PragmaticPixels.com

Derek Powazek - Powazek Productions

• Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki
• Doesn’t mean a group of people in a room are automagically smart
• Starts with Francis Galton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton); guess the amount games, average of crowd is usually pretty close to actual
• Most emailed stories, NYT
• So why is the collective wisdom of the internet so dumb? (See YouTube comments)

Bringing WOC online

Small Simple Tasks

• simple rating systems (hotornot.com, threadless.com)
• Wired.com assignment zero: started out with too large of task. Nobody wanted to volunteer. Broke it down into simple segments, assignments accomplished

Large Diverse Groups

• Shuttle disaster: centralized group of people who ignored the larger crowd; happens when people put the group ahead of themselves (don’t want to stand out, risk alienation)
• Chevy Tahoe crowd sourced advertisement debacle
• Large diverse groups means more input coming in, more resistant to group-think

Design For Selfishness

• People will not participate in your thing unless they’re getting something from it (doesn’t give us a free pass, people will call/not do anything)

Result Aggregation

• How do you take the aggregate (the score) without turning into a game of winners and losers?
• The Heisenberg Problem: Once you have a leaderboard, people will want to show up on it and may not use nice means of doing it
• Instead of showing a ranked list have a list of just good stuff
• Threadless: don’t show rating until voting has ended
• Popularity does NOT have to rule: Amazon.com product review page - most helpful positive review and most helpful negative review displayed with equal weight

Implicit vs. Explicit Feedback

• Explicit: voting and rating
• If you can’t think of a reason to use thumbs up or thumbs down, don’t.
• Implicit: pageviews, searches, velocity, interestingness

Design Matters

• How you ask the questions changes the answers you get
• Visual cues can even effect tone of feedback
• Red vs. Blue: color affects recall, memory. Red gets people worked up, more attention to detail to prevent failure. Blue makes people laid back and more receptive to emotional responses.

Putting It All Together

• http://brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click - Asked community to rate themselves, then rate art; crowd curation
• http://getsatisfaction.com/apple - Simple “I agree” button; can also add comment, comments bubble up to top based on favorites; includes simple stats/aggregation; mood rater

Seeing Things

• Our brains will make up a story to make our experiences make sense
• Online removes all sensory inputs, we just have lines of text: our brains work twice as hard to fill in those lacking inputs
• Getting people to feel like they’re in touch with something they’re used to can alleviate a lot of anxiety in an unfamiliar experience

Prog thoughts

• We rely very much on explicit feedback, I would even put our tracking metrics in the category
• we need to friendly up our feedback form ASAP
• Self-rating display (Brooklyn Museum) sounds a lot like Bobby’s covg project
• How cool would it be to have a mood display on our feedback pages for unpopular flows? Customers that feel validated feel happier

Richard Rutter - Clearleft Ltd
Ian Coyle - iancoyle.com
Samantha Warren - Viget Labs
Jonathan Tan - OmniTI Inc
Elliot Jay Stocks

(Insert pic here)

• panel catalyst - AEA: A Not So Sweet Tale of Digital Type

Why do web designers bitch about typography?

• Frustration with limited palette
• Variations in rendering btwn operating systems

What are the best ways to currently implement web typography?

• Use what’s available. Vista actually has some decent typefaces
• http://questionablecharacters.com
• Start with the core fonts and see where you can get. Don’t just jump straight to SIFR

How will we be able to implement web typography in the future?

• font-face, still need conditional comments for IE

Will font-linking be the death nell or a renaissance for typographers?

• Yes and no. Maybe. No clear answer.
• My opinion? Open-source could be a great thing for web typography.
• If you have to you can restrict access to linked fonts with .htaccess

Tips

• Go read: http://webtypography.net
• Pick a regular font and run with it, make it look good
• Check out CSS3 fonts module
• Check out Open Type

Scott Belsky - Behance
web: http://www.behance.com
email: scott@behance.com

• Attraction breeds loyalty - if it works people will keep using it instead of reinventing all the time
• Prioritize projects visually - project leaderboards
• Seek cross-pollination: look for ideas/people dissimilar to your groups
• Share ideas liberally: find validation or momentum for ideas/projects;
• Fight your way to breakthroughs
• Don’t become burdened by consensus: Everyone wants to have their piece and to have consensus and you end up with the lowest common denominator; find a few things from each project to protect, concede on the less important things
• Get respect (overcome the stigma of self-marketing)

Leadership

• Leaders talk last (silence the visionary): best thing leaders can do is nothing, let other ideas get out before presenting their own
• Reduce your amount of “insecurity work” (METRICS): don’t freak if you’re not hitting conversion goals, if Google Analytics server is down, etc
• Value the teams immune system: don’t harsh on the “debbie downers”, let bad ideas get killed; these people can help eliminate waste and cruft
• Seeking restraints: (gee, no worry for us)
• Stop focusing on the visionaries: don’t focus on award winning, don’t get drunk on your Kool-aid, quit building things for yourself
• Judge based on initiative, not experience
• Value chemistry over people: having all the smartest people in the room doesn’t mean squat if there’s no chemistry
• Unique is opportune: don’t shun unique until it’s successful: nothing extraordinary is achieved through ordinary means

Amy Senger
twitter: @sengseng
web: www.1×57.com

Andrea Baker

• Open up government information, share, try to do it in real time
• Collaboration with other nations is crucial, no more them vs. us
• This has turned into an argument/discussion about just how transparent government can be, should be, etc.
• Can adversaries use the data we provide?
• This is not yet a two way street. Gov’t Intelligence is consuming crowd-sourced data and providing results/answers (sometimes), while not really giving back to the crowd

Battery dead. Doh.

Paul Annett - Clearleft Ltd
email: paul@clearleft.com
twitter: @nicepaul
delicious: http://del.icio.us/paulannett/sxsw09

• Innocent fruit  juice, “Stop looking at my bottom” on bottom of juice carton. Little things that make you smile. Personal touch.
• about:mozilla easter egg

• Flickr santa hats; Google Moon, the moon is made of cheese (zoom in all the way)
• http://2007.dconstruct.org - nifty stylesheet switcher
• http://kyanmedia.com (scroll all the way down, click the worm)
• http://modernista.com
• http://mybloodyvalentine3d.com (watch in Firefox, the content breaks out of the frame)
• http://designedbyable.com - Very neat usage of web transparency
• http://www.webleeddesign.com - Even better usage of transparency

Kano Model of customer satisfaction

Dan Willis
web: www.uxcrank.com
twitter: @uxcrank
email: dan@dswillis.com
article: http://www.dswillis.com/sxsw/everything.pdf

• argument that web is just translated dead tree’s (print in disguise)
• “Grammar” for a medium, grammar for transcendent web design
• a new way of communicating a feeling, an idea, a fact - one plus one equals three : ?who?
• random voyeurism: Flickr photo feed
• Meta-data: self-aware (but controllable) content. Ambient findability. “This reflects a fundamental shift in power from author to reader and from authority to popularity.” Peter Moreville
• User-created context: context is everything.
• Ambient awareness: microblogging… a small post is like a single point in a pointillist painting
• experiential content
• Inverted pyramid model: put all the important stuff first so when things get cut the least important things are cut first
• users are creating context
• Designers must be leaders in defining and solving problems

Tips for Transcendent Web Design

• organize cross-discipline teams; exploit and protect expertise
• design for specific users and their specific needs
• embrace your ignorance
• don’t be distracted by busness models that don’t begind and end with the user
• don’t be distracted by technology
• don’t be distracted by failure