Webvisions Stands Up There With The Big Guys

I had been a bit anxious about missing two days of work to attend Webvisions. Now I just wish more of the folks from the office had made it to this excellent event.

Why? In terms of content, Webvisions stands up there with big time events like SXSW.

That makes me very happy. We have a home grown event here that draws from all over the US and internationally. The event’s focus on developing user experiences, interaction design, information architecture and trend discussions gives it the right mix for the mostly developer and designer community that attends the event.

For me, I like that most of the sessions are single speakers, not panels. That makes for a more focused and far more interesting way to spend my time at an event. Panels too often go off course or become self-absorbed.

Here are my notes from the sessions I attended yesterday:

Tagging

I started my day at a session lead by Gene Smith titled: “Tagging: Emerging Trends and Techniques.”

Key Takeaway: Gene talked through the four major trends he sees in tagging. Most significant, for me at least, is the advent of structured tagging systems. For example, Wesabe, the personal finance site, uses “sticky” and “non sticky” tags. A sticky tag is a tag that is always used when documenting an expense for a particular category. A trip to the movies with the kids may have a sticky tag titled entertainment. That tag will always be listed for the expense category. A one-time category may be “kids.” What this does is provide a split tagging structure. iterasi’s suggested tags is a form of a structured tagging system.

In the next session,Bill DeRouchey of Ziba Design kept the crowd chuckling with his insightful discussion about the language of interaction.

Key Takeaway: We try to reinvent things on the web and it often does not work. Staying close to the ways we have historically interacted with the world will serve us well when developing web sites and applications. For example, the color green is associated with start. Red means stop. For media player technologies, does it apply that buttons should be green for play and red for stop? Should there be a big button in the middle of a web-based player? It’s clear that on the web, interaction is still very one-dimensional, far different than the experience of using a stove, a microwave or a car.

Andy Baio, who founded Upcoming.org, lead my favorite session at Webvisions: “Star Wars Kid Is Your New Bicycle: The Changing Lives of Memes.” Andy played a major role in the viral video, Star Wars Kid, which Andy showed has been viewed more than 900 million times.

Key Takeaway: Andy methodically took us through how memes have developed and evolved to become our newest form of folklore. Andy uploaded the Star Wars Kid video in 2003 to his blog, waxy.org. Traffic spiked. He had to mirror the video to 30 different sites so the site would not crash. It was difficult to host. Today, all one has to do is upload to YouTube. As a result, memes have become so popular that they represent their own subculture. The question now becomes what will happen to this subculture with mainstream media embracing the memes as seen in the new Weezer video, which I just have to post:

Tjeerd Hoek, creative director at Frog Design, lead an afternoon discussion titled: Convergence 2.0: The Seamless User Experience Design. Tjeerd is formerly of Microsoft where he was director of usability for Microsoft Windows.

Key Takeaway: Tech products often start in the labs and then are given to marketers who go out and try to sell them to consumers. Tjeerd discussed the process of working with consumers to develop a product they need and why this is critical, especially as hardware and software continues to converge.

Jeffrey Veen finished the day with a keynote discussion: “Overcoming Chaos: Designing the Future Web,” which looked at how data visualization is today’s design challenge on the web.

Key Takeaway: Creating simple and informative visual experiences on the web is fast becoming the greatest design challenge.

So, in any regard, I learned a ton at Webvisions. Thanks to Brad and his team for making it such an excellent, world-class event.