Designing the First 15 Minutes

18 Mar

I just got back from Austin Texas, where Daniel Burka and I gave a talk on designing new user experiences at South by Southwest Interactive. Our talk focused on a few key philosophies that we’ve found successful when designing for Digg, Facebook, and Glitch. We talked about designing with empathy, getting users invested, building new user flows around your ‘ah hah’ moment, designing feedback loops, and educating users. The talk went fantastically well. Daniel has the amazing ability to react and engage with an audience, which boosted my confidence ten-fold during the presentation.

If you missed the talk, you can check out Julie Zhou’s notes. They’re well written and detailed — the next best thing to being there. And Daniel has posted the slides here. Audio from SXSW may be available in the coming weeks.

If you attended, feel free to drop your feedback in the comments. This was the biggest audience I’ve spoken to — it would be nice to know what did and didn’t work.

Background by velkr0, article photo by Jonathan W under Creative Commons

5 clowny comments from snooze-ville

  1. Benjamin Alijagić

    Amazing talk! Thanks and good luck with your redesigned blog! Hopefully you’ll find time to write more good posts.

  2. Rob Goodlatte

    Thanks Benjamin. I’m trying to fit in a post every week or so — we’ll see if I can keep that up :-/

  3. Ahmed Chergaoui

    That seems like a good presentation! Unfortunately, the notes from Julie aren’t available (maybe a privacy setting)

    Waiting for the audio to fully enjoy the talk :)

  4. Benjamin Alijagić

    Daniel uploaded notes on his site: http://www.deltatangobravo.com/archive/2010/march/thefirstfifteen

  5. Ahmed Chergaoui

    Cool! Thanks Benjamin!
    Much appreciated!

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