SXSW Interactive 2007

Sorry for being slow in posting, it’s been a crazy morning.

• Panel
  • Frank Robles, CEO Impalta Networks
  • Dan Dubno, Blowing Things Up,
  • John Hanke, Google, director of Maps, Earth
  • Doyle, MIT Museum working on Museum without Walls Project
  • Gina Bianchini,
• Doyle’s Museum without Walls
  • MIT is a large campus, 20K on 160 acres
  • 2800 wireless access points
  • Lots there for conferences
  • Many buildings and easy to get lost
  • Location-based storytelling
    • Trying to make it easy for people to contribute stories about places, in this case, places on campus
    • Need a place to store these [video or audio recorded] stories
    • Have a place for others to view these stories
    • The usage for this will be applications like guided tours using handheld devices
  • “Tour 2.0″
    • Handheld device
    • Location sensitive
    • Complete with stories from the online storytelling library
• John Hanke: Building the Spatial Web
  • 2004 - Made Keyhole
  • Became Google Maps in Feb 2005
  • June 2005 Google Earth launched, Google Maps API
  • Google has an exclusive partnership with a nonmilitary high-res satellite imaging company and provides the satellite basemap for Google Earth
  • 1.5 million places worldwide have been placed by users
  • Google bought SketchUp and released it to the world free
  • Hopes to bring real 3D models to maps by letting users add buildings to the map
• Dan Dubno
  • Attended many discussions on the ideas that John Hanke actually implemented with Google Earth
  • Problems with current system:
    • Spotty satellite imagery coverage
    • The majority of nonurban areas are not high-res
    • High-res worldwide is important for those rare times when you need imagery, such as providing imaging during earthquakes
  • Interesting use of Earth in partnership with CBS News is the Earthquake monitor
  • You can mashup a feed of earthquake events with their corresponding latitude and longitude and look it up on the Earth along with satellite imagery of the location
• Frank Robles
  • Did work with Panoramio which geotagged millions of photos
  • CAP - Common Alerting Protocol
    • Government-mandated location-based civil alert system
  • Also using Google Earth to map very tall buildings and show what level of Internet bandwidth are available there
• Gina Bianchini
  • These technologies are bringing the power of this map technology to the people, where it used to be only (in a lesser capacity) available governments
• Questions
  • Accessability
    • Want to allow people to navigate the system if they have physical disabilities
    • Need to have ability to read instructions aloud if necessary
    • Working to make this information available in more than one language
  • Privacy Issues
    • Dubno: Somebody’s always going to get concerned when you start carrying around a device that knows where you are, etc.
    • Dubno: These technologies will be opt-in and user-controlled
    • Hanke: The “eye in the sky” fear that spying on people is possible with Maps and Earth products is simply not the case
    • Hanke: on the other hand, satellite imagery has in some cases revealed to people what is happenning near them that they didn’t know about. Things like the rich elite’s mansions or dictator’s military location
  • What can this technology do for Third World Countries?
    • Huge potential. For example in Mexico, many cities that were previously unmapped got mapping online for people to see, perhaps for the first time
    • Another use is in natural disasters when location information is critical, that worldwide geoimagery is tremendously useful.
    • Hanke: Friend runs the Fair Trade organization that labels certain exports like coffee that are being made by places with proper and “fair” production practices

I only took some rough notes on this one, sorry, I was sleepy. Here’s what I got…

[Each panelist is taking 6 minutes to present their point of view, while the audience holds up given red or green cards in opposition or support, respectively, to their argument.]

Sarah Bloomer: You can’t ask users what they want. 60% of what users actually want is subconscious and users don’t know how to express it in your terms. People always have goals in their activities, but frequently cannot vocalize them.

In figuring out how your application will work, one way is to make “activity scenarios” which are narratives that detail how a potential user might use your product. The story can be made from real-life observations on how people use the existing product by watching and then writing down the steps they make using post-its.

Robert Hoekman: We should ignore users. Three example applications designed completely without user research have been very successful, with high sales and very low customer support calls. Users who voice opposition to certain features are often alone or wrong. After designing a product, then start listening to users, making sure to look for patterns in the feedback.

SXSW Diary has a better writeup with almost all of their talking points.

Here’s a few writeups of concurrent panels this morning. It’s amazing how fast this stuff gets posted…

• Under 18: Blogs, Wikis and Online Social Networkin Sites for Youth
• Emerging Social and Technology Trends
• Emerging Social & Technology Trends
• Emerging Social and Technology Trends
• Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses
• Kathy Sierra
• The Influence of Art in Design
• TV: The Next Generation
• After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration
• From Tags to Riches: Life After Code
• Grids are Good and How to Design With Them

Updated Sunday 4:39pm. I’m sure there will be more.

Kathy Sierra’s presentation was incredible. She is such a great speaker. I took some notes on her keynote but honestly couldn’t keep up with everything she said. Her speech was mostly on the idea of interacting with users like they are human. Her books all follow these same lines. Her Head First series taught me Java, and did so in a way that I actually enjoyed, which is a rare quality for a technical book.

A few things in her presentation caught my attention. She had a very good slideshow to compliment her talking points and always had something interesting on screen. She occasionally threw in gratuitous pictures of puppydogs, I think, to make the following slide sink in more with the audience. The actual content of her speech was making your apps more human, and not doing so in the way most marketers think. In absence of being able to have the computer interpret human-interactive things like facial expressions and gestures, she says, your app should have ways to let users become passionate, not just proficient, at using it.

Thats her keynote in a nutshell. I probably didn’t do it justice; it was the best speech I’ve heard so far.

Notes from the Decade of Style panel.

• Panel
  • Chris Wilson worked on Mosaic, CSS in IE3+
  • Doug Bowman
  • Molly Holzschlag, WaSP lead
  • Eric Meyer, CSS guru
• Key Events
  • CSS Zen garden
• Biggest Missing Piece?
  • Wilson says need a comprehensive CSS test suite
  • Bowman says need variables & constants in CSS
  • Holzschlag says a reliable WSIWYG editor
• Has the working group lost its way?
  • Wilson thinks it has too tough a challenge
  • Holzschlag thinks W3C has “lost its way”
• Hardest part of CSS?
  • Wilson (an MSIE engineer) admits “with IE7, we know we dont get everything right; big surprise”
  • He says backwards-compatability is the hardest thing
  • Holzschlag says teaching people to design with CSS and not just know its syntax is the hardest part.
• How does CSS differ from designing in general?
  • Bowman says CSS is not fundamentally a design tool, it is a tool for implementing design.