You see a lot of brilliance and a lot of douchebaggery in one week at SXSW Interactive. The 5-day conference in Austin, TX brings out the best minds in interactive, social media, and digital. With so many big brains and bigmouths in one place, what came out on top when it came to the sessions? I’ve highlighted a few observations – the good, the bad, and the memorable of the presentations at SXSW Interactive.
Go for MVP – Most Valuable Panel.
Don’t just present your knowledge in the same boring way. Make it interactive for the audience. Be memorable. Take a stand. Own your opinion. People respect that. The most valuable and entertaining session I attended was ‘UX Smackdown – Usability Testing Techniques in the Ring”.
Fix the format.
The UX Smackdown panel used a debate style for their session – much better than the highly disorganized panel I’d been to a few nights prior (where one of the panelists had a ‘Yep, what he said’ answer to almost every comment made by his fellow panelist’). Some panelists can tend to get lazy, relying on the moderator to ask the right questions. Clearly, there was preparation involved in the UX panel. The Smackdown moderator had downloaded a bell noise onto his iPhone, signaling the start of each round, and as we entered the session we were given noisemakers to vote for the winner of each battle.
Noisemaker!
Take a stand.
People respect people who have opinions. The debate/opposing viewpoints format that UX Smackdown had could be very effective for presentation styles where there are two or more presenters. This allows each presenter to really own the opinion and bring some passion to it. Whether your side wins or loses, it’s a win-win.
Hashtags.
One thing I noticed was helpful was adding the official hashtag for the session to the bottom of each slide. This allowed users to follow the conversation on Twitter as well as listening. Don’t tell me that’s rude because let’s face it – we have a habit of looking at our devices while we are listening and learning. We are dual or triple device users while watching tv, so why should a conference session be any different? Having the hashtag at the bottom of each slide made it easy to remember when you wanted to tweet something insightful to add to the discussion. It also made it easy to follow along with the imaginary drinking games that sprung up during each session. ‘Take a shot every time he says ‘beautiful’! (regarding Ben Silbermann, co-founder of Pinterest).
@prTini
Deck out your decks.
Use of simple, striking, visual slides vs text was popular. We’ve all complained about boring, dry, text-heavy PowerPoint decks. At SXSW, I’ve seen this trend emerging of large, vivid imagery on a stark background, with one, maybe two words. The images will often repeat, suggesting a single idea at a time (a fox, a large pair of dice, a Rubix cube) and then reinforcing it later. Other slides represented real people in various situations to bring home ideas. Specific examples and videos were also key to grabbing attention, with one presenter using a clip from 30 Rock, another playing a screen recording of trying to ‘break’ Google text (when you enter way too many characters, instead of showing the remaining characters, Google displays, “Really?”). What wasn’t cool was the guy who tried to make us all cry by playing Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ during his presentation. That song is scientifically engineered to evoke an emotional response, and crying is probably not the one you want your attendees to do.
Be flexible.
In addition to the attendees needing to be flexible when lining up their schedules because sessions may be full, the presenters showed a high degree of flexibility and courage under fire. In one case, Jason Hreha said Lion reverted his slides, so the deck he was showing wasn’t the deck he created. So he had to work with what he had in front of him, losing the joke he was going to open with. It turned out to be a great presentation on applying psychology to web design, because clearly Jason knows his stuff.
In another situation, @prTini had planned on giving a talk about PR and Marketing, something something gobbledygook (boring!), and ended up speaking to us about her trip to the earthquake-devastated island of Haiti. She announced that she decided the night before to make the switch, and had been changing her slides a half an hour before the talk. She spoke with us about how more than any manual labor she could have contributed to the Haitians plight, the people there had just asked that she share their story using her voice in social media, and that our #firstworldproblems pale in comparison. Needless to say, the topic was riveting.
Her bright pink skirt didn’t hurt either. Which leads me to my last point:
Be memorable.
Give the listeners something to do when they leave. Allow them to apply your experience to their lives. Make me want to find out about Haiti, go to a baseball game and understand the nuances and intricacies of an at-bat, determine whether my co-workers are ‘hedgehogs’ or ‘foxes’, tell the story of my life based on the music I’ve listened to over the years… or design amazing, beautiful (take a shot!), highly user-friendly mobile websites.
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Anne Munkwitz is a Project Manager at Roll Mobile. She is a gadget geek, fitness fanatic and Twitter addict. Suggestions for a BLOG@ROLL topic or inquiries about how YOU can be mobile can be sent to anne@whyroll.com or on Twitter via @RollMobile.