Ideas for a Smarter, Faster World

Today, really, was warm-up day. Last year, we were arriving just about now. In fact, a large contingent of attendees have been trickling in throughout the day, and will continue to arrive through the night. Although today was the first day of SXSW Interactive, what a lot of folks consider the juicy stuff doesn’t really start happening until tomorrow. Last year, I couldn’t help wondering what I’d missed. Now I know, I missed a lot. I’m really glad we were here from the beginning this time.

Even if you’ve been before, this first day is a good chance to get your feet under you. And rest assured, you need good feet under you. Moving from session to session in the labyrinth that is the Austin convention center can be like a frantic scavenger hunt in a maze the size of a 747 hangar. Oh, and the maze walls move. At least, they seem to. And some are hidden. Stairwells, most certainly, are hidden. And the nearest map is a block away, or buried in your backpack, or won’t load on your phone. And, by the way, you’re late. It really helps to begin to get your bearings when the crowd is a fraction of what it will be tomorrow. As I recall from last year, by the time the show is over, we’ll just about have the place figured out again.

I’m glad we were here today, if for no other reason than the first session I attended, which was a panel about mobile UX. Far from being just an iPhone app love-fest (which one might have expected, and would have been all too easy) the panel addressed the gazillion considerations you have to take into account when designing an experience for mobile devices — things you don’t really have to worry so much about on the web: Calls that cancel out a browser. The waiter in the restaurant interrupting your search. Signals that drop for no good reason. A jumbled basket of physical interfaces, and different users on different platforms with radically different, and deeply embedded, personal operational preferences. Those are just the abbreviated highlights many designers and developers overlook far too often. But they’re they price of entry if you want to be any good at mobile UX.

What struck me, though, about this particular panel, wasn’t some grand discovery or serious “aha” moment. What really struck me was that the nature, the level, and the content of the conversation were familiar. Because we’ve been talking about all this stuff, too. A lot. The conversations that were going on in this high-level panel discussion weren’t really anything you couldn’t overhear in one of our hallways. Because whether you’re talking about mobile or the web, when you’re talking about User Experience, the operative word is, “User.” Get that right, and you’ve got your feet under you, for just about anywhere you want to go.

Tags: Brunner, mobile, SXSW, SXSW 2010

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 at 12:25 am and is filed under South by Southwest 2010, mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.