SXSW continues to be a great experience. The talks are good but the best and most valuable part of the whole experience is meeting and talking to people. People I admire as a designer, people I admire as an entrepreneur, potential clients, existing clients and just people that are working on damn good stuff. It’s an inspiration.
Some notes on what I attended today:
Social Search: A little help from my friends
Panel
Notes
- Users want personalised responses to questions
- Give something good to customers to talk about and they’ll start the conversation
- Social search is about providing the user with information on what’s going on right now
- Make it personalised and relevant – relate to friends, relate to location
- Aardvark – ask a question and it’ll find you the answer
- OneRiot – realtime search
Revealing design treasures from the Amazon
By Jared Spool
Really interesting insight into Amazon and how people use it.
Notes
- Website owners often think “Why don’t we do it like Amazon?”
- Alarm clocks aren’t going to get good reviews
- 1/5 of all orders are heavily influenced by reviews
- The “Was this review helpful” question is worth $2.7bn to Amazon
- Be careful when emulating Amazon features – you need the traffic first
- Phase in new design features – target non-cookie users first, then x amount of users, then open up to all
- Eliminate tool time – shorten steps, remove obstacles
- Don’t fear trying new ideas
@anywhere
Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, introduced us to @anywhere – a new framework for integrating Twitter features into your website.
Product looks interesting, similar to Facebook Connect. The talk/interview itself was a bit underwhelming. No good take-aways, just chatting about Twitter.
Jonathan Cusick is also writing some good blog posts on the Northern Ireland gang too. Worth a read.
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Techboy says:
> Be careful when emulating Amazon features – you need the traffic first
Very true. A good example of this is sites that have little/no traffic and create a forum – then wonder why nobody is posting.
> Phase in new design features – target non-cookie users first, then x amount of users, then open up to all
That’s an interesting idea.
Cristian Pascu says:
Hey Lee,
SXSW was pretty cool, wasn’t it? I wish I met you there. I’ve been following your blog for a while now and I would have loved to chat a little bit. I met Andy Budd, Paul Boag and a few others. Maybe next time I’ll get to meet you, too. :-)
Cristian