South by Southwest
Conferences and Festivals

Social websites are funny places. What stories do you tell over drinks with friends? About the time when someone accidentally uploaded the *wrong* folder of pictures to your site? Or the time you had to manage a full-scale user revolt? Several creators and users of such sites will share five-minute stories of funny bugs, features with unintended consequences, and crazy customer emails. This panel will help you understand about first, second & third order effects when designing such social sites. How nothing goes exactly as planned. You learn about the importance of being agile and responsive to users when things go wrong. This panel is a chance to learn from others’ mistakes and avoid making the same ones!

Are you tired of entering your information every time you sign up for a new service? Are you fed up with adding the same contacts from scratch on every social networking site? The building blocks for portable social networks already exist. OpenID, microformats and OAuth let us build open, user-controlled networks. We talk about why this is good for users and how to actually put these building blocks in place.

Who are you? Who cares? With proper self-branding, not only will you find out who you are, you will make the RIGHT people care, opening up a slew of the RIGHT opportunities specifically tailored for you. This session defines branding (it’s not just the logo), talks about the top five things to focus on your brand, and shows examples of brands that work – and some that don’t, plus what they could do to improve. Most importantly, this session helps translate that information to your own personal brand. While this session focuses on a freelance or studio perspective, the ideas presented should be portable to any type of professional setting. Maximize marketing potential and get the type of work and respect you deserve.

Stage Managers wrangle directors, designers, writers, and actors every day, under strict union guidelines. Editors cajole writers into producing on time(ish) for each week’s publication. Conductors balance the needs of dozens of musicians while staying true to the needs of the music. These disciplines can teach us how to set up and support creative environments that are conducive to excellent design and development. Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson of Adaptive Path introduce you to 10 techniques used by creative management professionals to get great work from a wide range of employees.

The advent of Web 2.0 has exposed a demand for richer, more nuanced forms of interaction, posing new challenges for today’s information architect. We will examine how wireframing - one of our most readily used tools - is evolving to meet these demands. The creation of modern web applications involves designing intricate patterns, such as state-change and ajax-like behaviour. These designs need to be documented and tested quickly and efficiently. Using real-world examples, we will show how wireframes in the form of non-functional HTML prototypes can be the ideal solution to both documentation and design. We’ll demonstrate how frameworks such as JQuery can be your friends in prototype creation, and how best to put together your own library of design patterns. We’ll explain how interactive prototypes are ideal for use in agile, iterative approaches to web development, as well as with more traditional workflows, and ultimately ensure prototypes give maximum return to both you and your client. Wireframing and prototyping have long been the lynchpin of user experience design. This talk demonstrates why, with a little evolution, this is still the case.