South by South West is not a conference, nor a festival. It is a vast, exhausting attention vortex that wields global influence and remains unlike any other event I have experienced.
Unlike most other authors of posts like this, I have not been before. In fact, if you’re reading this, there’s a high chance you’re like me.

Every year, I would watch as peers from all corners of the globe would descend on Austin, shriek-tweeting their delight of endless partying and seeing big-name panelists duking it out over buzzwords we see in our RSS clients on any normal day of the week, but live. And at the same time you sit there at your desk, wondering how on earth they managed to squeeze it out of their marketing and events budget, since no dot com or old school agency MD worth their salt doesn’t know the stories of SXSW. The tales of booze and BBQ. The sporadic, perspiring schedule that engulfs an entire town. The jolly to end all jollies.

Sick of not going, we bought the earlybird tickets back in September. If I have to take holiday, pay my own expenses and profit for myself and not my employer, then so be it. Now I’ve had a few days recuperating in Los Angeles, I can say in retrospect I don’t regret the time and expense one little bit. SXSW ticks all of my boxes – amazing, exemplary American cuisine, the chance to rub shoulders with people you normally see in virtual print (in aforementioned feed reader), live music everywhere and enough free booze to sink an aircraft carrier. Not to mention hometown folks I don’t see nearly enough of, and the chance to feed off tangible creative energy; the prospect of contagious creativity, coming home with the desire to Make Stuff for yourself as well as servicing your existing clients and colleagues better.

But then it’s so irritating, right? I would selectively unfollow people at this time. Envious of their budgets, the sunshine, the knowledge, the vibe. It’s the ultimate party that you forgot about until it’s too late, and all the latest is being ploughed straight into your desktop twitter client as you sit at work promising to yourself you’ll go next year. In fact I’ve returned to colleagues apologising to me for temporary unfollowing. I completely understand.
Well, damn it, we did go. And I don’t think it will be a one-off.

UX content

Straight off the bat, I’d like to say that there is absolutely nothing content-wise that was new at SXSW. If anything, it was reassuring to hear techniques and processes that I’ve been subscribing to for years being wheeled out once again. And the audiences at these UX sessions were considerable. I get the feeling we are at the cusp of more and more money being shifted towards strategic UX in the future. It’s good to know that Trammell’s user testing lab at Twitter consists of a few Macs running silverback. It’s great to watch Hoekman Jr rant about the lack of clear customer experience strategy among his clients to a full house. It’s brilliant to see Khoi Vinh present a deck that consisted mostly of wireframes. It’s now up to us to not balls it all up, and do some decent work.
But none of it was new. At The Team we’ve long practiced the Holy Trinity (designers, developers and UXers working together as a unit, preferably harmoniously). Not only was this sexed up as Voltron at SXSW, it was presented as being a new and innovative working methodology. Perhaps I have my agency blinkers on, but this is not new to me. Am I lucky? Have I really forgotten all that client-side heartache so quickly? Plenty to reflect on, but reassuring to know that those who are considered The Authority do what you do already.

Wood panelling

The panel as a format is a horrendous thing.

After day one I swore to not attend another panel. It’s painful to see people you’ve enjoyed present before reduced to a formless, stuttering mess. What’s worse is the content is so potentially juicy too. Game design vs UX was weighted too heavily towards the AAA game designers, where the one guy who was supposed to stand up for the web barely said anything and was totally unprepared when asked to comment.

The role of panel facilitator is something else that often went horribly under-looked as blithe statements were left unchallenged, often to confused audiences. Having to listen to tired, derivative examples wheeled out (the Amazon homepage is ugly! We don’t have time for user experience due to project management timelines! Other tired project management cliché!) literally had me bouncing up and down in my seat.

I have come to learn therefore, that there is no closure in the provocatively titled panel session; only more confusion, group ego massage and a slightly bitter aftertaste when time’s up and you can’t ask any questions. Actually, sod closure, there isn’t even a payoff. Next year: more impromptu corridor chats, fewer superstars and more sessions miles away from my professional comfort zone.

The sessions I did enjoy most largely had nothing to do with design or making websites. Seeing Robert Rodriguez talking about the challenges of adapting Sin City from graphic novel to the screen was fascinating (not to mention the anecdote about writing the Predators script at Arnie’s behest in the mid-90s). The Ain’t It Cool News panel was the only good panel I saw. Having read and listened to the AICN guys for over ten years, hearing them recount the stories from the internet’s best movie site was electrifying. Pure geek joy. Only available at SXSW.

It is what you make of it.

Summer camp without any councillors. You have to find this weird balance of being super-organised about which speakers, sessions, parties and freebies you want to see, but then go with the flow and not be annoyed if serendipity leads elsewhere. This is ultimately key to having a good time; and we were blessed to have a healthily large group of friends, colleagues (both past and present) and brand new acquaintances to share it all with. Everyone experienced the joy and excitement of SXSW individually and as a group of Brits Abroad, and it was rollicking good fun to catch up and compare notes over a few Shiner Bocks at the end of each day. Foursquare was enormously helpful to track whereabouts and plan impromptu meet ups for a cheeky mid-afternoon hamburger. Yes. It was actually useful.

You can’t be everywhere at once.

I think Monday’s late afternoon session was the worse, with at least six sessions I wanted to see happening simultaneously. The agenda is so dense and confusing that not even the organisers themselves can provide anything particularly helpful to plan your day. The iPhone app is cluttered and hard to browse and the paper version has the heft of an Argos catalogue.

I can only extend enormous thanks to the Lanyrd folks for providing a free, unofficial and well thought out site to make this Herculean task a bit easier. But yes, I missed so much. Shan’t dwell on it though since the plus side of the things I did mange to see will stick long into my memory and provide inspiration for many months to come. And there’s plenty of video I hope to get round to at some point.
Even the expo is pretty good. It’s nice to meet the people behind the stuff you use every day (massive double take when Scott Berkun handed me a WordPress tshirt, and also amazing to meet Tim van Damme who is lucky enough to be working for Gowalla), and you can indeed collect more schwag than you’ll be able to stuff into your luggage.

Serious eats

The food, ohmygod the food. It’s everywhere. It’s often free and for a connoisseur of dirty American cuisine, it’s heaven on earth. This trip was as much about the food as anything else, and the BBQ is to die for. We had amazing meals at the Moonshine Patio, Frank, The Salt Lick, Casino El Camino, Jo’s Coffee, Gourdough’s, Austin Java and so many more. You’d think the extra influx of people would degrade quality, but nothing was bad. There Will Be Writeups.

Austin

The town. It’s well laid out. It’s sunny. It’s full of tattoo parlours, independent stores, great restaurants and dive bars. Most of the homogenous American crap is out of town, unlike the rest of Texas. Like the best bits of southern California squished a bit and shoved a thousand miles or so west.

Tips for next time

Only projects and budget will keep me away from SXSW for the next few years. Now we know the basics (good coffee, good breakfast, how the cabs work, where all the venues are, which local beers are best) I only expect things to improve for next year.  We are also lucky to have family in Houston to visit beforehand which really helped zap the jet lag. Arriving the night before might just kill me. None of us are prepared for the drinking, cholesterol intake and sleep deprivation that is par for the course. And hopefully they’ll liberate the Content Strategists from the Sheraton. It’s just too far away.

So if you’re considering it, or if you’ve always been on the fence, or maybe if you hate the whole thing and wish it would just go away, this is what’s stayed with me since getting back to London a few weeks ago:

Balance & Perspective

If you’re a digital professional (especially one that makes stuff on the web), it acts as a barometer for your own work. You’ll see cool demos. You’ll try new apps. You’ll quickly realise your own strengths and shortcomings. I’m not sure any other event can give you as much raw perspective of where Interactive is at that point time, and where it’s going for the next twelve months.

Culture Clash

It’s one of the few events where agencies and startups mix. In fact, agencies tend to sponsor with startups all vying for attention. This helps with the aforementioned perspective, since us agency-bound big-budget designers need to have our eyes opened to what can be put together without six figure budgets. And we all know who generates the most buzz. Sobering.

It’s really in the hands of the organisers and interactive participants to submit an exciting and relevant programme, hopefully with a few less panels. Old timers have remarked on the changes, which is something I’m ill equipped too comment on. Roll on 2012. I cannot wait.

A bit belated this, but here it is nevertheless:

It loses a bit of impact without the commentary, but you can get the main idea I think. I’d like to thank those that came along to listen and joined in with their own stories.
UXCampLondon was my first BarCamp experience, and it was brilliant. Thanks to everyone that put it together, there’s some absolutely fascinating work happening at the moment.

While I’m still in a post Berlin haze, lo and behold, Mark Hurst and the folks at Good Experience have come up with a great video by Chip Conley.

Chip’s the CEO of a boutique hotel chain in the US, which is the real world version of what we were fictionally designing for at UX Intensive a few weeks ago.

Some lovely insights into hospitality experience and empowering employees in a great talk from last year’s GEL conference in New York.

Last week Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to be sent off to a very big hotel in the middle of Berlin for Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive training course / conference thing.

It was really rather special. Special enough to warrant a proper blog post, so off we go:

The Adaptive Path Experience

This is the first time I’ve been to an AP event. They’re renowned for being a tad expensive, and for us Brits, often exotically located (San Francisco! Copenhagen! Other places that aren’t London!). I now understand why.

The consistent theme throughout was quality. From the small touches (branded sharpies and Moleskine cahiers) to theming the week around hotel experience and its associated design challenges (pretty savvy when most delegates are all staying in the same place).

Not only do the Adaptive Path crew know their stuff, they’ve succeeded at putting their UX expertise into an actionable structure. This is the one thing I think most UX practitioners can struggle with, especially when joint-managing a development team and managing stakeholder expectations. Agencies, startups, established companies, we all have the same set of challenges.

Each day was broken into the four main tenets of UX – design strategy, design research, information architecture and interaction design. After being dismantled into their component parts, they were ultimately reassembled into the ultimate breakdown of the *what* and the *how* of each phase, and most importantly, the deliverables each phase should generate.

My personal favourites were the first and last days, strategy and IxD respectively. This is probably because they’re closest to my current work and what I find easiest to deliver. The IA day just proved how much I’ve got to learn. Interestingly they steered clear of the traditional wireframe discussions, which was wise. If you put 100 or so UX folks in a room, they’ll happily talk about wireframing and present them to each other for *weeks*. IA was much more focused on controlled vocabularies, content analysis & modelling, site structuring and good old-fashioned metadata.

What can you actually cover in a day?

Quite a bit, actually. One of the most impressive things the APers pulled off is cramming so much content into each day. Not only that but they covered the most important elements in an order that made sense. This kind of event only works with a series of well planned practical exercises, and AP used a fictional California boutique hotel chain as our ‘client’. It helped tie each day together with a nice real-world bow.

Of course, much was missed out. It had to be. I think some of us were a little disappointed with the lack of hands-on prototyping (certainly of a digital nature, everything was strictly post-it note and paper-based). Having reflected on it though, and from talking to others, I think we’re all at a good standard when it comes to digital prototyping. Focusing on it more might have reduced the educational impact considerably and turned us into an OmniGraffle appreciation group. There is still a deep desire to share design prototypes with others though, just to get that reassurance from your peers.

Bringing it home

As with any good event, you always leave bursting with ideas. Since getting back from Berlin and resuming normal service in the office, I’ve been thinking about how to integrate what I’ve learned with our current workflows. It’s still going to take a few more weeks to nail it down and try to get everyone as excited about consolidating our UX and design processes into a leaner, meaner beast.

I’ve already extracted the practical techniques we’ve either not been doing where we should, or those we played at and not followed through properly. That’s a given. The really great part is having a list of deliverables that you can customise to your internal audience. That’s the stuff that I find really exciting – turning your findings and creative into the right kind of deliverable that will inspire fellow stakeholders, and most importantly, users.

Team Europe

UX Intensive is the first web event I’ve been to that’s been on The Continent. There were only two or so Brits there. A whole new experience.

It was great to mix with people who don’t judge your work based on who your employer is. We’re not a big site in Europe really, due to a strategic UK/USA focus (and lots of other more boring reasons), so it was nice to be relatively care-free on that front.

I could show other designers some prototypes completely fresh, with no historical baggage that can accompany a well-known, highly trafficked and *old* website. It was really inspiring to see that newness of the P2P fundraising concept once again at a human level. It’s been a while, especially now that we’ve seen tons of sites spring up trying to replicate our success. It’s amazing to watch how a concept becomes commoditised and then carry on designing the secret sauce that keeps it successful.

I also made some great new friends from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Denmark and everywhere else inbetween. I think we all enjoyed mixing with like-minded individuals for what turned out to be nearly a week. UXers are often teams of one, maybe a couple more. Putting that many of us together from all over the world leads to some absolutely superb conversations, both in and out of the sessions.

Denmark’s Facebook penetration, for example, is something I knew nothing about and is scarily huge (it’s half the adult population or something). It’s also refreshing to see the same issues are prevalent across Europe; one particular example that fuelled lots of debate was the ongoing identity crisis UX designers tend to have: what to call ourselves.

Oh, and Twitter really isn’t a big deal outside of the UK. Not yet, anyway.

So what’s your job title, then?

Yep, we all struggle with it. Even the eminently practical Germans. Most of us are User Experience Designers, some are strategists, others were IAs or a mixture of all three. I’m sure there were a few evangelists scattered about too. The common issue is that when talking to people outside of the web industry, they have no idea what a UX designer is. We didn’t find a solution, but it’s something that bothers lots of us. The relative nascence of user experience as a subcategory of design leaves the door wide open for a little bit of controlled vocabulary of our own. Something that everyone can understand.

The way forward

So I’ve got a ton of content to distil and share with my team, I’ve got a physical workspace to help redesign and a brand new technology platform on which we can once again change things for the better, on a pretty grand scale. The timing of UX Intensive couldn’t have been better for me, and I’m really excited for June’s UX London event and the great stuff that will bring too.

I’ll share how we fare over the coming months as much as I can. Thanks to all those who attended too and made it such a memorable experience – you all know who you are and I hope you guys go on to do even greater things with what we all learned together in a questionably four star hotel in Berlin. Maybe we can all squeeze a bit more budget out from under the sofa for UX Week in September.

More stuff:

The group flickr photos and my specific set

A flurry of #uxintensive tweets

This past week was the Carsonified crew’s second biggest event, Future of Web Design in Kensington.

Traditionally, I’ve always preferred the vibe at FOWD a bit more than FOWA. It may not have the same globally recognised internet-rock-star line up, but the focus on creative brilliance is far more inspirational. There’s also less attention given to entrepreneurial fluff which personally I find can get a bit nauseating.

This is my first big web event in 2009, and I’ve been wondering if there would be a conference downturn to fit with the times. Sure enough, the perks have nearly all gone. Microsoft (the diamond sponsor) just brought a telly with some beanbags, no Guitar Hero. Embarrassed themselves with their Table tech by ruining Watchmen for all those who haven’t seen it (and those who have). No more sexy printed name badges. Little things, but all noticeable.

Trouble is, I don’t think the content suits the event anymore. Designers, on the whole, like to see what others are up to creatively and cultivate tips on working better and smarter. Unfortunately FOWD didn’t really deliver on that, not for me. As an IxD type, the content is not intended for me but I like to keep up with what’s going on. There are clear parallels we can all work towards to achieve better results and better websites.

The big theme, instead of riffing on the future of design, was much more a retrospective of what’s gone before. And I don’t think it was even intentional. Lots of snickering over Photoshop 2. Seeing the guy who designed the original MTV2 brand play all the shorts (very cool, I was a big fan). But I can’t connect the dots between digital stuff that was done in 2001 and the future of web design nearly halfway through 2009.

Only Mark Boulton‘s talk on Typography was genuinely inspirational.

Often overlooked and very important for sites that thrive from user-generated content that is written. The question I’ve taken away is how can we help users tell powerful stories by using great typography and design, and integrating that into the page in a more holistic fashion. I’ve ordered his lovely looking book.

There is no clear message or trend going forward, and that’s what has left me a bit cold. FOWD needs to be more practical, maybe a workshop only event. But maybe as a UX person, I should stick to my own scene?

My buddy Kai did his superb doodle notes again, so check them out:

*Update* – Mark’s talk can be listened to here.

Future of Web Apps starts next week. Exciting.

Probably my favourite event of the year, and in 2007 it was partly responsible for helping our team really push forward. Just like a really great conference should.

So here’s my (unashamedly honest) FOWA todo list.

Talk to Kevin Rose without coming across as a babbling fanboy

Steal a Microsoft bean bag

Get at least another ten Twitter followers

Learn amazing stuff from Matt Biddulph

Try not to lock myself out of my hotel room

Find some brilliant UI developers who don’t shrink at the mention of ASP.

Find a really, really talented freelance Facebook developer (or agency)

Don’t lose all my expenses receipts. Again.

Stay awake during the Zuckerberg keynote

Drink lots of Adobe beer. Party.

Are you going? What’s your FOWA strategy? I need more ideas!

Disclaimer: I am totally trying to win this competition.