Getting together with other liked minded, talented professionals & friends is what it's all about...oh and those pesky panels you almost forget about because of the night before.
My experience of SXSW this year was one of the best yet. The panels were well organized and the parties were well executed. I met a lot of new faces...most I recognized from around Twitter. I've already began my excitement for next March!
This post is a tribute to the absolutely, amazing sketch notes that will be popping up over the next week or two.
SquaredEye
- Blurr your designs to see placement of elements
- Study eye movement
- Phyc of a creative high
- Show how craftsman is worth it..details
- If your budget is 10k, find out how to fit the budget into 9k and then save 1k for the details.
IA Sketching
- Your design process is a story
- Throw away templates
Design: the first 15 minutes
- Geni
- Users are dumb is the wrong approach via @rsg
- Get them using the app first, then get them to save and/or create an account
- Instant feedback cycles. Nice rewards for doing right things
- Educate the user
- See your user experience through fresh eyes
- Get new people who never seen your product
Is wordpress killing web design?
- Wordpress sites look the same
- Wordpress is only a set of data
- Designers are running out of problems to solve. CMS's already style comments and content so "we should just make a PHAT footer"
HTML 5 tales from the trenches
- Whencanweuse.com
Freshbooks: Your UI is your Lab
- Screenshots of the app had better conversions than video introductions
- No matter your employees job, make them answer support because it helps them do everything they can to make the app better (hence less support!)
- Feedback use emotional state
- Shit changes...retest every two years
- Testing apps: Kissmetrics, mixpanel, google website optimizer
- Google: Effective a/b testing
- Roll your own a/b testing
- Book to read: Landing page optimization
- Funnel testing
- A good designer is one who can humble himself and say I don't know everything
Gmail
- Arielle Reinstein, marry me.
Ev keynote
- Be transparent
- Open of data...openness
Ian Coyle
- Don't include money into proposals, you either want to work with me or not. We are a good fit or not.
- Design is not a service industry and thinking it is creates bad design
- Establish a clear group leader when collaborating
- If you don't respect me I'll go out of business before working with you
- Do 20%/80% work time
Get your company funded
- Understand your investors: Angel vs VC
- Angel: Small money and for learning...VC for scailing
- Have a big vision with a clear mission
- Taking money = marriage
- Understand the technology
- Common stock: ownership of the company
- Key words: preferred stock, options, warrants, fully diluted ownership
Until next time, follow me on twitter, @michaeldick