Other than the adrenaline rush associated with hanging out with people who not only inspire you, but who can also make you bust a gut, I’m having mixed emotions about SXSW and my continued attendance.
The larger problem is that I’m not someone who builds websites. I work in and with technology, but I have more invested in the personal side of technology: how people use technology to make sense of their professional and personal lives. I’m deeply committed to the theory and practice of user centered design, but by definition, SXSW Interactive’s target audience is web developers.
I’ve been talking to people about how important it is to plan customer visits, to be where your users live and watch as they try to interact with their product. User experience is a critical part of the development process, yet I can count on one hand the number of panels that focused on pure UCD.
I told my breakfast companions that I suspect there is a fair amount of distrust on both sides of this divide. I suspect that developers think that human computer interaction and user experience is little more than common sense, and therefore doesn’t merit a separate discipline. I also suspect that there is a bit of snobbery on the part of UCD practitioners who often get so wrapped up in our educational credentials and holding on to the (limited) status that these credentials grant us that we’re a little too overprotective of our field.
One of the most enjoyable and rewarding experiences I’ve had as a user experience professional involved taking developers along on contextual observations (customer visits). Too often, developers are quite far removed from the people who use their products. Yet at the end of each customer visit, developers told me that seeing how people actually work with the products they built was a valuable and sometimes revelatory experience. Yet those stories are missing from SXSW and the conference suffers because of it.
Maybe this is a charge for me to finally get off my fat ass and organize my own damn panel.
