Post-show Coverage

A quick round-up:

Tech Chronicles via the SFGate
Wrangling Web 2.0 at CNet
Wrap-up from Read/WriteWeb

More tidbits in this post and some video, too.

That's a Wrap, People.

Time for dinner & drinks!

2 Sessions Left

Ah, the final stretch... So I ended up following Raph over to the Strategy & Business Models track and checked out this, and I'm now back to the Design & User Experience program:

Session
How to Make 27 Million People Hate You

David Crow
Jay Goldman

Track: Design and User Experience
Date: Wednesday, April 18
Time: 4:30pm - 5:20pm
Location: 2018

Radiant Core enjoyed the terrifyingly good fortune of working closely with the Mozilla team to design the official theme for Firefox 2. Designing for a group of users larger than the population of Canada is hard! Learn about the challenges of cross-culture/language/platform application development, and why passionate users are both a blessing and a curse. Plus, we'll share the big secret about great design!

Thoughts, as Promised

As mentioned in last post, this turned out to be great. (Raph Koster had the whole hour as the other guy fell ill).

Thanks to whoever had the foresight to include this in the DUX track.

So what made it good? Firstly, Raph had a lot of smart things to say, and secondly, and maybe more importantly (when giving a talk anyway) he was opinionated - he came with a lot of ideas to share. He just laid it out, and did it as someone who knows what conference speaking is about.

The crux of his presentation was offering a unique perspective to many of the same problems we're confronted with, as website and webapp designers - but coming from a different industry: game design. The parallels are many, as I'm sure many differences can be drawn too, but as the title states, it's about the insights: "Immersive Experiences: Lessons from Game Designers".

I did capture some notes, but was more compelled to listen than record frankly. The basic setup was a game design learning, followed by an anecdote, and then the general best practice that could be drawn. (He made it an entertaining formula.)

The PPT stack is promised on his website soon. See update below.

Meanwhile, here are the titles of the ones I managed to capture (clearly meant to be provocative):

• The average person is below the average
• Nobody reads the manual (ref. George A Miller: 7 + or - 2)
• Older men act like women
• Cozy Worlds
• Do it everywhere
• Casual gamers can be hardcore
• Audiences kill genres
• Adaptive difficulty has pitfalls (Oblivion)
• Bottom feeding
• Cameras convey psychology
• Avatars are filters
• Never ramp smoothly (Dunbar’s 148.6 aka “the rule of 150")
• They chase the carrot (feedback loops/incentive structures)
• Democracy fails in small groups (<50k>
• Free assignment of guild roles
• There’s 3 kinds of rules
• The map is not the territory
• Content will kill you
• Unpredictable policing
• People are lemmings
• They also make shit up
• Players need to know they will see each other tomorrow
• Make games gamers like
• Topple your kings
• Balance is overrated

Update 4/23: Newly posted materials

Web 2.0 Expo: Immersive Design
PDF here and audio, too (by way of trippy) and a write-up in Red Herring

Currently...

Surprisingly good thus far. Notes forthcoming.

Session
Immersive Experiences: Lessons from Game Designers

Ben Cerveny, Director, Playground Foundation
Raph Koster, President, Areae, Inc.

Track: Design and User Experience
Date: Wednesday, April 18
Time: 2:10pm - 3:00pm
Location: 2022

Game design has dealt with a lot of the interaction issues that designer-developers are just beginning to face today. Ideas like flow, easter eggs, and feature discovery have been used and refined for years by game designers to achieve some of the same user experiences web designers are pursuing now. This session looks to games and other related fields for both inspiration and practical strategies for improving web design.

Wednesday AM

Admittedly moving a bit slower this AM (4 days of conferencing will knock anyone out). Time to get some coffee, and surf over to the daily schedule to plan the day.

Day 3: And that's a wrap

All in all a pretty hit-or-miss day. I guess like any conference I've ever been to, some of the keynotes and sessions are good, and some of them... not so good. I've been doing my best to get to the better ones when I find myself in one that is clearly not going anywhere, but yesterday I have to say it wasn't easy. Sunday and Monday proved to be more interesting for me.

One of today's more enjoyable was "Social Networking Winners & Losers: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". A good selection of folks on the panel, and a bit of entertaining cheekiness, too. I've updated that entry with some comments.

Here's some frank thoughts at AppScout discussing another pair of hit and miss.

Here's to hoping for a strong finish tomorrow.