PragmaticPixels.com

Traci Fenton - WorldBlu

• 73% of US workforce is disengaged (butt in seat base minimum of what you need to do; all input, no output)
• 1 /4 fee they work in a dictatorship, 80% felt more freedom would mean more productivity

10 principals of a democratic organization

• focus
• transparency
• dialogue and listening
• fairness and dignity (fairness != sameness); rankism is bad, abuse of title
• accountability
• the individual & the collective
• choice - of: working hours, projects
• integrity
• decentralization
• reflection and evaluation

Open discussion

• Open salaries - this would be spectacular in a car wreck, natural disaster sort of way at work
• no real research on doing X thing democratically and getting X amount of money as a result
• plan workspaces democratically
• coworking: like working at home but with pants
• We live in a “democratic” society, why do we work in such structured and rigid companies?
• Forget about guerrilla change, you need the buy in of the folks at the top… viva la revolucion?

Bruce Sterling - Awesome and brilliant dude

• Bruce Sterling rules. That is all.

Kathy Sierra - CreatingPassionateUsers

Incremental vs. Breakthrough

• incremental == arms race; quality, features,
• getting through the wall: breakthroughs
• word of mouth vs. word of obvious
• change the way you help people make a breakthrough with your product, don’t just change your product
• ask: what superpowers would you give your users? how would that change how you do things?
• increasing productivity = broccoli

things

• 2.) Superset game ( (you)  (competitor)             bigger/cooler thing        )
• 3.) Shortcuts - 10k hours to be a master; learn the patterns, shorten the duration
• 4.) Kicking ass in < 1k hours with deliberate practice; after 1-2 years experience is a poor predictor of performance expertise; offer things that build on users strengths
• 5.) Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard; make it easier for users to have a breakthrough than to stay where they are
• 6.) Get better gear (and offer it) - have to help them justify though. Find, make, offer high-end “gear” that bumps them to a new level
• Reading: The Cluetrain Manifesto
• 7.) Be dumb?
• 8.) Total immersion jams: 16 hours in 2 days or 16 hours over 2 weeks
• Check out: Ad Lib Game Developer Society
• 9.) Change your perspective - don’t make a better X, make a better user of X
• 10.) What movie are your users in? What movie do they want to be in? (and don’t forget the soundtrack) Who are your users allies and mentors? Your tech support, Aragorn or Jabba? Your company is to your user as _____ is to Frodo.
• Check out: Roomware
• 11.) Want breakthroughs? Don’t ask your users. Users = incremental improvements (which are bad). Graph: The Featuritis Curve. Ask other peoples users.
• Read: Hugh McCloud, Ignore Everybody
• 12.) Be brave - Death by risk aversion: Fantastic idea -> fear happens -> crap output
• 13.) Rethink deadness - Henry Ford: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said faster horses.” Etsy, Make Magazine
• 14.) Change the EQ - don’t just change things (move the sliders), add new things (new sliders)
• 15.) Don’t mistake narrow for shallow
• Check out: http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/, Literally, a Web Log, The blog of uncessary quotation marks,
• 16.) Be amazed

• No single majority browser, platform wins
• IE guy: “My wifes computer got hacked” Mozilla guy: “What browser was she using?”

An interesting talk but overall not much to take note of.

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