SXSW Day 4

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.