Conference-a-Rama

I attended two different conferences in the past two weeks: BlogWorld2011 Social Health Track and TEDxPhilly. Sometimes I wander around large conference centers and wonder if it’s all worth it…

Blogworld Social Health Track Badge Decorations

Years ago I worked at a management consulting company producing and managing their line of multimedia products. Our Marketing department travelled to almost every industry conference; setting up booths, talking to clients, getting leads, and delivering sessions.

I once asked our Director of Marketing how many true sales were generated by our conference efforts.

His answer sounded something like, “Almost none. The main reason we do this is to talk to our existing customers and make sure our competitors know we’re doing well enough to spend money to go to conferences.”

Did you catch that? We attended conferences to make sure our clients and competitors knew we were still alive. It was all about showing up.

When I started presenting at conferences, I quickly learned that no matter how valuable your sessions are, very few qualified leads come of them. Sure, cards are exchanged and relationships begin, but conferences are often places to learn what’s out there and consider where to expand your business.

At most conferences, the bar was set quite low for session speakers. Usually, it was based on your ability to write a snappy title and a 250-word description. In case you’re wondering, neither of those is a requirement for being an engaging public speaker.

Then TED happened.

TEDxPhilly: Organized By Folks with an Eye for Design

While I’ve never attended TED, I have attended TEDxPhilly for two years now. TED is what many trade conferences often want to be, but can’t figure out how to be. For me, above everything else, TED is about the free exchange of ideas facilitated through compelling storytellers. It allows everyone to digest ideas and see how they may be able to apply them elsewhere. It doesn’t work unless the speaker has something worthwhile to say and can say it in a compelling way. You don’t need a laser-light show or rocking intro music or even a PowerPoint deck.

Before TED, I went to conferences seeking speakers I knew or topics I practiced.

After TED, I often seek out speakers I don’t know and topics totally unrelated to my day-to-day work.

If I want to learn something more about things I already know, I’ll reach out to an industry leader, search Google, or read a book. Finding the connections between things I’m not familiar with makes it a little more difficult.

Both the Blogworld Social Health Track and TEDxPhilly had more to offer than just showing up. So, rather than do a full summary of these two vastly different conferences, I thought I’d focus on one connection from each conference that changed my perspective a little bit:

BlogWorld 2011 Social Health Track

First off, big thanks go out again to Rob Halper from Johnson & Johnson and Marc Monseau of MDM Consulting for their tireless efforts putting this track together and keeping things running smoothly throughout. The word I wrote over and over again in my notebook for the three days of excellent sessions was Curation. Digitally engaged healthcare professionals like Dr. Val Jones, Dr. Nick Genes, or The Nerdy Nurse are involved in many different projects, but all focus on the central theme of curating content for their peers and patients.

Our Own Russ Starke Moderates a Session With Patient Advocate Bloggers Jenni, Kerri & Katie

Meanwhile, on the patient side, friends like Kerri (sixuntilme.com), Jenni (chronicbabe.com), and Katie (overflowingbrain.com) curate content for their followers to help guide them through the journeys their conditions dole out for them. There is SO much information on the internet, much of it false or misleading, that everyone needs help navigating through it. The more these folks do their jobs well the more the good information will flow to the top. That improves treatments, lives, and even the cost of healthcare.

So my perspective has now changed. If you manage content you’re either a creator, a curator, or both. I plan to study more about curation. I’ve talked about it for decades, but what does it truly entail these days? I’m excited to continue exploring that.

[On a side note, it has been more than just professionally rewarding to participate in the Social Health movement. Sure, Russ' skillful moderation of the Patient Advocate panel at the beginning of the conference was a great example of his years of experience working and teaching in our industry. It's the long-lasting friendships we have formed over the years with engaged patients, physicians and industry leaders that will last far beyond any conference session.]

TEDxPhilly

The official theme for TEDxPhilly was “The City.” Throughout the day, I kept thinking about how each speaker was finding ways to simultaneously transform a city while maintaining its identity. That’s not so easy if you think about it. Youngjin Yoo from Temple University’s Center for Design+Innovation observed, “Cities are the most complex man-made artifacts.” They are ever-changing, self-aware, and perpetually trying to improve. We often hear about the singularity as the moment that humans will create a system that has become self-aware, but haven’t we done that already? Wasn’t that accomplished long before technology was so advanced we could even think of the singularity? The City is simultaneously a self-aware organism and a computer collecting and processing data. TEDxPhilly was just an opportunity to see different systems within that organism come together.

We often talk about ecosystems on the projects we take on, but we don’t think about the entire ecosystem as an organism. That may sound like semantic mumbo-jumbo to you, but to me it solidifies something that has bothered me for a while. While you’re building or re-building your corner of a system, all the elements connected to yours are evolving as well. You should always expect that. You often can’t plan for the disruption this causes, but you can certainly panic less when it does.

So, conferences aren’t dead, they’ve just evolved. The massive, multi-track conferences have their place, but the trade show floors are often a depressing circus of tacky tchotchkes, lots of whizz-bang, and little substance. Keynotes are hit-or-miss, but when they’re a hit, you’re glad you came. The hard thing to do is to root out a session that changes your perspective, even a little bit.

Presenting Data and Information: Thoughts from a Day with Edward Tufte

If you’re not familiar with Edward Tufte, he may be the preeminent voice on data visualization and presentation. Assuming you haven’t already, find a friend or co-worker with some of his books (or buy them yourself). Whatever you think of his teachings, I think it’s hard to deny that the man has an eye for design and produces beautiful publications. 

Last week, Emily, Mike, and I had the opportunity to spend the day at an “ET” session: “Presenting Data and Information.” We thought it would be fun to each take a short crack at what our key takeaway was from that day. 

Emily

“So what?” I asked myself after hearing Tufte talk. He offered a lot of great observations and insights, but so what? No offense, Mr. Tufte, we ask this a lot at Think Brownstone. And clients engage us to help them answer their “so what’s.” Here’s one of the whats that came out of my so whating of his talk.

We spent a good deal of time looking at visual explanations of things, like: the evolution of rock, Napoleon’s 1812 march through Russia, and the origination of the SARS outbreak. Each of these represents an effective model for presenting complex information clearly and building understanding around an issue. Which is great, but…so what? The content is set in stone, fait accompli. Once I understand what it is conveying, the fun’s over.

If you’re putting all this rich data in front of me, I want more. I want to get my hands dirty and interact with it. I want to be able to pull it apart and mess with the variables, to run alternate scenarios and learn from them. What if there had been three fewer days below -20 degrees during Napoelon’s march? What if the Beatles never formed? You’ve given me what is, now let me play with what isn’t and learn from that too. In a digital world we expect more. Models need to become tools. Audience needs to also be manipulator. The marriage of data interaction with design can vastly magnify the “so what’s” asked and answered by a single data visualization, and that, my friends, is exciting stuff.

Emily's mashup of Napoleon, Robin Hood & The Pringles Man. Click For Full Sketchnotes.

Mike

I can see why Tufte uses so many examples of older charts and figures, from a time before people were concerned about projector resolutions and PowerPoint functions. There is much to be said for rendering figures entirely by hand and not having to limit yourself because of print margins or the price of glossy paper. Myself being an aggressive doodler, I was tickled by the fact that when Galileo wanted to show people what Saturn looked like through his telescope, he just drew it right there in line with his notes! With as much as I draw, I still feel a need to keep my notes and my drawings separate, as if they’re two different things. I think that stems from the fact that when I think, I tend to think about things as I would do them on a computer. If I’m taking notes, I open a word processor. If I’m drawing, I open up a graphics program. The two things become separated not because they are fundamentally different (in fact, with the way my brain works, they tend to perfectly complement each other), but because the methods that I use to create each thing don’t get along well with each other. 

Tufte made the point that whenever the methods of information transfer are separated (i.e. color vs black/white printing), the quality suffers. One of the examples he gave was books that had color inserts in the middle of them. Not only do the full color pages feel different then the others (they’re heavier), they’re stuck in the middle of the book and far away from any of their context. All of that leads to an awkward experience and a compromised information transfer. Integration is the key. So if you can’t fit your image onto a PowerPoint slide and keep it legible, it’s entirely possible that PowerPoint isn’t the tool you should be using.

Sometimes Mike's drawings should rightfully remain separate from other notes.

Brad

Nobody is going to question Edward Tufte when it comes to data visualization; he’s not only written the book on the subject, he’s done it four times over, each taking a different (and successful) tack on the larger issue. I was therefore somewhat surprised that he spent what seemed like such an inordinate amount of time during our one-day session extolling the virtues of “sparklines,” a miniature form of data visualization that he claims to have invented. The self-promotion and adulation was obvious and if nothing else, left an impression. 

I suppose that’s why it came back to me several days later as I reflected on the death of Steve Jobs, another famous self-promoter. Steve got a lot of flack from haters about the “reality distortion field” and how he created a cult of personality that tricked people into paying more for Apple products. But I will tell you as a design professional, what he created was no trick. He sold the hell out of it, but without the products to back his claims, Apple wouldn’t have pulled out of their mid-90’s death spiral. I’m betting that Tufte’s claims will be borne out as well, as you can already see on Google Finance (look at “Related companies”) and Google Analytics pages.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter to me whether the sparkline tangent was warranted or not. What seems more important is the pattern of success Mr. Tufte managed to (unwittingly?) illustrate with it:

• You can be great at your job, making a nice living working heads down your whole career. Those people keep our economy running.
• You can be a slick talker who knows what people want to hear and when they want to hear it. Those people might also have a bridge to sell you.
• Or—if you somehow find the courage, skill, luck, and charisma necessary—you could be great at your job and to get out there to share your knowledge with others. Those people are the drivers of our world and the enablers of our future. 

I know which one I’m not interested in. I’ll get back to you in about 30 years and let you know which of the other two I picked. Thanks, ET.

Brad changes the trajectory of sketchnotes. Purple. Woah.

Recap of SXSH “Unconference”

It has been a whirlwind since SXSH (Sharing. Exchanging. Social Health.) a few weeks ago! I’m finally getting around to re-capping it from the Think Brownstone perspective, but that’s fine since we had Phil’s take on ePatCon 2011 to tide us over…not to mention the great recap of SXSH from Deirdre at WalkWithWill, whom I was lucky enough to join at the event.

First off, kudos to Shwen, Dana, Kerri, and Jenni for putting together a really engaging event and keeping the spirit of an “unconference” alive in the face of increasing interest and attendance. When you design something to purposely go against the grain, it can be a bit disconcerting when it grows to the point that sanity dictates having to pull in some more of the conventional logistics. These are the good kind of problems to have. Plus, personally, whether or not something is ultimately worthy of the label “unconference” is immaterial to me – what I care about is the substance and the spirit of the day.

It was a brisk single-day event packed with engaging speakers, and I won’t go through an exhaustive recap of each but will instead use this as a place to quickly capture some thoughts and links that I made note to take some time further digging into.

Todd Park (CTO, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services) was a smart choice as keynote speaker and a great way to start the day. If we’re ever going to get to a future state of healthcare that truly works for everyone, we’re going to need to know that there are good, smart folks in the government actively fighting the good fight – and Todd immediately struck me as the type. Lots of great info here on how he’s working with HHS to exploit data and technology to make serious strides – and he’s got quite a track record going for him. I was duly impressed, and made note to get more familiar with the data, functionality, and concepts employed by the Blue Button campaign, The “Direct Project”, Healthdata.gov, Asthmapolis, Doximity, and Ozioma.

Ed Bennett from the University of Maryland Medical Center had a fantastic presentation jammed full of the latest data around how social media is really being used in healthcare – it’s no longer up on his site (that I can tell), but poking around on there will be enlightening all the same. I especially liked his quote that “social media is a conversation, not a lecture” – which is relevant to pretty much everyone using social media tools, let alone every organization that tries to – healthcare or not.

You can, however, find the presentation from Melissa Davies (“Healthcare Social Media By The Numbers) – and dang, if you want to dig into the numbers, and you want REAL numbers, leave it to someone from NM Incite (Neilsen/McKinsey). Fascinating, well-organized and well-presented stuff in here – it is well worth your time to review.

Yours Truly With The Organizers & The Minds Behind WeAreAllPatients.com - Catch Us Together At BlogWorld!

Another quick shout out would be to Mark Bard for founding digitalhealthcoalition.org, recognizing that change has to start with all-inclusive conversations, but requires moving beyond conversations (we’ve got plenty of those) to real action if we’re going to make good on all of this “talk.”

Also, I candidly told ePatient Dave that I had been wondering what his “second act” would be to his powerful patient story after I saw that talk a few times. That story was always about more than just Dave, and he masterfully drew analogues to all patients and thus, all people. But where would he take it from there? Where could he take it, and how would it fly? I’m happy to report that Dave’s new talk came from a place that was more holistic and data driven, and he was as powerful and convincing as ever. Bravo, fella.

A pleasant surprise was the presentation by the folks at ismycancerdifferent.com, who sponsored lunch (which was fantastic, BTW) and gave a talk during that timeslot. That’s usually enough to raise an eyebrow and make you brace for a sales pitch, but what we got was the farthest thing from it. I was extremely grateful to be exposed to their site and their mission, and think that they’ve got a really unique for-profit model that gives them a lot of ammo to do some serious good for cancer patients and beyond.

Finally, I made sure to attend the superhero team-up of Jenni and Kerri who moderated a discussion around patient advocacy and kicked off their “We Are All Patients” campaign that pushed into ePatCon the following two days. Always professional, they surfed the churning waves of differing opinions and made powerful arguments bringing the room back to the inevitable – those differing opinions are valid, but we won’t get anywhere without compromise and understanding that at the end of the day, we’re all in the same camp (like it or not): patients.

Here’s hoping we continue to do more to achieve some real progress and move from talk to action – something we’ll be working on out at the Social Health track of BlogWorld in in Los Angeles this year (11/3-11/5). I’m happy to report I’ll be moderating a session including Jenni, Kerri, and Katie from overflowingbrain.com. Hope you can come out and join us!

E-Patient Connections Recap

Many of Think Brownstone’s clients are in the Life Sciences industry, so it’s critical for us to keep an eye both on how the industry is changing and on how patients themselves are engaging with healthcare professionals, each other and the industry itself. This isn’t the creepy kind of “let’s read what they’re saying and pose as patients” thing.  It’s a genuine desire to interact with people and learn what their needs and frustrations are, then find ways to close the gap. With that in mind, we try to participate in KruResearch’s e-Patient Connections each year.

It’s difficult to do justice to a 2-day conference in a single blog post, so I’ll hit the main themes I extracted from the sessions. As you know, we are fans of single-track conferences, so I was happy to learn that ePatcon switched back to a single-track model this year. If you want to review everything digitally available from the conference, I’d recommend reviewing their slides in slideshare.

Kicking It All Off

I’m a fan of Seth Godin’s blog and his book Tribes, and I’ve been wanting to hear him speak for a while. Although circuit speakers like Seth have a few standard presentations they pull out for speaking gigs like this, clearly Seth studied the goals of the conference and customized his work for the audience. The main themes:

• People like doing what other people are doing
• The general population of a tribe needs a leader
• Leaders don’t necessarily invent anything, they just show up to lead

These were great messages for the crowd, and something to really think about.

Following Seth was a truly inspiring vocal piece and patient story by Charity Tilleman-Dick, a Soprano who has suffered from several debilitating lung diseases and recently went through a lung transplant. Charity’s inspiring patient journey highlights how important it is for patients suffering from chronic diseases to have a laser-sharp focus on their goals. There really is no better way to kick off a conference that focuses on patients than to have an inspiring patient story.

Dr. Internet?

Data from Manhattan Research and Ron Gutman from HealthTap tells us more and more folks are using the Internet as their #1 health resource. Searching for health research increases as reliance on physicians decreases. Not necessarily a good thing, unless we can shore up the quality of the information people can find.

The e-Patient Bill of Rights

In one of the preconference sessions the day before I arrived, a group of e-Patients sat with some industry representatives to begin to spell out what they expect from their digital interactions. The e-Patient Bill of Rights was displayed prominently in the room for users to peruse. Patients want access to their own records, they want efficient communication methods, and they want more trustworthy information.

The Medical Community Reacts

Several presentations from physicians and medical communities showed that there are some progressive movements out there to engage with patients electronically. Julian Bond from the Detroit Medical Center and Ed Bennett from the University of Maryland Medical Center are both doing great things to engage with patients, physicians and medical students through social media channels. While the entire population of physicians have been slow to react to the notion of engaging with patients online, Dr. Kent Bottles and Dr. Bryan Vartabedian of 33charts.com both offered insight into the future of healthcare and the advances of some digitally-engaged physicians. Phil Bauman, a registered nurse from the Mayo Clinic’s center for Social Media discussed several approaches they have taken to pull medical professionals into social media spaces, including engaging in weekly online Twitter sessions under#RNchat and #MDchat.

Industry Lurches Forward

Chris Schroeder of Health Central opened his session asking, “Where are the pitchforks and torches?” – an apt question for everyone in the room. While all trends point to fully engaged e-patients, less-progressive physicians and industries have moved into the digital space at a snail’s pace, often blaming the litigious and regulatory environment. Chris theorizes that true healthcare reform with a strong digital component and a focus on patient empowerment won’t take place until patients scream loud enough.

So, how do we get there? Well, we start following the lead of more progressive organizations like:

• The Lance Armstrong Foundation, who announced the upcoming launch of their new iPad app for Cancer patients.
• Gilead Sciences, who discussed the importance of partnering with patient advocates when creating SpeakFromTheHeart.com in conjunction with Mended Hearts, a women’s heart health advocacy group
• Ignite Health, who discussed merging gaming concepts with health management tools
• Vgo Communications, who developed an internet-enabled robotic telepresence that allows patients to interact with their communities when they are otherwise unable to leave their homes or care centers

In a fascinating keynote, Harris Rosen from Rosen Hotels and Resorts described how he believed he could do better than what the insurance companies were offering. Today, his company is fully self-insured, covering thousands of lives for a fraction of what it would cost to go through a traditional insurance company. His approach isn’t without controversy (a strict anti-tobacco policy causes employees to undergo nicotine tests along with their drug tests), but it seems to be working.  In the very least, it should give health care professionals and providers pause when they gripe about the system. There are other models emerging.

Patients Are There and Are Waiting… Patiently

Jenni Prokopy of Chronicbabe.com and Kerri Sparling of SixUntilMe.com summarized the SXSH event the day before and kicked off their We Are All Patients campaign by stickering anyone who would let them. Jenni and Kerri are active E-patient advocates and good friends of Think Brownstone. Their campaign’s goal is to close the gap between patients and the healthcare system by reminding us that we all came into this world as patients and we’ll all leave it the same way. An atmosphere led by patients could put us all in a better position to get healthy.

Tell me you don't hum the Dr. Pepper theme song when you see this

While the event opened with the inspiring patient journey of Charity Tilleman-Dick, one of the final sessions was Kelly Young’s devastating struggle with Rheumatoid Arthritis. While Kelly struggled with finding the right specialists and securing the right treatments, she learned a great deal about her patient journey. Kelly manages RAWarrior.com to offer insight to patients with RA.

Kelly offered the following advice for the industry to take to heart as we all work to improve healthcare:

Patients are more involved in their own care than ever before. Taking their input in four areas is a critical component to improving healthcare:

• Patients could help create new methods to assess disease
• Patients could help design more effective clinical trials
• Patients could improve the focus and effectiveness of marketing efforts
• Patient-generated data could improve product inserts and warnings

Final Words

This post highlights only a third of the sessions over a two-day conference. Due to time limitations, I skipped a number of engaging speakers covering important topics. For me, the recurring theme throughout the event was that while things are slow to move, change is coming.

Change: It’s About The Experience (Like Everything Else)

At Think Brownstone, we don’t shy away from the fact that the most common Experience Design targets tend to be applications (mobile, tablet, desktop, etc.) and web technology – there’s a lot of exciting and important work being done there, and it’s the way in which we first engaged with many of our long-term clients. But lately we’ve been having more and more conversations outside of that realm, talking about things like recruiting methods, informal learning strategies, charity events, and non-profit donation experiences (among others).

Recently, we spoke with a client who is anticipating a major organizational change and is looking for strategies to facilitate the shift internally. The change will be on a scale that it will affect every individual in the organization in many different ways. The impacts will be felt on a continuous basis, in a manner that will require quick and agile response to keep the organization in alignment. It’s what you might call, in official terms, a “wicked problem”.

The client team needed to prepare themselves to adapt, react, and shepherd employees through the uncertainty and turmoil to achieve the business goals that are triggering the change. A problem like this may sound overwhelming, intimidating, or even insurmountable. To an Experience Designer, however, it’s the kind of challenge that gets us out of bed in the morning. So, we scheduled a session with the client team, and pulled out all of the stops – including round trip transportation to the Think Space via party bus and free reign of the space after the scheduled portion wrapped up. We were going to tackle some heavy problems, and we wanted the experience with us to be as easy and comfortable as possible.

All Hands On Deck At The Think Space

There are, of course, many different ways to approach this issue and plenty of respected and long-standing organizational theories and models to consider that can help guide the process of managing change. But our natural response to approaching a problem like this, while it may be informed by organizational psychology and related fields, stems from our holistic Experience Design perspective. We truly believe that any challenge can be successfully addressed at a fundamental level by following the design process, even if certain steps might require tweaking based on the specifics (something Carl brought up repeatedly during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill). We also believe that the arguments around Design Thinking being dead or alive tend to boil down to yet another battle of semantics – the fundamentals are sound no matter what you call it – and have learned from experience that teaching our clients the fundamental tenets of Design Thinking gives them some additional arrows in their quiver to point at organizational problems that need solving.

Scratching The Surface

So, that’s what we did – providing a reusable structure that can not only help define the problem, business objectives, and employee needs, and drive appropriate solutions, but it can also help the client team navigate through unexpected challenges and determine appropriate solutions throughout the change process. It’s all in a day’s work for…Think Brownstone! Let us know if you’d like to learn more.

DMI “Value Of Design” Conference Recap

Brian, Carl & I headed to Amsterdam last week to attend “The Value Of Design” – a conference held by the Design Management Institute (DMI). Why travel to Amsterdam for this? Well, there were a number of good reasons:

1. We’re extremely interested in the topic, as we’re continuously looking for effective ways to explain the value of design to our potential clients (and the world, for that matter). A conference dedicated to full exploration of the subject, with built-in peer collaboration/discussion sessions, was right up our alley.
2. We’re interested in making connections in Europe and worldwide, to continuously grow our global insight and also to plan for future partnerships or office locations. A full roster of international design professionals (speakers and attendees) was a huge draw.
3. Dude, it’s Amsterdam. Have you had a fresh Heineken and a stroopwafel?

So, in keeping with tradition, I’ll provide our high-level impression of the conference and Brian will provide interactive sketchnotes for some of our favorite sessions. Be sure to hover over each sketchnote image for links to lots of great information and resources.

Brian's interactive sketchnotes. Click image to see 'em all.

Overall, we were really impressed and felt that we got a lot of value for the investment. As we debriefed, some telling things rose to the top. For instance, there was a refreshingly low hipster quotient, with absolutely no talk of ninjas, superheroes, rockstars, or zombies. Not that those things aren’t fun…just, tired. There were plenty of laughs besides.

The venue (the Felix Meritis) was a brilliant choice, and infinitely better than a conference room at a hotel complex. There were a few logistical problems due to the uniqueness of the space, but the organizers handled them very well and we’ll take that any day as the potential price to pay for two days at such a distinctive location. The food was great, the pacing felt right, and there was ample time for networking, breaks, and reflection.

Perhaps most importantly though, we were amazed and heartened by the speakers not only sticking around for the rest of the day after they were finished, but for the rest of the conference. They participated in the breakouts and exercises, asked questions from the audience, ate meals and attended happy hours with the rest of us as equals. You might think this shouldn’t be an exceptional case. But it was. It made a big difference.

Marty Neumeier at DMI Amsterdam 2011

So what of the sessions themselves? As with all conferences, some hit harder than others – and that’s par for the course. However, there was healthy skepticism openly and professionally offered where warranted (as opposed to only passive aggressive Twitter-snark), rich discussions as a result, and on the whole, very strong content. It was interesting to have so many speakers all orbiting around a central issue – at times it made us long for something “off-topic”, but in the end it was one heck of a concentrated punch. We’re DMI converts, and grateful for all of our new friends and connections worldwide – that’s the way to do it!

The Slide That Haunts & Inspires Me

I recently attended the IA Summit in Denver, where I attended many thought-provoking sessions, led by great speakers with interesting perspectives on all things Information Architecture. (A collection of links to decks and info about most of the sessions can be found here.)

While I took many ideas, lessons, and inspiration away from the experience, there was one slide that has really stuck with me since the Summit.

The slide appeared in Jared Spool’s talk about “The Most Valuable UX Person in the World”. He described the skills and areas of expertise that this person would possess, and showed a slide listing those skills that looked like this:

Copyright Jared Spool - From "The Best Is The Enemy Of The Good"

Several things really struck me about this slide.

First, I never paused to think about all of the qualities that make for a great Experience Designer, but wow – that slide illustrates the impressive breadth of skills that we as UX Professionals practice and refine on a regular basis. Of course, most of us specialize in one or two areas, but we should all strive to hone our skills across the board, supplementing and complementing the expertise of our team. (By the way, if you feel that you possess many of these skills and knowledge areas, contact us – we’re always on the lookout for more of those Most Valuable UX Persons to join our team).

The second thing that struck me about this slide is that we are in such an exciting field: one that incorporates many different disciplines, one where we can learn from our peers who have different specialties than we do, and one with so much possibility for fun and interesting work.

The final and most poignant take-away from this slide was how closely the items on the slide parallel my area of focus: add the word “Learning” above “Experience Design” and you can see almost exactly what is required to create great learning experiences (I’d add Adult Learning Theory and Cognitive Science to the slide, not just for LXD, but for XD as well). This is what many Instructional Design practitioners are missing: the perspective of all these skills and knowledge areas that can inform learning strategy, process, and deliverables.

Jared went on to mention three “specialty collections” in our field: Mobile Design, Service Design, and Content Strategy in his talk. At Think Brownstone, we’re adding Learning Experience Design to the list.

Thanks for the inspiration, IA Summit!

Phil’s SXSW Interactive Recap

OK, it’s a few weeks after SXSW Interactive closed. While Russ and I posted our misgivings about the setup and execution of SXSW, we were able to find a ton of sessions and there was a lot of value to be absorbed. To see our sketch notes, click the image below.

Visit our sketchnotes set complete with links!

Cooperative Gaming
Buster Benson, healthmonth.com
Thor Muller, Get Satisfaction, Inc.
As I noted in my off-the-cuff review here, Buster and Thor practiced what they preach in this session. After over a decade in the learning design industry, I’m always glad to see something new and different, and Buster and Thor served it up.

Conference Presenter Tip #1: Don’t just talk, DO SOMETHING

From Web to Mobile Apps
Aaron Forth, mint.com and Intuit
Aaron spoke about their journey from the web to their mobile app. He highlighted three main steps that any experience designer would say, “duh” to, but I bet most don’t follow when the rubber hits the road: 1. Pick your platform  2. Identify what is transferrable from the web to your app  3. Concentrate on the user’s experience

Identifying what transfers from Web to App

Stop Listening to Your Customers
Mark Trammell, Twitter
Nate Bolt, Bolt/Peters
This session covered alternative methods for user testing and customer research. Twitter isn’t making a profit yet, so their testing budgets are tiny, but they have successfully redesigned and launched their site and app through multiple versions. How did they do this? Watching behavior of existing users, combining inexpensive tools like silverlight, and rapid prototype/test cycles. This is where I heard the best line of the conference:

Fire Lazy Designers and Developers

Patients and Caregivers on Facebook: Establishing Boundaries without Barriers:
Dana Lewis, Swedish Health Services
Daniel Goldman, Mayo Clinic
Ed Bennett, University of Michigan
Keely Kolmes, Ohio State
Jennifer Dyer, Psychotherapist
This was one of many of the health track sessions I attended. This session focused on ethical ways caregivers can engage electronically with their patients while still protecting themselves. The highlight of the session was the participation of Daniel Goldman, the intellectual property attorney for Mayo Health Clinic. It’s no mystery that Mayo is one of the most digitally engaged healthcare facilities in the nation. Clearly, the progressive perspective of Goldman has contributed a lot to that. Some advice Goldman gives physicians who are concerned about getting involved online: “The riskiest thing a doctor does is practice medicine.” He uses this to set the stage, not to encourage doctors to dive into the shallow end.

Social Media in Regulated Industries
Shannon Paul, Blue Cross Michigan
Shwen Gwee, Vertex Pharmaceuticals
Marc Monseau, Johnson and Johnson
The panelists answered questions from the crowd on how to engage digital audiences when your organization operates under government regulations. These folks know their stuff. Attendees covered a range of industries from tobacco to law enforcement to pharmaceuticals and the military. We barraged them with questions for an entire hour, then pulled them out into the hallway to continue the conversation while SXSW prepped the room for the next session.

Conference Presenter Tip #2: Q&A is valuable. People want to ask experts how they do what they do. Make sure they are experts.

Online Health Communities
Jenni Prokopy, chronicbabe.com
Jenni demonstrated how online health communities rock, how they struggle and why they are necessary. Jenni is a pioneer in online health communities and a good friend of Think Brownstone. A patient herself, Jenni and all online health community volunteers are an inspiration. They provide support for large communities of patients, often without much credit or compensation. The Q&A session was great. See Conference Presenter Tip #2 above.

Free Your Content! Who Really Owns Your Online User-Generated Content
J.J. Johnson, founder Virtual Tourist and Lunch.com
J.J. discussed different UGC ownership models. As most of us know, you usually own your own content when you participate on a UGC site and some organizations are exploring sharing revenue with their most prolific contributors. J.J. discussed how his organizations have explored those revenue models. This was one of those gems of the conference that was, unfortunately, sequestered a mile away at another hotel.

The Legal Ramifications of Saying “I’m Sorry”
Chris Moran, Consumerist
Fred Taylor, Southwest Airlines
Margaret DiBianca, attorney
Paula Berg, PR consultant
This panel session brought together a collection of experts to discuss the ramifications of organizations saying “I’m Sorry” online. This panel was another lively Q&A, session. Two great highlights: Dan Goldman describing the dreaded sports apology as, “I’m sorry you were offended by my vomiting on you” and Fred Taylor discussing Southwest’s unique formula for an apology: Level with the customer. Show you are engaged with their issue. Acknowledge what they went through.

The Sports Apology

Q&A with Google and Bing
Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land
Matt Cutts, Google
Duane Forrester, Bing
This was easily the most crowded session I attended. This was the ultimate SEO geekfest with Matt and Duane answering any question the audience could throw at them. The session was standing room only and the audience asked questions ranging from simple to expert. Their advice can be summarized pretty simply and has been the SEO mantra for years: Create valuable, unique content and use Webmaster tools. This was an extremely valuable session. See Conference Presenter Tip #2 above.

There are no normal results

Abolishing the Hourly Rate
John Lax
Lee Dale
John and Lee led a session specifically for agencies on how to abolish hourly rate pricing and embrace value pricing. These guys had enough guts to base the business models of their two agencies entirely on value pricing. For those of you who have worked in agencies, you’ll be surprised to hear they don’t use timesheets. If you are interested in this topic, they recommended Ron Becker’s book and Tim Williams blog.

Ideas not Objects
Robert Brunner, Ammunition Group
An icon in the industrial design community, Robert walked us through some of the highlights of his career. His joked that his claim-to-fame at Apple was that he hired Johnny Ive. One of the most impressive moves he made, actually, was his redesign of the failed Macintosh Portable into the Powerbook series. This series set the standard for laptop design you know today whether you’re on a Mac, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba or other laptop.

Standout Sessions At SXSW

After my post about the overall experience of SXSW Interactive (an experience that left some things to be desired), I wanted to also do a quick recap of the highpoints. Despite the hit-and-miss scorecard for the sessions I attended, there were a few real standouts and two earlier ones that I have some sketchnotes on to boot.

“The New Frontier Of Social Gaming”
Brian Reynolds of Zynga
One of my favorites, this session provided some great insight around the secrets of designing successful social games and was one of the few that had actual bullets that could be taken away and applied to your own projects and ideas. I tend to like sessions that are broadly interesting but also have some take-away potential for practical application – this fit the bill nicely.

Some SketchNotes From The Brian Reynolds Session

“How Many Rungs? Social Change & The Engagement Ladder”
George Weiner of Dosomething
Laura Cochran of Gannett
Patty Huber of Groupon
Tom Dawkins of Hopelab
Robert Rosenthal of Volunteermatch
Panels can be tough depending on how they’re run. Pitfalls at the opposite end of the spectrum would be a quick 5-10 minutes from each participant with a loosely unifying theme following by quick Q&A, or a bicker-fest right out of the gate with no common thread (like the one I attended with folks from big banks and “indie” banks sniping at each other for an hour). But this particular panel worked – it was more unified than most with some engaging participants with compelling ideas and points. There was a novel take on the typical engagement ladder model and good conversation around it, as well as some talk about companies like Zamzee and their unique engagement model. Definitely some folks and companies worth following.

SketchNotes From The Social Change Panel

“Cheaper, Better, Faster: Can Casual Games Save Education?”
Gary Goldberger of Fablevision
Kristy Bowden of D2D Fund
Scot Osterweil of MIT Education Arcade
Ward Tisdale of Advanced Micro Devices
Another panel, and one that suffered a bit from the time constraint – I think that panels have the potential to be extremely valuable, but when you’ve got one with 4-5 folks on it and it’s stuffed into an hour slot, it can be limiting. Though all of these participants did well, it was a real pleasure learning about the work Scot Osterweil has been doing and I think in particular he captured the imagination of the audience, based on the volume of questions aimed at him afterward.

That leads me to the Heath Track, and the two sessions I attended over there – both of which were outstanding and had me so engaged that I actually forgot to take notes.

“Your Computer Is The Next Wonder Drug”
Jonathan Richman of DoseOfDigital
A fascinating session on the future of the integration of technology in healthcare and in particular, how we’ll integrate this kind of technology into our own lives to personally track and monitor our health on a daily basis. But interestingly, there was also a lot of talk about the psychology around it all and how certain technologies may address curious habits humans have regarding proactive vs. reactive measures toward increasing health. I’ve found myself thinking about messages from this session since, and even quoting it to others – a sure sign that it hit the mark.

“Health Communities: Superheroes Who Need A Justice League”
Jenni Prokopy of ChronicBabe
I was already a fan of Jenni’s from seeing her at BlogWorld in Las Vegas back in November, but this session really hit home for me because it aligned very closely with some of the conversations we’ve been having around Think Brownstone on how to take action on the promise of “Social Health”. There’s a lot of talk about it, but few seem to take active steps toward doing it – not Jenni. She not only created a space to start walking the talk, but has been actively monitoring it to see what’s working and what isn’t, making adjustments and improvements, and distilling the learning so it can be replicated elsewhere for communities in need. A superhero in her own right!

Those were really the standout sessions for me, despite attending nearly double this amount while in Austin. But hey, this post is about accentuating the positive – and if SXSW beefs up the speaker list with ringers like these, we could be on the road to redemption. Well done, folks!

SXSW Interactive As An Experience

Phil and I went down to SXSW Interactive last week with the best of intentions, despite being concerned about the quality of the on-line experience before flying down to Austin on 3/10 and wondering if it was a harbinger of things to come. It was and it wasn’t, but it mostly was.

As those of us who were there know, and perhaps much to the chagrin of those who weren’t, there’s a lot of chatter about SXSW on the social networks – a lot of it along the lines of…

“I’m having the best time ever!” or “I’m having lunch with @pixelgeek24 and we’re going to conquer the world! We’re ninjas/rockstars/superheroes! W00t!”

That’s all fine and good, and generally aligns with the typical self-promotion and non-wave-making that you’ll see clustered around conferences. We’re all guilty of it, and for a lot of folks that’s the whole point of engaging there in the first place.

But there’s a special kind of walking on eggshells that seems to happen around SXSW – because I found a totally different undercurrent of sentiment lurking in the physical realm that isn’t nearly as represented in the Twittersphere: being in Austin with a lot of like-minded folk has its definite positives and potential, but the conference itself is decidedly “iffy” (note: the health track held in the Hilton Garden Hotel was the one shining, glorious exception). In fact, I talked with several folk who probably wouldn’t want to go on record saying it, but who said that they’re seriously considering next time just coming to Austin during SXSW Interactive and not even registering for the conference (actually, if you read between the lines on Twitter, it was easy to see just how many were regularly out gallivanting during sessions already this time around).

Love Austin...But The Jury Is Still Out On SXSW Interactive

Why might that be? Well, here are my top 5 reasons:

1. Picking a valuable session is like trying to make your way through a minefield with your shoes tied together…after downing a 5^th of Jack. Aside from the sheer tyranny of choice triggered by having to select one of 20 or more sessions occurring during each time slot, they’re also spread out all over the city – putting even more weight on making the right choice, and making it all the more painful when you choose…poorly. That happens to be an extremely easy thing to do – ranging from something that is probably decent but just isn’t as relevant to you as you thought it might be from the description, to someone with the presentation skills of a handball and/or really weak content. Give me a single-track powerhouse like An Event Apart any day, with vetted speakers and solid content – I know I’m going to walk away with value. The Russian Roulette at SXSW is brutal.
2. This minefield has resulted in a culture completely accepting of getting up in the middle of talks and walking out, and then barging into other ones already in-progress. I guess I can’t blame people for this, and I must confess I walked out of a few sessions myself. But I was completely floored by the audacity of people walking into sessions I was genuinely interested in 45 minutes late…sitting down for 5 minutes…and then getting up and leaving again. In almost all of my sessions I endured a never-ending stream of KA-CLICK…KA-CLACK! – the doors opening and closing relentlessly. Again, it’s a symptom of #1, and while the symptom was treated at some sessions by volunteers trying to minimize the impact by holding the doors, it’s not getting at the disease.
3. The whole thing is mind-numbingly commercial. You know when you’re walking down the strip in Vegas and there’s those people slapping postcards and pamphlets against their hands to get your attention, and when you make eye contact they accost you? Same deal, only with techy tchotchkes and other nerdy stuff of questionable value. Absolutely everything is sponsored and plastered with a logo…and that’s just a drag.
4. The “must see” sessions that you know are going to be cool/interesting are so over-attended due to the size of the conference that it’s not even remotely enjoyable. I can’t think of too many reasons I’d submit to standing in a line that stretches for two blocks (and maybe for this reason I am getting old). But I’m definitely not doing it (again) to then be crammed into a tiny tent where people are packed shoulder to shoulder like an underage frat party, or to have the doors be closed in front of me because the venue is at capacity. If they curated the sessions better (while still keeping the important democratic element so it’s not all “celebrity” speakers) they could increase the size of the rooms and improve the experience greatly. And hey, while we’re at it, subtract a day, cut the session count in half, and see how that separates the wheat from the chaff.
5. Bigger does NOT equal better. 25K+ people feels like being on a college campus when classes are changing. There’s nothing intimate, communal, or special about the way you feel racing from one session to the next, trying to find a place for lunch without a monster wait, or battling for a free power outlet.  At least not the way the conference is run now. No wonder people elect to just step out of the flow and do it on their own terms (jeez, Seth Godin even does that at TED) – the conversations I had with folks outside of sessions were certainly the most valuable part of the experience…but I still genuinely like to be enlightened by a killer session.

OK, whew…I got that off my chest. I would have liked to see an honest review of SXSW Interactive before going because the experience wasn’t really in line with the chatter. Maybe this year was the turning point and it wasn’t always this way. But as I finished writing this I was informed that I’m not the only one saying some of these things…so I’m hoping the organizers are taking note and thinking long and hard about how to preserve the experience if they choose to keep growing – because it’s breaking.

Pssst – you’ve got our contact info if you want to fix that.

P.S. I’ll be posting a follow-up soon on the fantastic health track and the few outstanding sessions I did attend.