Designing the next generation of web apps was an attractive panel again for the individual panelists. They included Mena Trott (co-founder and president of Six Apart), George Oates (founding member of the team that built Flickr), Evan Williams (CEO of Odeo), Jeffrey Veen (lead developer of Measure Map), and Eric Rodenbeck (director of Stamen Design). SXSW described the panel as:
With hype around “Web 2.0” reaching an almost unbearable level, it can be tempting to dismiss it all. That would be a shame. For all the breathless marketing and ill-funded startups, there’s some absolutely amazing design being done out there. We’ll talk to those behind some of the most successful applications on the web and find out what the process was behind them, how they bring users into their designs, and what it’s like to stay on the cutting edge of web tech without succumbing to it.
Here are the notes:
– Six Apart products are an evolution of what theyâ??ve seen in their other apps; it’s been an iterative design process (Mena)
– future bloggers will use very different tools than they’re using now (Mena)
– APIs within products will be important and internal to applications; an example is a billing system for all the apps within a company (Mena)
– thinking like a user doesnâ??t necessarily work; it’s better to work with them and listen to them (George)
– show people how to do stuff, not tell them what to do (George)
– Odeo uses flash on site, but only where necessary (Evan)
– provide feedback; people like to see stuff when looking at screen (Evan)
– Odeo has a service to leave voice messages; quick voice messages are less intimidating than long podcasts (Evan)
– make it work like magic, users donâ??t care about the technology (Veen)
– Measure Map was designed first, then developed with quick iteration cycles (Veen)
– Six Apart has 125 people now, 60% engineers (Mena)
– iteration comes from sharing product info with the other product teams (Mena)
– you can’t design from many user behaviors (Mena)
– consulting doesnâ??t typically allow you to do these frequent iterations (Veen)
– Odeo has adopted a scrum methodology; they started with 30 day iterations and now have cut it down to 2 weeks
– architecture of participation (Veen)
- give users the power
- audience question: how may people talked to a human for travel plans to get here? (2 hands raised in over a 1000 people)
- some services (craigslist, wikipedia) assume participation by users
- consumers vs. contributors blurred; often time users take both roles
– most bloggers started by reading and then commenting on blogs before publishing their own blogs (Mena)
– editorial control is coming from algorithms now (Veen)
– The Hype Machine aggregates the aggregators of free music / band samples
– user-generated content means design becomes just a container (Veen)
– show options without being prescriptive of what the user is doing (George)
– huge fan of incrementalism; doesnâ??t like to pull out rug from under users (Veen)
– content export is important; allows people the freedom to leave; donâ??t keep data hostage (Mena)
– FeedBurner gives options for you to leave the service
– user research is a foundation from which you innovate (Veen)
– book recommendation: Abstracting Craft
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