Today marked the first day of SXSW Interactive. Panel programming started in the afternoon and it was fairly light compared to the upcoming four days. I attended two panels - How to Rawk SXSW: The Basics and Respect!. The How to Rawk panel was entertaining but not really all that useful - especially since I’ve been reading up on SXSW online. I actually wasn’t expecting much from this one but there wasn’t anything else going on that I wanted to go to so it wasn’t a total loss. I think I was just super annoyed by the amount of time they spent talking about drinking and and how to “hack” (kill?) your liver. I guess I just always wish Americans/Westerners were a little bit more sensitive about other cultures - and that’s saying a lot given how OK I am to be the only person at a party not drinking.
I really enjoyed the Respect! panel. I must admit that my main reason for attending was to satisfy the fangirl desires of my inner 21-year-old-web-designer who would have just *died* had she not seen Jeffrey Zeldman speak. The panel focused on how to gain respect for the web design profession but I felt a lot of the issues discussed could be applied to all of user experience. Zeldman was joined by designers Jason Santa Maria and Doug Bowman, writer Erin Kissane, and IA Liz Danzico. All of the panelists offered valuable insights but I think this panel could have offered richer perspectives had the panelists been more diverse - all except Bowman worked at Happy Cog.
The key takeaway from the panel is that getting respect for design/user experience by other disciplines (dev/pm/mktg/your client) involves A LOT of work. I already knew this from experience but it was cathartic hearing great designers facing the same issues I’ve encountered in my ux career thus far. A few points mentioned:
- get your stakeholders/clients involved early and throughout the design process - if that means handing them blank sheets of paper to sketch their ideas, do it. Aside from learning about your client’s vision for the project, you’re also making them feel involved.
- utilize the “Alzheimer’s method”- there’s a good chance that your pm/client/dev isn’t familiar with a user-centered design process so you’re going to have to reiterate it over and over again throughout the design process. This means explaining the value of every deliverable (e.g. this is a wireframe and here’s why we use it) at every stage. This is all part of educating stakeholders about the design process and only through learning about it will they learn to respect it.
- network with your peers/talk to people/be nosy - don’t expect to get invited to meetings - you have to push your way through and it all involves talking to the information gateways at your org. Learn who’s meeting with whom and ask to be invited.
- present design in pieces, not as a whole/complete solution - again, this is to make everyone feel involved/part of the process. It also makes design more tangible to non-designers and less about smoke and mirrors.
- “design is a dictatorship” - at one point, Bowman was describing what design is like at Google and how almost everyone can have a say in what gets implemented. Zeldman counters with, “Design is a dictatorship.” That was my favorite quote of the entire day. And he’s right - given that you have a *good* designer as the dictator.