I’ve always meant to go to SXSW. Next year I just might make it. My proposal made it to the Panel Picker stage, which is nice, but with the popularity contest now well and truly afoot I should probably have a go at getting the word out. So:
Tapping the Mainline: Designing for Learned and Evolved Responses
We love stories, recognise patterns in fractions of a second and have a set of highly developed social behaviours. In this talk Mike will be running through a collection of these hard-wired influence points and exploring how they can be used in the design of products, interfaces and experiences.
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1144
And while I’m about it I might as well have a bit of a poke at the process…
The Panel Picker seems like a good way to engage with the conference audience but I can’t help thinking that the execution is lacking. There are currently some 1,273 proposals in the mix. That’s an awful lot of reading for anyone wishing to participate. With that sort of volume I really wish they’d put more thought into the desired outcome: unbiased participation, which will involve discovery, weighing and rating in volume.
My main problem with the Panel Picker interface is the clunky tabular layout. The addition of keyboard shortcuts is a fantastic addition but I need to read the title, summary and maybe name to reach any sort of informed rating decision. There just isn’t enough horizontal real-estate available for all that in a single row. Why not have a Hot-or-Not style view? Let me focus on one thing at a time and make it as painless as possible to contribute? Or just break the title and summary onto separate lines?
I also feel that the 1-5 scoring system is unnecessarily complex. How can I judge the quality of a proposal to that sort of accuracy from 50 words? A yardstick of interest is all that’s required and with 1,000+ proposals to get through speed and ease should be the highest priority. I’d go with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down widget.
Anyway, them’s the breaks! Tapping the Mainline is version 2 of the Ego to Ergo talk I gave (and thoroughly enjoyed) at SkillSwap last month. If you’d like to hear it, go give me a rating.
