2:00 PM
to 3:00 PM
Your Meetings Suck and It's Your Fault
171 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Kevin Hoffman, Kevin M Hoffman
event::about Your meetings are stale, remote, and awkward conversations. You know you rock, but not everyone in your meetings is rocking to the same tune. Sometimes you aren't even sure you are in the same rock band anymore. After having one too many unproductive (and occasionally sleepy) meetings, Happy Cog reinvented it's approach to meeting design around interactive activities, informed conversation, and collaborative design exercises. Happy Cog’s Experience Director Kevin M. Hoffman will review the key ideas from the history of meeting design and good facilitiation, then explore approaches for meetings that have proven engaging and successful to Happy Cog clients. This talk will cover business strategy and project definition activities, conflict resolution processes, big group/small group conversation management, simple research engagements, deliverable presentations, and finally, post mortems. Many expamples will be pulled from Happy Cog's meeting approaches for clients like ecommerce (Zappos, Groupon), tourism (VisitPhilly.com), higher education (Georgetown University, MICA), and museums (the National Holocaust Museum).
3:30 PM
to 4:30 PM
Play at Work: Agile Games for Productive Teams
75 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Alon Salant, Christian Nelson
event::about Get together with other conference attendees and play games in this unique participatory interaction. If you are curious about Agile development and want an insider view of the activities Agile teams do every day, this session is for you. A special emphasis will be placed on experiential learning through Agile games and exercises, such as "Story Writing" and "Planning Poker," in this hands-on, interactive session. Learn first-hand how games and other Agile tools and techniques can be successfully adopted by project teams, resulting in rapid delivery and improved teamwork. Participants will be strongly encouraged to share their own experiences and learn from each other in this session.
event::tags Solo, #playatwork
5:00 PM
to 6:00 PM
OMG - My Pancreas Just Texted
32 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker John Pettengill
event::about I am not a doctor. I am not a medical researcher or lab technician. I have never watched a complete episode of Grey’s Anatomy. But I am a Type 1 Diabetic. I am just one of 25.8 million Americans with Diabetes. We're all kinda experts on managing chronic disease. Because, really, outside of a doctor’s visit every 6 months or so, we’re the ones doing all the work. No one taught us how to do this. A meeting or two with a dietician isn’t enough, the behavioral changes necessary for those with a chronic disease are wholly unsupported in our current medical system. We have to do something. 7 out of 10 deaths in the US are caused by a chronic disease, and between heart disease and diabetes alone we are, as a nation, hemorrhaging money. Many of these conditions are preventable through lifestyle changes that no doctor can write a prescription for. Doctors like to talk about charts and graphs, blood tests and medicine. Let’s start talking about the patient, the person, instead. Let’s make a disease that you have for life something that’s simply managed every day. Let’s get isolated patients together, talking, trading tips and tricks. We’ll be talking about this (and more) at ‘OMG – My Pancreas Just Texted’.
event::tags Solo, #OMGDiabetes
9:30 AM
to 10:30 AM
It's About Time: Visualizing Temporality
64 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Joanna Wiebe
event::about Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. I agree about the banana, but I'm not so sure about the arrow. What is the shape of time? Our online calendars, clocks and other models of time often are designed with the understanding that time is a forward-moving arrow. This sounds logical to the Western, English-speaking scientific mind. However, not everyone conceptualizes time as a relentless hurtling forward. Some cultures understand time as a fractal, a spiral, a mandala, a cycle. And a child, playing with the same toy over and over again, lives in a single seamless moment from dawn to dusk. Visualizing temporality is a fundamental issue in interaction design today. For example, we are looking at a future where our work must be useful for both Eastern and Western audiences, who differ in time-oriented cultural traits such as long-term vs. short-term orientation. We also need to be able to provide tools to differentiate the personal, bodily-felt experience of time from clock time. We may want to expand our customers' perception of time, to invite them to stay in the Deep Present. Our beliefs about time and its passage profoundly affect the design of software and interactive media. It's time for interaction designers to understand deeply how our customers know time, whether as an arrow, a spiral or a squiggle. How people slice and dice nature into concepts is fundamental to designing tools people can use to successfully live on the earth, for a long time.
event::tags Solo, #temporality
11:00 AM
to 12:00 PM
Believe Me or Your Own Eyes: Eye-Tracking Entertainment
62 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Ania Rodriguez, Jesse Zolna, Kerin Smollen, Karl Steiner
event::about “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes” said Groucho Marx or as the wikiquote page for Groucho tells us, the line was actually spoken by Chico Marx. This panel discussion will focus on the usage of eye-tracking to get quantifiable data to support what users see and what they don’t when they visit entertainment sites (e.g. sports, games, news, or book sites). While many entertainment sites use analytics to get information about user behavior, there is no way to measure the effectiveness of the visual aspect of their site. Users cannot rationally describe what they feel and what makes certain visual elements desirable; eye-tracking can help you measure such metrics. This panel will bring in user experience managers, directors, and/or vice presidents who have an eye-tracking lab or have used eye-tracking consultancies to get data to support the value of photography and video on their site.
event::tags Panel, #KLITracksEyes
12:30 PM
to 1:30 PM
AVAdventure: Digital, Handheld, User-defined Storytelling in Action
27 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Adam Stackhouse, Kelley Quinn
event::about Originating from the "Audio Adventure" series of 1693 Productions in Williamsburg, VA, this unique, one-time storytelling experience uses mobile video devices to take attendees on an interactive journey wherein they define their own narrative. The day of the event, users are sent a link to a hosted video file, instructed to download, and at a predetermined time, press play. As the story begins, users are given instructions, choices, and are introduced to characters creating a experience that is part movie, part concert, and part interactive fiction. The resulting sensation - caught within personal headphones - is compellingly solo and communal simultaneously, and in its miss-it-and-it's-gone temporary existence, distinctly uniting for the participants.
3:30 PM
to 4:30 PM
Designing for Silence: Using Email for Good
71 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker M Jackson Wilkinson
event::about Every service you use bombards you with email. Status updates, notifications, nudges. Whether you call it spam, bac'n, or even just effective, it's certainly annoying. We can do better, though. We can create web apps that get more valuable, not less, when users don't visit every single day, and we can use email in more valuable ways to greater effect. This session will explore a few product and interaction design strategies to embrace this silence between your product and the user. We'll also look at how business models can adapt to value mindshare over visits, and how to surgically use email to it's best effect.
event::tags Solo
5:00 PM
to 6:00 PM
Web Anywhere: Mobile Optimisation With HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript
146 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Bruce Lawson
event::about Web apps, mobile phone apps, websites that work anywhere, SVG, HTML5, Widgets, location-aware sites, Media Queries. Beyond the buzzword assault is a revolution in the way sites are made, what they can do, and how they are accessed. We're going to talk about what the buzzwords actually mean and how they all fit together. We'll explore different methodologies for making websites that users can access on mobile phones and other devices, and how to optimize your existing website for mobile. Then we'll put all the buzzwords together into a coherent vision that works now, with real code snippets that you can use right away. Finally, we get out our crystal balls out and look at what's coming around the corner in HTML5 and the W3C APIs that allow websites to access native capabilities on devices.
event::tags Solo, #html5mobille
9:30 AM
to 10:30 AM
One Codebase, Endless Possibilities: Real HTML5 Hacking
115 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Joe McCann
event::about HTML5 is no question the "buzzword du jour" in tech nowadays, but looking past the vernacular cruft one will discover that the HTML5 technology STACK is actually an incredibly powerful & useful framework for apps well beyond the traditional web browser. Massive companies like Google and Hewlett Packard are placing huge bets on the future of "HTML5 App development". From HP/Palm's WebOS to be used in their mobility products to Google's Chrome OS, HTML5 is not simply another buzzword that can be treated as a mere passing trend, but should actually be taken seriously for app development. But what makes up the HTML5 stack and how will it truly be the future of software? What are the benefits & risks associated with using the HTML5 stack? Prove to me it works. All of these questions & demands will be answered & showcased in the presentation including important issues such as: What constitutes the HTML5 stack Benefits of using the HTML5 stack Use a single codebase Rapidly prototype an app targetting multiple devices including: iPhone, iPad, Android Devices, Chrome OS Devices, Mobile Webkit Browsers, Desktop Browsers Target thousands of developers for extensibility & community development See code & install an actual working HTML5 app that works on a number of devices See code best practices in use for tailoring the UI based on the user's device See code using Phonegap to create native mobile apps See code using Titanium to create native desktop apps
11:00 AM
to 12:00 PM
The Politics Behind HTML5
80 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Charles Mccathie Nevile, John Foliot, Paul Cotton, John Foliot
event::about HTML5 is the flavor of the month. Steve Jobs thinks it will feed his cat, Google thinks it means whatever they think is good, and the rest of us are waiting to discover what (apart from video, better forms, and interoperable parsing on the web) it actually *is* when it's done. Obviously, there is a lot of interest in the next generation of such an important technology, and a lot of discussion about what it will be, how it works, etc. Where the people go, politics follows close behind. From CSSquirrel to MrLastWeek, from the New York Times to bloggers in Kyrgyzstan, people are also watching the politics. And there is a lot of it. On this panel, the people who have been there take you on a guided tour of the (smoky backroom) discussions and deals that shape HTML5, and looks at what is happening now. Where did HTML5 come from? Who were the players, who are the players, and what do they think? Why is X3D not in HTML5 if MathML is? What happened to accesskey, and why are people unhappy? Why does HTML5 have two licenses, and two specs? This panel *won't* answer your questions about how to include HTML5 in your website. It will explore the thorny questions you want to ask but nobody wants to answer, and we'll maybe have a little fun along the way.
event::tags Panel
12:30 PM
to 1:30 PM
Better Crowdsourcing: Lessons Learned From the3six5 Project
42 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
event::about 365 Days. 365 Voices "the3six5" started on January 1st, 2010 and ultimately crowdsourced the story of an entire year from the perspective of a different person each day. The authors come from a variety of backgrounds and geographic locations and together revealed our collective conscious of what took place over the course of 365 days. While the individual tales shared with the public were an amazing result, we'd like to share the learnings and anecdotes that happened behind the scenes of this seemingly simple (but quite the opposite) crowdsourced project that took us from nothing, to a published book. Ranging from an unknown senior citizen in Nashville, TN, to a physicist working at CERN in Switzerland, to major personalities like Baratunde Thurston or Ann Curry, guiding this project and PEOPLE every single day as a mere "side project" to our day jobs taught us many things. Many of our fans and authors often made the point that, "the case-study of this project will be just as interesting as the project itself" and we would like to finally share the inside story of the commitment, humor, and stress that came along with bringing this crowdsourced project from January 1st, to December 31st one day at a time. This session will serve those who are seeking to develop their own crowd-fueled web content by sharing the mistakes and revelations that the3six5 experiment taught us.
3:30 PM
to 4:30 PM
HTML5? The Web's Dead, Baby
116 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Branden Hall, Emily Lewis, Rick Barraza, Thomas Lewis, Erik Klimczak
event::about Wired declared Web 3.0 the age of apps and that the Web was dead and the future is native apps. Insight or naiveté? We’ll discuss the current merits of HTML5, and which companies and technologies will accelerate its adoption among mainstream consumers and create new opportunities for developers. We’ll also discuss the impact this can have on current native application strategies for Windows, Windows Phone 7, Mac, iPhone/iPad, and Android by looking at the impressive work that is being done today with the Web and apps to deliver compelling consumer experiences. But we’ll also address the shortcomings and the reality of HTML and what Web and app designers and developers can and should be doing today. This session is sponsored by Microsoft.
5:00 PM
to 6:00 PM
Where Web Typography Goes To Next
103 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Richard Rutter
event::about The future of web typography is as uncertain as any other aspect of the medium, but one thing is for sure: it's got momentum. At no other time has typography been taken so seriously by so many involved in the web, and that means there's an awful lot of change and innovation to keep up with if you want to stay on the cutting edge of online type. In as much depth as 60 minutes will allow, this presentation will cover recent proposals and additions to CSS 3, from ligatures to hyphenation, synthesis to capitalisation, and much in between. It will cover the reasoning behind the new aspects of CSS 3, and reintroduce older properties which only now are becoming implemented and useful (and thus browser support will not be ignored either). No session on web typography would be complete without discussion of webfonts. There is still much learn in this field, both in what CSS can provide, and the technical implementation within browsers. But web typography is not just about CSS, or even good type setting. The bit that touches us most closely is the medium through which most of us read: text rendering and screens, and this presentation will discuss and demonstrate the cutting edge of both. Web typography is a hugely exciting part of web design, and the field that is moving most quickly. This presentation will give you everything you need to know to keep right on the spur of the serif, the apex of the ascender, and the edge of the curve.
event::tags Solo
9:30 AM
to 10:30 AM
Can The Games Industry Learn From Web UX
29 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
event::about Big budget games with ground-breaking gameplay can so often be let down by difficult user interfaces, cryptic menu systems and poor usability. User experience design and information architecture have become fundamental to the process of developing great websites and mobile experiences; could the same tried, tested and trusted techniques work for AAA games? In the world of mobile gaming it's frequently the smaller independents’ who are the real innovators. Often coming from a web background, many independent mobile game developers are producing beautifully considered interfaces for a whole new class of intelligent contextual games, while the big publishers are still attempting to port console games to inappropriate devices. Have the web backgrounds of these independents’ given them an innate understanding of designing for user context or is it just never having been restricted by the sometimes stringent requirements for Gold Master and the limitations of the 10ft interface? This is of course a two-way street. Some of the processes involved in game design for consoles have a far greater lineage than that of design for mobile and web, and as such there are techniques that deal directly with adherence to a set of constantly evolving industry standards that could certainly be considered by the wider developing community.
event::tags Panel, #webuxgames
11:00 AM
to 12:00 PM
Games: Tools For Mass Communication
49 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Michael Agustin, Benjamin Taylor, Brett McCall, James Portnow
event::about Art, education, economics, propaganda. Games are arriving at the forefront of media to become an important way to engage entire generations of people. What's different from before? Five billion people are replacing the most common communication device, the simple cell phone, with a full-fledged gaming system in their pocket. There are multiple ways to publish and distribute games over the Internet and to the masses. For many, game creation is becoming a regular activity, as tools become both easier to use and more powerful for people without programming knowledge. This panel will cover unique perspectives on how games are becoming more meaningful forms of expression and a significant tool for communicating ideas.
event::tags Panel, #MassCommGames
12:30 PM
to 1:30 PM
Game On: Design Patterns For User Engagement
80 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Nadya Direkova
event::about How do you drive up user engagement? What game-like design patterns get your users to complete the sign-up, bring friends and come back? This session will expose the design patterns of engagement and incentives, including relevant metrics. Led by Nadya Direkova, Sr. Designer at Google and game designer, it will teach useful techniques that can drive up - and keep - your user base. You will leave with an arsenal of 7 design patterns to: design effective sign-up sessions and tutorials, promote virality, invite return visits, and apply game mechanics beyond points and bagdes. About the speaker: Nadya Direkova is Google’s local search designer and a game mechanics consultant - helping millions of users find knowledge and fun. She comes from the world of game design, having created fun games for Leapfrog and Backbone. She’s taught design at M.I.T. and spoken at IXDA’09 and SXSW’10.
event::tags Solo
3:30 PM
to 4:30 PM
Having Fun Yet? 10 Usability Heuristics For Games
35 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker John-Mark Josling, Corey Chandler
event::about The joke goes something like this: if interaction designers had made Super Mario Brothers, the game would just have one large button labeled “Rescue Princess.” There is some truth to that. Interaction designers strive for products that let people get tasks done quickly and easily. Yet, the fun of gameplay is overcoming challenges and rules deliberately set to impede a player’s progress. So as interaction designers, how do we separate challenges that add to the gameplay from those points of frustration which detract? For game developers without access to interaction designers or researchers, the challenge can be even greater. When developing a new game, what general principles should be followed to make sure it remains safely on the fun side of frustrating? Jakob Nielsen gave us the ten canonized Usability Heuristics for web and system design; our humble goal is to do the same for computer games. This presentation will provide ten interface heuristics applicable to games as well a few useful “discount” evaluation techniques for when you don’t have the time, or the money, for a full lab study.
event::tags Dual, #HavingFunUI
5:00 PM
to 6:00 PM
Scalability: Covering Your Rear with a Good Backend
29 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
event::about With nearly 2 billion people online worldwide and the potential for online startups to become the next big thing overnight, companies must be prepared to handle the massive amounts of traffic they strive to acquire. However, not everyone with an idea for a potentially successful website is a network engineer. This panel will inform those who run startups, or companies that are thinking about changing their infrastructure strategy, about the latest options for building out the networks from multiple executives who have had success with the options on both ends of the spectrum, hand build servers to 100% in the cloud. Panelist will discuss options in infrastructure housing, such as: in-house, outsourced or in the cloud. They will also address the pros and cons of each, what kind of business models will benefit the most from which network configuration, and the immediate and long-term costs involved.
event::tags Panel, #scalingastartup
9:30 AM
to 10:30 AM
Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information
45 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Dawn Foster
event::about Information overload is less about having too much information and more about not having the right tools and techniques to filter and process information to find the pieces that are most relevant for you. This presentation will focus on showing you a variety of tips and techniques to get you started down the path of looking at RSS feeds in a completely different light. The default RSS feeds generated by your favorite blog or website are just a starting point waiting to be hacked and manipulated to serve your needs. Most people read RSS feeds, but few people take the time to go one step further to hack on those RSS feeds to find only the most interesting posts. I combine tools like Yahoo Pipes, BackTweets, PostRank and more with some simple API calls to be able to find what I need while automatically discarding the rest. You start with one or more RSS feeds and then feed those results into other services to gather more information that can be used to further filter or process the results. This process is easier than it sounds once you learn a few simple tools and techniques, and no “real” programming experience is required to get started. This session will show you some tips and tricks to get you started down the path of hacking your RSS feeds.
event::tags Solo, #hackingRSS
11:00 AM
to 12:00 PM
Beyond Wordclouds: Analyzing Trends with Social Media APIs
48 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Chris Busse
event::about There are many services that will generate wordclouds and simple graphs from the conversations on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. These services use Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) to access the data on the platforms then perform various analysis on that data. These tools are often very limited in their functionality, or are very expensive to use for large-scale ongoing analysis and even then they often don't cover all the needs of a dynamic organization. This presentation will demonstrate how to programmatically access the APIs of several social media platforms to pull out specific data, store it in a database, and perform custom analysis on it to meet the needs of various business cases. We'll take a look at how different social media platforms are better suited for gleaning different kinds of data. This includes Twitter and Facebook as well as various blog and location-based platforms. Specific business cases will be shown around marketing, communications, competitive intelligence, crisis management, and return on investment analysis. Attendees of this presentation will leave with a better understanding of how looking at the universe of online conversation as a whole can provide valuable insight into what consumers are thinking and interested in at any given moment.
12:30 PM
to 1:30 PM
Social Ranking: Finding Interesting User-Generated Content
49 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
event::about As more people use the internet to share statuses, tweets, links, and other content the task of separating the wheat from the chaff is quickly becoming more and more important. Luckily, there are a number of approaches to finding the most interesting content in use across the internet, both by analyzing content itself and by giving users themselves the tools to identify what is good. Our panel will explore the details of how sites we use everyday have attempted to solve this problem. We’ll talk about voting systems where democracy works on a smaller scale, social systems that try to figure out who you care about or whose style you share, content analysis approaches that try to show you things based on your explicit or implicit set of interests, and other interesting algorithms for scoring and ranking content. We’ll also talk about implementation, touching on scaling distributed databases, training Machine Learning models, etc. We’ll talk about some common issues across these systems. Something as simple as counting votes can actually turn into a long lesson in statistics. And there are other factors our algorithms must balance, including making sure we show recent stuff vs. the overall best, ensuring new content gets a fair chance to prove itself, and keeping the a site simple with all this complexity happening behind the scenes. Finally, we’ll talk about how algorithms that control content distribution end up being big targets for gaming and abuse.
event::tags Panel
3:30 PM
to 4:30 PM
The Wonderful Things in Internet of Things
18 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
Speaker Alex Williams
event::about What an exciting time we live in. The past few years have seen such a huge change in what the Internet means to us. And now we are on the verge of what almost seems magical in what we will be able to do. Most of us remember a time when a desktop was the coolest thing ever. Now, the wonder is about smartphones and iPads. But what will come of us in a world where everything is connected? How will we exist in this new world? What are some of the examples we can point to that gives us a guide to what we should be thinking about? The Internet of Things means a world where the fabric of our lives is about data and the way it connects any kind of object. In this discussion, we'll give you a tour of this new modern universe ,the wonder it holds and the dangers that come with a society supported by a deeply woven data fabric.
event::tags Solo
5:00 PM
to 6:00 PM
Voices From The HTML5 Trenches: Browser Wars IV
106 schedule::attendees
Location
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom C
eventtype Panel, Interactive
event::about The term HTML5 now refers to the much-hyped kitchen sink of the web. It covers *everything* including things not officially part of the HTML5 specification. Yet "HTML5" is now the catch phrase to describe the new wave of platform competition on the web, and browser vendors vie to outdo each other on benchmark tests touting compliance and performance. Every major browser vendor -- Apple, Opera, IE, Chrome, and Firefox -- will have a significant browser release by SxSW 2011. Microsoft's recent IE9 press event suggests that they are "all in for HTML5." So if all of us browser vendors are "all in" for HTML5, what does this mean for web developers? And what's up with the dirty marketing buzz around tests and demo pages? This panel will expose the areas where we browser vendors cooperate as well as compete, and will push on the painful spots where we seem to disagree. We'll bring every major browser vendor to the table, and talk about open video on the web (and video codecs), what this all means to Flash, APIs (including contentious ones, like databases), CSS (including once hot areas like fonts) graphics, SVG vs. Canvas, WebGL, Device APIs, and security. This browser wars panel will be less like Inside Baseball, and more about the practical issues confronting web developers today. We'll poke at the raw spots that browser vendors need to discuss. As always, audience participation will account for a substantial chunk of time.
event::tags Panel, #browserwars
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