It’s surprisingly common for redesigns to cause outrage amongst their users. People complain that they weren’t consulted, criticise the quality and appropriateness of the new solution, and state that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However if you leave the site for a while, you often see the most critical detractors become the most vocal supporters. Why is this?
This morning I'm going to be standing in front of a room full of SEO people to let them know how I feel about their industry. Here's a rough outline on what I'm planning to say...
Like most designers and developers we've come to the conclusion that big design up front doesn't work. Six month requirement gathering exercises which result in thousand page specifications don't work. In the time it has taken to produce these requirements the business landscape has almost certainly changed. So new requirements appear and designers and developers are forced to battle scope creep and keep these documents alive while at the same time trying to build something that is ever shifting and changing.
The architect Frank Lloyd Wright famously told a customer to move their table when they complained that water was leaking from the ceiling when they ate dinner. This is almost certainly apocryphal but hints at the ego of the experience designer. W tell our users and customers what experience they are going to have (sometimes based on research) but they have to live with the results.
I've been coming to SXSW for 7 years and I've seen it change from a small and intimate event to the tech sector's equivalent of Glastonbury. Back then bloggers were king and CSS2.1 was the hot technology of the day. Today the conference has gone from 2,500 people to an astonishing 25,000. Blogging is considered old hat, and the new tech superstars are the start-up founders, the professional publishers and the best selling authors. Think Gowalla, Mashable and Shirky rather than Zeldman, Bowman and Veen.
If you're going to be speaking at a conference soon, here are my top 10 tips to make your session a sucess.