This weekend I’m misssing my favorite event: SXSWi. I start looking forward to the next one the day the current one ends and I usually have more fun during those four or five days than I do when Karina and I go on vacation.

But I’m missing it for a very good reason: Karina is due any day now and it turns out there are a (very) few things that are more important than south-by.

To all of our friends who are in town: we both want to say ‘hi’. Even though we probably won’t see any of you, we will think of all of you with envy for the next four days. Enjoy south-by and send us the cliff notes! (If you have my cell or email, drop me a line — I am hoping to make it downtown for an hour or two tomorrow if we’re not in the hospital.)

I’m normally a “play-it-cool” kinda guy. I don’t like to fawn over people or even go out of my way to meet them. They’re just people. And if they’re well-known people they probably already have enough of that going on and wouldn’t mind a little bit of personal space.

But a combination of fascinating people, one day after another of free booze (top shelf stuff too!), and a lot of really interesting discussions combined to push me past the bounds of propriety.

Did Matt Mullenweg need to hear me tell him that I make money off of his product that he gives away for free? Probably not. Did Tantek çelik need me stalking him for 20 minutes to take a picture ? Definitely not. (I was really just sitting two rows behind him and trying to get a shot when he turned his head.) Did the guys who make Red vs. Blue need me to take advantage of their open bar tab? Well, that one’s their own fault.

I’m slowly recovering from SXSW Interactive, which ended last night. I’ll (hopefully) post more on it once I’m a little bit caught up on work. Like it does every year, it has left my head bubbling over with ideas.

Random notes from the panel which is still ongoing. Maybe I’ll liveblog!

1. Web design should be controlled by designers
2. AJAX is the future of the web
3. Every big company should have a usability lab
4. All web apps require ethnographic research
5. 99% of Flash is BAD

The above are all DOGMA. Forget it. Let’s talk about the direction we need to be going. –Dirk Knemeyer

Savant
Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. –Steve Jobs, Apple

Scientific Method
Introduce cautious, well-measured changes and introductions of new features and products. […] UI is a science not an art. –Marissa Meyer, VP Product, Google

The above pair of quotes were presented on a slide

Hey, I’m am liveblogging [Update:]

Grossman is talking now: discussing how usability testing can be taken to extremes and become dogma. It reminded me of a common theme today for the smaller businesses that are creating beautiful products that work well. Amazingly they have product release cycles measured in days or, in some cases, hours! (I can’t even conceptualize that.)

They pointed out something that has been obvious to me for years: Amazon has a horrible interface. Yet they do a ton of usability testing and A/B testing for any change they make to their site. A/B testing is like comparing McDonald’s burgers with mayo to McDonald’s burgers with mustard (analogy stolen from one of the panelists). At some point a radical change is required to move forward with the design of the site or product or whatever.

Of course the example of good usability testing is the Apple iPod product line which also popped up on a slide.

Conventions are a useful thing. Jakob Nielson is not. (That one is my own.)

The Leadership Triumvirate

1. Ideation
2. Communication
3. Implementation

Design normally comes in at the implementation stage as the production part of the product assembly line. It should start after the initial idea stage (design as communication is a strategic value add).

“He who can define the problem can define the solution.” –Goto

Really neat process map by Wroblewski:

http://www.gotomedia.com/goto/lifestyle/process/

Flickr photo stream

I’ve temporarily added the Flickr Flash app to display my SXSW photo stream below the menu on this site. Temporary because I don’t like the Javascript implementation but I don’t have time to put up anything else right now.

Microformats presentation by Tantek Çelik

I saw these applications on Jakob Heuser’s laptop and thought they were cool:

Textmate (Text Editor for OS X)

It first grabbed my attention because Jakob had edited his color schemes to be colored text on a black background. Silly reason I know but it took me back to my days of programming MUDs back in college.

The functionality took me back too. It was the best of both worlds with the syntax highlighting and robust features of a GUI editor and the aliasing system of Linux. I’m not saying I’m going to replace my BBEdit, but I’m definitely going to play around with Textmate.

Adium X (Messenger for OS X)

I have no idea about this one but it looked interesting and I saw it at the same time that I saw Textmate, so I want to check it out too.

This panel defined folksonomy and the current state of tagging. During the course of the conversation there were a few suggestions on ways to improve upon the current state of affairs, which is what the panel was really about. I wanted to expand on that part of the conversation.

It seems to me that every time a cool new technology or idea comes around, we jump on the bandwagon with such enthusiasm that we leave behind everything that came before. When the discussion repeatedly turned to letting non-power-users rely on or draw from the knowledge of the group, either in the form of automatic tagging or keyword suggestions, people questioned how any one person could rely on the opinions of another. While I agree that no system is perfect (systems are, after all, created by imperfect humans), it seems to me that we’ve been developing methods of quantifying trust for a long time.

When I buy something on eBay I’m reasonably assured that I’m buying from a reputable seller. The same goes for opinions on Epinions. Does anybody remember when Epinions was the cool new kid that would empower the masses? I still use the site when making purchasing decisions. For that matter, look at any peer-to-peer network.

Simple ideas tend to be the best ideas. That’s my corollary to Occum’s Razor. Simple methods of user ranking can create a trust mechanism that would allow novice users to rely on the wisdom of experts. This could easily allow for experts in specific areas (Jazz was mentioned during the panel).

I want to repeat one suggestion that was brought up during the panel: tagging should be incorporated directly into the browser (and operating systems). Regular bookmarking should take advantage of tags. This should not replace categorization but rather be offered as an option to it. Just because you think it is better doesn’t mean it has to replace something people have already learned to use. There is something to be said for the efficiency of knowledge already learned.

That suggestion led directly to something that I have not heard mentioned by anyone despite it being extremely obvious. In fact, it hadn’t occurred to me until the panel. Tagging has been around since the early days of the web. It has been done by the experts in each subject area and it has been done to a vast quantity of what is out there. I’m talking about keywords. Remember meta-tags?

Why has nobody created a bookmark plugin or web utility bookmarklet that automatically includes meta-data with the link URL? This should be automated in every browser and bookmarking website and, at the very least, include the two most common meta-tags: description and keywords. Relying on past lessons learned: bookmark searching should be able to very easily include or exclude metadata in order to deal with keyword spamming (there we go re-using past knowledge to enhance the trust of the system…).

I’ll leave off there. Hopefully other attendees (and the panelists themselves) can offer more suggestions or point out the flaws in mine. The evolution of ideas is best accomplished through collaboration.

Related Links:
Panel Listing on SXSW
Beyond Folksonomies (great resource page)