive discussion. Come with your thinking caps on and ready to learn!

Re-Invent the Wheel!: Redesigning your Design Process

Christopher Fahey

It’s the start of a new project. You’ve got requirements, guidelines, data, research. Now what? Like an artist staring at a blank canvas, designers of interactive products often don’t know where to start. Instead of following a rigid methodology or waiting for the perfect idea to appear out of the blue, designers must invent new tools and tricks to foster real UX innovation.

Strategic User Experience: Not Just for Products Anymore

Karen Bachmann

The success of an organization is no longer measured by many or even happy customers and users. The relationships have changed. Successful organizations cultivate advocates and partners with a strategic approach to the total user experience. Panelists will discuss the culture and practices required for a total user experience strategy.

The Ten Commandments of User Experience

Nick Finck & Raina Van Cleave

User experience is the result of your interactions with a product or service, specifically how it’s delivered and its related artifacts according to the design. In this presentation we will explain how following the ten commandments can boost your project’s ease of use, appeal, conversion rates, and more. Longer version: User experiences are your everyday experiences—anything from operating a car, to making a pot of coffee, to ordering a pair of shoes online. User experience is the result of your interactions with a product or service, specifically how it’s delivered and its related artifacts according to the design. In this presentation Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave will explore the ten characteristics of a great user experience. They will cover all aspects of user experience design such as user research, information architecture, information design, technical writing, interaction design, visual design, brand identity design, accessibly, usability and web analytics. Nick and Raina will also explain how following the ten commandments can boost your web sites, web app, or mobile app’s ease of use, appeal, conversion rates, and more.

User Experience Without Design

John Zeratsky

Web user experience is virtually synonymous with design. But there are plenty of other factors that will make or break the user experience of your web-based product, service, or publication. This presentation introduces holistic user experience design and proposes a number of ways to improve the user experience… without design.

User Experience Careers, Teams & Evangelism

Creating a User Experience “SWAT Team”

Joseph Dickerson

With increased demand for UX professionals often comes increased pressure - multiple projects and stakeholders vying for limited resources. How to cope? In this panel, Joe Dickerson, User Experience Architect for Fiserv, discusses methods that can help you to build a UX “SWAT Team” to adapt to this pressure.

Career Wayfinding: Tools and Techniques for UX Professionals

Margaret Stewart

UX professionals enter their professionals from all sorts of angles. And many dabble in several “careers” throughout their life time. So what does it mean to help yourself and members of your team through “career planning”? A seasoned creative manager will share concrete tools to chart career goals for yourself and your team.

Demonstrating the Value of User Experience Design

Jessica Petersen

Are you a User Experience Designer who feels undervalued in your organization? Are your decisions constantly questioned? Are you at a loss as to how to demonstrate the value of what you bring to the table and earn the trust of your colleagues? We will offer you some great tips on how to diplomatically demonstrate your value and earn trust in your organization.

Leveraging Animation in Communicating the User Experience

Kate Ertmann

The User Experience is the wave-of-the-future in transforming ideas into next-generation products and services. Learn how animation can be leveraged as a key strategy in communicating this human-centered research to decision makers, venture capitalists and customers. This presentation will discuss important considerations as well as two real-world case studies.

Before Giving Up: Your Users Desperately Need You

Lance Christmann

Why is it that businesses – large and small have a hard time implementing basic, obvious improvements to their user experience? Why have you given up hope that any good ideas will ever make it to your company’s end user? Learn why companies are having a hard time adopting UX practices and how to cut through the political ‘red tape’ by employing strong collaborating and socialization techniques to radically transform the customer experience.

Optimization & Conversion

The Neurobiology of Optimal Human Design

Ben Sykes

We’ll examine the biology of the human experience, the triggers employed to create an optimal experience as it relates to interface design, marketing, and retail spaces, and how to integrate these common factors into ones product to impact positive emotional association, memory, and thus increase conversions.

Slacker Website Triage: Addressing Purpose, Usability and Conversion

Pat Scherer

How well does your website perform its purpose? Our panel will walk through examples submitted by the audience to discuss the fine points of designing sites around audience, purpose, usability and conversion.

Designing the First Fifteen Minutes

Rob Goodlatte

That user who just signed up is about to bail. And a thousand other people just stopped in but didn’t even bother to register. Your product is great, but your users don’t stay long enough to find that out. The first fifteen minutes of your product are the most important. Learn from the successes, mistakes, and insights of designing new user experiences for products.

Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!

Andy Budd

So you’ve designed a great product, fixed a stack of usability problems and spent a fortune on marketing. The only problem is, people aren’t using it. In this session you will learn how to get your users to do what you want them to through good design, human psychology and a touch of mind control.

Beyond the Click: Converting Website Visitors into Customers

Ayat Shukairy

For an online business, persuading visitors to purchase your product or service is crucial to increasing sales. Using the science and art of analytics analysis, marketing, usability and software, discover how the Conversion Framework approach can convert online visitors into customers such as RHDJapan and Metro Uniforms.

On User Experience Design… and Screenwriting

Joseph Dickerson

All the people who practice user experience design are all, to some extent, screenwriters. All the ideas used to create affective designs and the best possible user experience - domain research to understand users needs and motivations, create representative personas and user stories… all of this is what our best screenwriters do as well.

Analytics

Finding Insights In Data

Whitney Hess

Do you have any idea what your users are actually doing on your site? Are they getting their needs met? Are they doing what you want them to? In this session you’ll learn how to use web analytics to design better user experiences and ultimately improve your bottom line.

Data, Data, Everywhere: Drowning in a Sea of Analytics

Marissa Goldsmith

A Web site gives a nonprofit access to data that makes old school direct marketers salivate. But many organizations find themselves getting bogged down in producing graphs every month, obsessing over drops in pageviews, throwing their hands up on the air, and deciding they don’t have enough resources to maintain this kind of analytics analysis. Stop obsessing about the small stuff, and start learning about creating a goal-oriented, actionable analytics plan that can help your Web site thrive.

What Are Analytics? A Guide To Practical Data

Blake Robinson

Analytics are often a confusing and convoluted mess, but that doesn’t mean that they have to be. The Guide to Practical Data will help ensure you’re reaching your full analytical potential. Learn how to analyze public and proprietary data to accelerate the success of any initiative. Featuring detailed demonstrations from top bloggers, corporate execs and analysts.

Site Search Analytics

Marko Hurst

When it comes to understanding users both User Experience & Web Analytics are inherently flawed by focusing on only 1/2 the story: Motivation & Behavior. If you want to make the best design decisions possible you need to develop a complete user model and the only way to do that is to combine your qualitative & quantitative data. learn how by applying simple techniques of Site Search Analytics you can inform and improve: Design, SEO, SEM, IA, Navigation, Metadata, Content, etc. to deliver a superior user experience.

User Research, Usability & User-Centered Design

FAIL: When User Research Goes Horribly, Horribly Wrong

Steve Portigal

Best practices for user research are not hard to come by, but experience is the ideal way to develop mastery. And with experience inevitably comes failure. Embarrassing, awkward, hilarious failure that gives the gift of self-improvement. We’ll share our own unvarnished examples and what they taught us.

All About Audience: Improving User Experience

Brenda Huettner

Whether you’re preparing a presentation, designing software, or writing a pitch, you must understand your audience in order to create a compelling experience for them. This presentation covers the basics of audience analysis, including personas, ethnographic research, task matrices, and other elements from the technical communication and usability toolkits.

My Three-Year Old Is My Usability Expert

Dave Stanton

Children are perfect testers for the innate usability of visual structures. Learn how neuroscience and cognitive psychology research can make your designs and interfaces more intuitive.

Earning and Keeping Your User’s Trust

Carl Smith

People often talk about usability and learnability when discussing web and application development. Things have to be intuitive and familiar to increase conversions and trial… blah blah blah. All of this is really important. But what does it really boil down to? It’s all a matter of trust.

The Human Interface (or: Products are People, Too!)

Christopher Fahey

More and more, users are interacting with web sites and software on a conversational, physical, psychological, and emotional level—just like we’ve always interacted with other people. UX designers, then, must stop thinking about interfaces as dumb control panels and begin using technology to envision interfaces (literally!) as human beings.

Practical Digital Anthropology: Getting to Know Your Users

Marc Vermut

Most modern analytics attempt to boil complex behaviors down to statistics; but is that the whole story? Are your design decisions informed by actual behaviors, instead of near approximations? We present digital anthropology: practical, high-touch techniques that will give you an edge in understanding what really makes your users tick.

What Can Carl Sagan Teach Us About The Web?

Mark Trammell

2010 is the 30th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Not only is his explanation of our universe relevant today, it can teach us a great deal about how to create better websites.

Information Architecture

The Right Way to Wireframe

Russ Unger

This session will provide a step-by-step explanation of how four designers in the User Experience space approach wireframes. An external resource will provide clear business requirements to the UX designers. Each UX designer will choose their own tool for exploring the requirements via wireframes and specifications. In addition, each UX designer will work with their own graphic designer of choice for visual design exploration. Each UX designer will present their results and fully detail their process and their final deliverables to the audience. The audience will be provided ample time to critique and ask questions of the UX designers.

Devil in the Details: Wireframe Fidelity

Mike Dunn

Wireframes can be executed in many different ways; From hand-drawn napkin doodles to very precise layouts. Is one better than the other? When is the right time to do a sketchy wireframe versus a high-fidelity one? When should you take it to the next level and turn it into a functional prototype? As the nature of the web and the way we use it changes and adapts to advances in technology, so too do we need to change and adapt how we define user experiences on the web. Wireframing needs may differ from project to project, and it is vital to retain a level of flexibility when determining your approach.

User Experience Design Deliverables: Expert’s Choice

Lilia Manguy

A myriad of user experience deliverables are available to the UXD practitioner: sitemaps, interaction diagrams, wireframes, storyboards, and much more. But which are most effective for capturing the design concept, process, and vision? A panel of veteran designers share their preferred sets of deliverables and give pointers for choosing yours.

Rough Wireframes and Clickable Prototypes

Vitorio Miliano

Wireframes support iterating on page, interface and interaction designs without getting caught up in the visual design. Learn how we used Balsamiq Mockups’ “hand-drawn” wireframes on client engagements, and how custom tools (soon-to-be-released as open source) added the flexibility of HTML and JavaScript prototyping without losing the low-fidelity look.

Interaction Design

Work Smart: Dynamic Prototyping with Sketchflow

Sara Summers

Building prototypes in same medium as the final product is something other industries have done forever. Sketchflow in Expression 3 offers real collaboration and live solutions. Remove ‘fuzziness’ from meetings, with lo-fi, interactive prototypes. Showcase instant value with rich, tangible, interactive narratives. Dynamic process allows you to: test instantly, FEEL and share the user experience and keep ideas light and non-destructive. It’s time to take frustration out of your work!

Rapid Development - Where’s The UX?

Preston McCauley

This presentation takes a look at the skills, techniques,and problems that face UI & UX designers as they work in a tight AGILE process. The goal is to provide some direction and help to those thrown into this situation and lost as to where to go.

The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions

Stephen Anderson

Usability? Meh. Let’s talk about persuasion. Are you designing serendipity, arousal, rewards and other seductive elements into your applications? We’ll discuss specific ways that sites like Dopplr, iLike and LinkedIn leverage basic human psychology to motivate and shape online behaviors.

Add Some XBOX to Your UX

Josh Knowles

Tricks and techniques from the game design world can be applied to non-games—social apps, creative tools, etc.—to improve user experience, user enjoyment, and results. We’ll look at traditional UX in a new light: from the perspective of games and gamers (and zombies, aliens, and goombas).

Prototyping Web Apps - Nobody Loves a Wireframe

Michael Leggett

Wireframes and mocks aren’t enough on their own. Functional specs are boring. We’ve found prototypes to be an incredible tool for bringing a design spec or concept to life. Learn how to make and present prototypes to improve all stages of the design and development cycle.

Content Strategy

Content Strategy FTW

Kristina Halvorson

11th hour copy. Fix-it-later launches. Our users deserve more than the last-minute content we often get stuck with. And you have the power to change the game. Learn how to introduce (and sell) content strategy into your web design process.

Designers Aren’t Writers: Why You Need a Content Person

Roby Fitzhenry

Small and mid-size design firms don’t have the resources to employ teams of writers and information architects on their projects. However, with a confident team of two (one writer and one designer), boutique firms can conquer any project and deliver a compelling user experience that fits the brand visually and contextually. This dual preso will give insight into the collaborative process a designer and writer should take to deliver the gold.

Will User-Generated Content Wipe Out Technical Writers?

Sarah O’Keefe

Official technical documentation competes for attention against user-generated content. If organizations want their information to be relevant, they must shorten publishing cycles, allow readers to comment and modify documentation, and increase the candor of their documentation. Otherwise, users will ignore the professional content.

Making Content Relevant To Me, Here And Now

David Maher Roberts

In a world where content is available anywhere, at any time, users will consume more content if relevant and personalized… based on location, time, entourage, tastes and mood. The panel will talk through practical examples of using data to better match relevant content to users and increase consumption.

Oh, Go Service Yourself! Interactive Content for Humans

Colleen Jones

You know the self service schpiel. It lowers support costs and lets customers take care of their own needs, on their own time. Designed well, interactive self service makes everyone happy. More often, it frustrates and confuses users. On any platform for any industry, improve content and design practices—and take self service from sucky to super.

Social Media

Social Design for Enterprise 2.0

Adina Levin

Enterprise 2.0 adapts Web 2.0 software for organizations. There are significant differences in social design patterns between the public internet and private organizations. Differences include identity, groups, “friending”, object-sharing, scale, adoption, privacy, and administration. This session helps you think through the design, evaluation, rollout and adoption of Enterprise 2.0 software.

SocialMania: Designing Social Interfaces - The Game

Erin Malone

Learn about designing social interfaces through interactive, collaborative gameplay. Players will use interaction patterns, principles, anti-patterns, and lucky cards to design a social experience and deliver the best product before time runs out. Teams will collaborate, but have to watch out for other teams who may sabotage their efforts.

Mobile User Experience

Making the Mobile User Experience Simpler

Giles Colborne

Mobile interfaces offer the greatest challenge to interactive designers and product managers. But why is it so hard to create simple interfaces? Do you think simplicity means removing features or reducing options? This presentation overturns those myths and at last gives clear rules backed up with examples.

Time + Social + Location. What’s Next In Mobile Experiences?

Josh Babetski

As more devices become location aware, social uses will continue to evolve beyond just who and what, to WHEN. Adding the temporal dimension creates new opportunities for social interaction. Learn about ways to leverage and use technology to add features at the intersection of temporal, social, and location.

Mobile Technology: What’s New, What’s Out, What’s Next?

Anup Murarka

There’s lots of talk about creating engaging experiences for consumers on their mobile phones… but what’s the reality? Hear some of the industry’s top players as they hash out what’s hot with mobile technology, what needs to be changed, and what the future holds.