Our adventures at SXSW 2009
Last month we headed out to the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, as part of the UK digital mission. SXSW interactive is an annual conference attended by many of the leading thinkers in new media. It was a great opportunity to gather and share ideas.
Old media and the economic downturn
Not surprisingly, a core theme across many of the panel discussions was the downturn in the economy, and its implications for the digital industry. One of the stand out panels we attended was ‘The Ecosystem of News’ run by Stephen Johnson from Outside.In.
There is an interesting contrast between how old media is dying as fast as new media is advancing. Its future life depends on whether it can adapt fast enough to counter the challenges it faces. Is there a place for old media in the rapidly expanding and flourishing ecosystem offered by new media?
The evolution of natural user interfaces (NUIs)
One of our favourite themes at SXSW was the proliferation of Natural User Interfaces – interfaces that get away from keyboard+mouse+screen and offer new ways of interacting with technology.
Talks such as ‘Minority Report is Real’ (run by Ben Rigby, Barrett Fox, and Jeroen Lapre) showed how interfaces that were science fiction just a few years ago (including the gesture-controlled information screens used by Tom Cruise in ‘The Minority Report’) are now available in workplaces and homes.
Users are embracing gestural input methods (for instance on the Nintendo Wii) and devices such as the iPhone offer voice activation, motion sensors and GPS as interaction inputs. This means interface designers face new challenges to create compelling and usable experiences.
Going beyond touch screen interfaces raises new issues as they’re often used where groups of people are present. These systems need to understand social rules among users and onlookers, to enable them to function as desired.
For instance, imagine a voice controlled TV being used by a family. In the past, one member would have held the remote, and would have had the control of which channel was watched. The channel would only be changed if there was some sort of consensus or if the person holding the remote had the authority to override the wishes of the others present.
A voice activated TV would need to understand the hierarchy within the family, and would have to understand when a consensus was reached, or authority was being invoked, before changing the channel. Without an understanding of social rules, the TV would cause chaos!
The importance of social rules becomes more apparent as users are located (physically) further from the product itself, and a defined ‘master’ user is harder to specify.
Gestures and social interaction
Connected to the ideas around popular new input methods on technology devices, is the area of promoting its ongoing adoption. Users have been quick to adapt to NUI’s as they mimic the real world, however, maintaining the momentum which they have been consumed faces challenges for designers.
The strongest theme we saw at SXSW was the development of social networking and social interaction. We saw ideas that have incorporated both gestural input methods and social interaction to encourage users to engage on a deeper level with the technology they are using.
An example we heard about was EA’s interaction development for their new NFL Madden game for the Wii. They wanted to encourage players of the game to have a greater sense of interaction between them during play. They found that this type of bonding could be achieved if the players had to mirror each others actions during in-game conflict (like a football tackle).
The physical action of mirroring your opponents movements was found to create a stronger bond between the players and a greater sense of engagement with the game.
At a conference where social media were high on the agenda, the notion that user interfaces needed to understand social rules, too, showed just how far we’ve come in humanising the Internet.
You can find out more about the conference at the SXSW website. If you want to talk to us about any of the points we have discussed in this post, please get in touch.
About the author
Giles has been making products more usable for over fifteen years. He was President of the UK Usability Professionals’ Association from 2003-2007 and speaks frequently on usability in the UK and overseas. He writes on usability for Revolution magazine and was one of the editors of the PAS 78 accessibility guide from the British Standards Institute. Email Giles, or call +44 (0)117 946 3930
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