Rob Grady

It’s that time of the year again and I’m doing the SXSW dance. The biggest challenge so far is picking the sessions that will be the most interesting and beneficial. At the end of the first day, here is my session tally.
Session 1: Emerging Social and Technology Trends
I must admit I had high hopes but this was less than enlightening. I had hoped it would be interesting and spur some interesting thoughts. Oh well.
Session 2: Getting to consistency Good session with discussion on providing users with a consistent experience. While primarily application focused, Steve Johnson from Adobe had some great comments about putting user goals first, focus on user workflow and not using the word ‘feature’ too much.

• Consistency for the sake of consistency is not worth it, do it if it benefits the user
• Let users drive changes in product (Adoption of RAW drove Adobe LightRoom)
• Use defined toolkits as much as possible to drive consistency
• Use of 508 compliance (accessibility) to drive unit testing.

Session 3: Web App Autopsy While a few minutes late due to technical difficulties, the session was very enlightening. The panel represented folks from a variety of web-app based businesses including WuFoo, Blinksale, Feedburner, and regonline.

• Each company used a different language to develop their apps
• Since the first version of the apps were released, all estimate they have refactored at least 50% of the code base
• Blinksale commented much of the refactoring was because rails was young
• For Blinksale, the billing portion of the application accounted for 31% of the codebase. It was very complex.
• Feedburner evolved their metrics over time with subscribers and reach (defined as subscribed and opened)
• Support requirements varied widely (8-234 per day) across companies
• Implementation of a knowledgebase reduced support requests by 30%
• One company practice is to reduce support request for a given feature to zero in six months or remove the feature
• All online companies had their worst month in December and three out of four had their best in Jan/Feb
• regonline
  • Split testing has found an 11% increase in registration when a video spokesperson was used
  • Looks for small tweaks to make big differences. A logo that included ‘look behind the screen’ led to a 339% increase in click-throughs
  • Don’t focus on the early adopters but instead
• Wufoo subscription response numbers
  • 7000 Invitations sent
  • 3500 Created an account
  • 50 Became customers with a 50% discount offer
  • Ads on account confirmation page had a 10.5% click-through rate

Session 4: Grids are good While this session was extremely rushed, Khoi Vinh and Mark Bolton did a great job of introducing the audience to the use of grids. I will definitely examine grids in further detail.
Session 5: Ruining the user experienceAaron Gustafson and Sara Nelson did a great job of outlining an approach to stratify interaction design: No Frills, Dress it up (add CSS) and Make it sing (add javascript/ajax). With this approach the designer is able to gradually enhance a page (or element) while ensuring maximum compatibility across browsers and platforms. I like the concept of evaluating to what level of interaction is appropriate.
No Frills

• Make content accessible
• No distractions
• Clean Semantic markup
• Light, fast downloads

Dress it up

• Refined Visual Design
• Simple Interactivity
• Some Flash
• Cross-Browser compatibility
• Styles for alternative media

Make it sing

• Responsive Interface elements
• Predictive data delivery (ajax to reduce errors)
• Allows for more customized interactions

Slides can be found here