Error In Syntax

Presented By

Reid Hoffman
Partner at Greylock Partners

Introduction

Web 1.0 was a very low bandwidth environment. We went out and searched for files. HTML, PDF, Flash, etc. We went into cyberspace not as ourselves, but a different person

Web 2.0 mixes our real life and the web. Our presence online is our real personality. The apps are used to help us facilitate our real life connections. Blogging, social networks, mobiel, etc.

What is web 3.0?

What people have said

• Bandwidth
• Mobile
• Video
• Location

We are generating massive amounts of data with all of our activities online. What we should be looking at for the future, for web 3.0, is what we are going to be doing with all of this data.

Challenges

• Privacy
  • What are corporations doing with this data?
  • What are governments doing with this data?
• Truth vs. Lies
  • With all the data being generated, how do we know what is the truth anymore?
  • Many people will stop basing decisions on their own thoughts, but data provided

The Data

Rule 1: Never ambush your users. Ensure that you a trustworthy with your data collecting from the data.

Rule 2: Not all data are created equal. Identifying information is more important to protect.

What can we do with the data

Mashing up data from our website with other websites to make it easier to navigate the data to find useful information. Example: taking “tag” data on LinkedIn and comparing that with skills on Wikipedia to find marketable skills to add to profiles. Mint.com mashes up our financial data with data from other users and helps you make decision on your spending by comparing it to others. Also, they look at what a lot of people are spending money on and try to bring in offers to help people save money.

Creating Web 3.0

10 rules of entrepreneurship

1. Disruptive change: when you start something, think “is this new and game-changing?”
2. Aim big: is it going to affect the whole industry?
3. Build a network: networks enable us to have a distributed intelligence store.
4. Plan for good and bad luck.
5. Maintain flexible persistance
6. Launch early enough that you are embarrassed by lack of features
7. Always keep your aspirations and aim high, but don’t drink your own kool-aid
8. Having a great product is important, but it’s more important to have a great method of product distribution
9. Pay attention to the culture of your hires from the beginning. They will be hiring the next group of people.
10. These rules are not laws of nature. You can break them.

Note: Presentation available at http://www.w3.org/2011/Talks/03-15-SXSW-MC/

Presented By

Genevieve Wilkins
Creative Director at DCI Group LLC

Michael Cooper
Web Accessibility Specialist with W3C/WAI

Introduction

The 50+ demographic is the new target market on the web. Our vision decreases as we get old and people are living longer. Therefore, there are more people over 50 that are on the Internet.

WAI – Web Accessibility Initiative

Focused on making the web accessible to people with disabilities. Part of the W3C. The goal of the W3C is to make the web accessible to all, so the WAI springs out of that. Founded in 1997, 3 years after the W3C.

How the Web Impacts People with Disabilities

• Perception of content; the output from the computer
• Interaction with content; can you input into the computer?
• Understandability of content; complexity, structure of content.
  • Some people may have learning disabilities.
  • Visually impaired people use a 1-dimensional approach to the Internet, while visual users use 2-dimensions.

Assistive technologies sometimes but not always used to help with these issues

• Output
  • Screen reader
  • Screen magnifier
  • Braille display
  • Captioning
• Input
  • Keyboard
  • Mouse
  • Speech
  • Switches

WAI Guidelines

• Guidelines
  • Authors: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
  • Authoring Tool Developers: Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)
  • Browser and assistive technology developers: User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG)
• Technologies
  • Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)

Designing for Accessibility

• Accessibility is both a design and technology issue
• Some issues are principally design (e.g. color scheme, page layout)
• Some issues involve good use of technology (e.g. proper encoding of features like headings, regions, lists, etc)
• A good design reduces need for technological accessibility features, and makes it much easier to implement them when needed
• Universal design: designing for all users makes a better experience for even those without identified special needs

Guidelines Support Materials

• Background
  • WCAG Overview
  • WCAG 2.0 at a Glance
• Guidelines
  • WCAG 2.0
• Support materials
  • Understanding WCAG 2.0
  • Techniques for WCAG 2.0
  • How to Meet WCAG 2.0

How Often to Standards Change?

Guidelines change as technology changes, however the guidelines are written to be as technology independent as possible. The techniques change often, depending on the technology.

Presented By

Phil Zimmermann
Zfone

Sorry for the lack of formatting and the random nature of the notes. Just trying to get down the things he is saying.

When PGP was first founded, it was to protect against governments. Now, organized crime is becoming the new threat model. Spam, botnets, phishing scams, etc are the new threats to the average internet user. The most popular target for identity theft is children because they don’t do much with their identity.Most crimes are known about very quickly, but identity theft can take much longer, especially in the case of children. The crime itself depends on you not being aware of the situation. The Pentagon spends lots of money on situation awareness, which are systems that help know what is going on on a battlefield. Situational awareness is something we should have on our side when our identity is at stake. The criminals are banking on our lack of situational awareness. We focus a little too much on digital signatures, but those can be spoofed. We need to step away from our computer screens a little and live in the analog world.

Presented By

Hugo Liu
Chief Scientist at Hunch
@dochugo

Jennifer King
PhD Candidate at University of California at Berkeley
@kingjen

Mat Harris
CEO at BizGreet Inc
@matharris

Noah Weiss
Project Manager at Foursquare
@noahweiss

Vijay Ravindran
Chief Digital Officer at The Washington Post Company
@vijayravindran

Why is personalization important?

Life is too short to see random stuff. We have the ability and the data to show you relivant data, so why can’t we? But it is important that users understand where the personalization comes from and how you know this data about the person. If someone wants to know why, there needs to be a pathway to tell the user why they are seeing this. There also needs to be a way for the user to turn it off if they are uncomfortable with it. Users don’t read privacy statements, and they don’t read it when you change it. We need to take back privacy from the lawyers. Great relationships come from intimacy and customers want to be intimate with a brand. But it must be done right. This is as important as supply chain optimization in the 90s. It is affecting our economy.

What is the line between great and creepy personalization?

Trust is fleeting once you have violated it. Expectations is crucial. The user needs to have control over what is shared and what is personalized. And the privacy should be the most strict when the user starts. Start conservative to gain trust. “Don’t try to get laid on the first night.” But don’t hide your intentions. Personalization should be a dialog with the user.

Should personalization always be opt in?

Users don’t always understand what is going on behind the scenes. With a single facet model, the user might understand (Twitter, Foursquare) but when a user is being tracked across multiple sites, it is much more confusing and creepy, so these should be opt in. Product design is like designing a building. You wouldn’t make a building that isn’t easy to get out of, but there are a lot of online communities that are hard to opt out of. Opt in can be an opportunity to get the user to provide more data, or better customize their experience, if they understand the benefit they will see.

Customization vs. personalization

Customization is allowing the user what they want to see and what they don’t. Personalization is about using data to derive information about the customer.

Presented By

Hank Williams
Founder/CEO of Kloudco

Why are databases important?

The way the database stores your data and the way you query on that data reflects in your application. We hav e been doing relational databases so long that we just write our applications to fit into that model.

Are relational databases really dying?

For 30+ years, there was only one way to store data. In the last few years, people are beginning to realize that there are other ways that we can store data. Relational databases have gone from 100% of the data storage to about 95%. And that number could continue to decrease as people become more aware of alternatives.

• Benefits of relational databases
  • They have been around for so long that they are incredibly tuned
  • Very efficient and powerful
• Problems of relational databases
  • The interface we use to interact with the database. They do not reflect how we naturally think about information.
  • Scaling becomes difficult. You have to be able to know everything you are going to use this database for in the future.

Why are things changing now?

• There are free (or cheap) tools available to play with
• There are fast tools available
• There is an information overload

Some Tools

• mongoDb
• couchDb
• neo4J
• Riak
• Redis

What would the best database interface look like?

We need the ability to have heterogenous collections. We should be able to store anything we want, with no restrictions. We also need relationships as objects. In a SQL database, we have objects like people, invoices, etc, but we don’t have relationships as objects. In other words, we need a graph. Facebook’s social graph is an example of this. People and groups are nodes and there are relationships between these nodes. You can always add more object types and relationships and you can ask any questions you want, as long as the data is there. Graph storage solves the largest problem in data management: siloization. Whenever we want to do something new in relational databases, we create a new database. But we cannot reach across the databases if we want to connect them. Current solution is data warehousing.

Ideas discovered along the way

• When all of your stuff is in one place, you need to specify who has access to what. When we create web apps, for example, we build permission models. Why can’t this be part of the database?
• We need a way to confer permissions to people.
• When you modify the data, you need to be able to notify other code that the data was modified. Your data begins to react to the data it is connected to, automatically.

What are some of the opportunities?

• Machine learning. The more data that is in the same location, the more the machine is able to make sense of the data.
• A modular web.

What does this all mean?

It’s about smart data storage that allows you to extract real value from accumulated data.

Presented By

Seth Priebatsch
Chief Ninja (founder and CEO) at SCVNGR
@sethpriebatsch

The Game Layer

• Next decade of human interaction. Game mechanics in the real world to drive human actions.
• The last decade was the decade of social.
  • We digitized all of our social connections and put them online.
  • Facebook created the open graph protocol so that you can build onto the social layer with facebook.
• The next decade is the decade of games.
  • The game layer seeks to act on individual motivation and to motivate where we go and what we do.

School is a Game

• School is a game, but poorly designed.
• Near-perfect game ecosystem
  • Motivated players
  • Challenges
  • Rewards
  • Rules
  • Allies
  • Enemies
  • etc
• 2 majors problems
  • engagement
    • students are not engaged
    • don’t do homework
    • check out early
    • come late
    • grading is a game mechanic but done wrong
  • students are also cheating.

Engagement

Students are bored. The grading system has replaced the real reward (learning for the sake of learning) and replaced it with a fake reward. Once you take away the reward, people stop doing it. School is a game that you don’t want anyone to lose. But grades are a game mechanic that you can fail. If you base your grades on experience, people can’t move down, only up.

cheating

We currently use disincentives to prevent cheating. But it’s only bad if you get caught, so people figure out how to not get caught. We need to change the game to have all the players (students) enforce the rules, instead of the omnipient overseer.

Customer Acquisition

• Free lunch
  • The deal is too good to be true.
  • Plays off of our skepticism but the game tells you exactly how you must get the deal.
• Communal gameplay
  • Disconnected community comes together to solve a problem
• Countdown
  • Ff you provide a countdown, people are more likely do jump on a deal.

Loyalty

• Status
  • The idea of being a regular somewhere.
  • Businesses that reward people who are regulars have higher loyalty.
• The “level-up”
  • By providing an incentive to going back and leveling up, you are creating a feeling of loyalty

Location-Based Services -> Mainstream

• Lots of big partners and lots of big money. but no one is adopting it.
• 2 problems
  • The game is too hard
    • People aren’t playing. So we need to losen the rules. The big rule that needs to be loosened is that you must be at a place to play. Being able to engage with a place from afar, or saying that you will be at a place in the future.
  • Reward schedules
    • All LBSs have rewards for playing the game. Rewards spike interaction. But people stop checking in. People have started to expect something for checking in, but we can’t always offer rewards.

Presented By

Anjuan Simmons
Director at Adverlyze
@anjuan

Introduction

Will Eisner, legendary comic book creator. Wrote a book called comics and sequential art, which is what Eisner called comics. Comics are not just for kids, but comic books could, and should, be considered high art. Codified the science of comics into written form.

The mobile application industry

• Apple 400,000 apps, Android – 200,000, Other – 40,000.
• iOS and Android are competing for the 62 million users.
• Users download 16 billion apps per year, for a total of $15.1 billion in revenue.

The problem of saturation

• There is a crowding of apps for users to choose from
  • It’s easy to get lost
  • There is also a problem of cloning, that is creating an app that is a clone of a popular app.
• The app store is cluttered.
• App tourists – only 26% of apps are used more than once.
• Have to design an app that keeps users coming back.

Mobile design challenges

• Paradigm shift: the screen is the input method.
• Design disruption: the user has to align with the mind of the designer and developer

Comic Book Design Solution

The comic book and mobile device are similar. You hold both in your hand. We are also becoming a much more visual culture because we have the ability to bring more visuals. comic books are experiencing a renaissance. 9/11 commission made a comic book to explain their findings in a report.

• The comic book language
  • Comic books are a marriage between words and art. This must be done well to be harmonious. The words have to accurately describe what is going on in the picture. Apps have text and images in a similar marriage.
  • Jack Kirby (the Kirby Grid) was able to guide the readers eye from one panel to the next. Mobile app developers should use similar grid layouts to guide the users eye.
  • Choice of image: you should be able to use the app without the text and it should be obvious. The text should compliment but not take the place of the images.
  • Choice of words: if your words are proper, the words should be able to be used on their own without the need of the text.
• Adding cliffhangers to your app
  • Comic book writers use cliffhangers to get the user to come back next month.
  • Important to add pleasant surprises to your app.
• Innovate with Achievements
  • Find ways to interact with the users.
  • Use achievements.
  • Greet users with their name.

Presented By

Even Jones
Owner of Stitch Media
@stitchmedia

Introduction

Progress bars are much older than computers. Hourglasses is an example of an old school progress bar. Also, advent calendars (progress though time towards a goal). The original computer progress bars were called “thermometers”.

We have always needed the ability to track linear motion through time (spear throwing). Pickpockets have to change this linear motion to change our expectation of linear motion. Waiting in a queue tells me how long it will take to get to the destination.

Commandments of the perfect progress bar

1. Thy progress bar shall be quantified and have an endpoint.
   • Throbbers (spinning beach ball, hour glass) are not progress bars. They only tell you that something is alive. But these often lie.
2. Thy progression must always be forward. None shall reverse or reset to zero.
3. The hierarchy of motion is thus:
   • acceleration -> constant speed -> deceleration -> unpredictable speed.
   • We are good at constant speed, but prefer acceleration.
   • Acceleration feels faster, even if it takes the same amount of time.
   • We perceive time (speed) as an average of peak and end speed.
   • Other illusions:
     • Pulses that increase in frequency as bar proceeds
     • Ripples moving backwards from the leading edge.
4. Thou must do something after thy progress bar has completed.
   • We expect the world to be different after the progress bar completes.
5. Thou shalt tell the user why he may not proceed.
   • Bonus: thou shalt make use of the waiting time with relevant information.

Youtube has changed the model of the progress bar. The progress bar is not longer what you are waiting for, but instead a meta-layer to media to tell us how long something is (and also how much has loaded). Tells the user how long their experience is going to be and where you are in the experience.

Progress bars are motivators

• Incompleteness bothers us and we take steps to complete.
• Gamification
  • Set up goals
  • Give tools to reach it
  • rewards them when they do it
• Progress bars create tension.
  • We crave resolution.
  • We love seeing tension because we love having resolution.
    • Music is a great example; also storytelling.
  • Progress bars do this through cognitive dissonance.
    • It’s a difference between the expectation of ourselves and what the outside world tells us about ourselves.

Progress bars are a black box

They are good at making a hidden process understandable. Progress bars are a layer of abstraction. They allow us to do more without thinking about it. We trust the progress bar to complete a task and tell us when they are done.

Will progress bars exist in our future?

Moore’s law is making black boxes invisible. Wait time is starting to decrease near instantanious response. Shifting our progress bars from machine-focus (machines dictate how far we have progressed) to people-focus (how far have we, as the user, progressed). The problem is humans break the commandments. We are not good at quantifying everything. We are unpredictable. And we don’t always know when things are complete. It’s not always about quantity, but sometimes about quality. Evan took off 70% of his clothing (that is, 7 of the 10 things he was wearing). But it was the last 30% that really counted (if you wanted to see him naked). Apart from 0% and 100%, everything in between is subjective.

Presented By

Margret Wallace – CEO of Playmatics
Michael Fergusson – CEO of Ayogo
Jason Brown – Zynga
Adam Penenberg – Fast Company, New York University

Introduction

Brains of people who are gaming look like people who are gambling, which looks like people that are addicted to crack.

What makes a really good game?

• Creating conditions where player can suspend disbelief and emerse themselves in the environment. Players must accept the premise of the game and the rules.
• Trigger fundamental human instincts.
  • Gambling provides no survival instinct, but we feel good when we are able to “predict” the result of the game.
  • Good game designers can manipulate these human instincts. H
• Humans are happiest when they have control, when they have achievement, when they can be creative and when there is a social connection. Highest scoring games have many of these attributes.

What games have been developed that have these attributes?

Game was developed for a diabetes foundation. They already had a great plan to help people change their lifestyles. Failed immensely. The goal is to solve the problem in the short term, instead of the long term. Game was developed to reward people in the present for making good choices. People who engage in the social game are 3x more likely to continue the healthy actions.

Game developed around energy consumption. People become aware of things in their life when there is a positive experience or a negative experiences.

Games used to be an excuse to get together with friends and family and socialize. The more social you can make a game (with gifting loops, for example), the more successful it is. People who get gifts in a game have the same brain chemistry as people who get gifts in real life. Social gaming taps into people’s desire to give to a greater cause. Farmville donated to Haiti relief by people buying something special in the game. Games are free to play, but paying small amount or inviting friends makes the game easier.

Is there a game layer being created?

Some marketers are using the “gamifcation” to compel people into compulsive actions (clicking the buy button).

Most people are smart. Poor game design will be weeded out of the market. It’s hard to manipulate people for too long, but people can be manipulated. Good game designers look to provide a positive benefit to the world. People will get used to gamified models, but people will ignore the pointless and mundane games. However, some people are vulnerable to these cheap games (children, etc).

Players of collaborative games went on to be more collaborative in real life. With social gaming, competitive gaming will get a fair market share, but you can get much more market share with collaborative gaming.

When spam email first came out, the response rate was really high. now most people can ignore it. gaming will go to this as well.

What is your vision for social gaming?

People want to be more social. Over the next year there will be a surge of social interaction in gaming.

Social gaming is not innovative, but leverages basic human instincts. Sees social gaming fading into the background and becoming just part of our daily lives. Games are already a natural part of our life.

Do you see games and game mechanics in real life?

Kids just try stuff on their parents until they just work, not thinking of preconceived notions of game design.

How can games make us better people?

The world is already a game. It may be unpleasant and hard to win, but it is already a game, perhaps poorly designed. We should not accept the rules as they are given, but to redesign the game to make it more pleasant.

Leveraging social game mechanics can expose the underlying system. Why can’t we do games that teach systemic thinking?

Presented by

Chrissie Brodigan
Mozilla Firefox
@tenaciouscb

Introduction

Success of a project depends on developers and users. Insufficient design leads to failure. Developers tend to distance themselves from design. Designers and developers are willful and prideful people, and there is a divide between developers and designers.

• Documentation matters
  • Developer, user and designer documentation are not the same
• Confidence matters
  • The way a project is presented builds confidence and the contributors time will not be wasted

Hacktivation – Ability to Get a Designer Motivated

The open source community could even demotivate Mother Teresa. Designers are scared and demotivated by developers. Developers see logical problems as a way to bypass design.

Doing away with bad habits

• Work-arounds
  • Developers do this for speed
  • Designers design to avoid workarounds for user experience
• Going rogue
  • Developers misinterpret design logic and make it work the way they think it should work.
  • Designers don’t provide documentation (a.k.a. the “why”)
• Being trendy
  • Designers design to trends
  • Developers design for the future and with mantainance and interation in mind
• Source code
  • Developers do code review religiously
  • Designers don’t practice version control and don’t treat output as source code.
    • Power of the many over the power of one.
    • Teach designers version control and encourage them to treat design assets as source code

Things to do

• Design “graphic lite”
  • Don’t depend on a lot of graphics
  • Tons of great ways to design without using graphics
• Promote design-specific bug-tracking
• Make micro-opportunities for designers to get involved in the development process
• Design and document for localization
  • Start with localization in mind when you start the project.
  • Come up with a flexible design that can be easily translated
• Refactor together
  • go back and look at source code, add stuff you learned from users
• Include forkability as part of the project’s design ethos
  • Learn to let other designers play in your work
  • Practice the play of forking
    • Dribble rebounds
    • Layer tennis
    • Design-swap.com
• Design design contests
  • Firefox logo came from community-driven design challenge

Other Thoughts

lettering.js – down to the letter control of web fonts.

Encourage designers to use creative commons

Good design is a powerful (non-markety) way to spread the word about your project