I just got back from a whole day of hanging out at the Warm Gun: Designing Happiness Conference put on by Dave McClure and his crew at 500startups. Once again, it was a stellar event, gathering designers and developers and the occasional investor (like me, although I guess I’m also a designer and developer with my CS degree). I thought I would post about the event, but post differently than posting just the notes or what was good and not so good. Instead, I thought I’d post some alternative impressions that I got while at the event which I thought were interesting.
I was shopping for a lot of books!
Two presenters gave some suggestions for reading, Geoffrey Miller and Jennifer Aaker. Through them I instantly bought on Amazon:
We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion by Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris
resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences by Nancy Duarte
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior by Geoffrey Miller
I am glad that some of the presenters did give favorite texts because it is hard to take notes in a conference setting; they talk fairly rapidly and move through slides so quick that it is hard to take the important points down. Some of them thankfully will either post their presentations on Slideshare or email them to me personally which is pretty cool.
Ex-Yahoo! designers, the next generation
I met a few designers who had been doing design at Yahoo! and left relatively recently. Most of them got there after I had left, with one I saw who was there when I was there and was still had not left!
But seeing them present and hearing about the work they did for some reason gave me a lump in my throat. I spent 9 years at Yahoo! as VP of User Experience and Design and we did so much while I was there. Now there was the new generation who designed for Yahoo in not only a new regime but new internet environment of high bandwidth, HTML4 going on 5, advanced browser technologies, faster computers, iPhone and iPads – it was a much different environment than the one I had designed Yahoo! sites for way back when. For some reason I felt nostalgic for the old days, but was impressed by their skills and knowledge and also felt disconnected with the new generation.
It was good to say hi and talk about the Yahoo!s that we respectively knew and where we were going from there.
“Twitter intros” were everywhere
What an amazing thing Twitter does – I walk into Warm Gun and immediately I am meeting and talking to people as if they know me because they tell me they have been following me on Twitter for a while now – I do the same to them if I recognize their names by their Twitter handles.
It certainly breaks the ice and for many, we seem to already know each other before meeting in person!
On the other hand, it is vaguely stalker like – should I be afraid…?
“Those who do not remember history are destined to repeat it.”
Sitting through the last presentation of the developer track, I was listening to Tom Chi, former Yahoo! search designer and now at Google. He was giving a quick talk on the intricacies of designing a search user experience.
A lot of the things he talked about were things we did when I was still at Yahoo (although afterwards, we got into a great discussion on all the cool things they were doing that weren’t mentioned in the presentation due to time constraints). Still, I could not recall where anyone had recorded information about search UX much. One of my designers, Christina Wodtke (now at MySpace) wrote about search UX design in her book, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (2nd Edition). On Boxes and Arrows, there are a few stories about search UX:
Advancing Advanced Search
Search Behavior Patterns
Long Tails and Short Queries (which references an excellent research article by Amanda Spink, From E-Sex to E-Commerce)
But if you didn’t know where to look, it would be potentially really hard to find this information. And the new generation of designers might not even try to find it before trying to design a search experience on their sites. What a shame that would be: they would most likely make the same mistakes that others have made before them. IF ONLY they had the knowledge of others before them!
Yet I find that much of the deep knowledge tends to be proprietary or trapped in the minds of individuals who worked on the problems and then went elsewhere, or left to rot on departing employees’ hard drives.
At Yahoo! we had a website where we made all the user researchers upload their usability reports into one place so that we could always go back and see what others had done before them. Now that I’ve been gone for 6 years, who knows if that repository still exists. Certainly the individuals have been scattered to the four winds.
Perhaps this is something that someone on the internet would do, which is to create a repository of design knowledge. Perhaps we could somehow get donations of historical proprietary data. Perhaps we could save presentations from all the talks both formal and informal (like on Slideshare). Maybe it could be a Design Wikipedia, or something like Television Tropes & Idioms where every formula for a TV show has been recorded and basically reused and recombined for new shows.
Otherwise, we’re going to be relegated to finding these individuals and making give the same presentation over and over again for each new generation of designers…maybe that’s yet another great reason to hold Warm Gun next year!