User Experience: What's Your Fail?

I've been excited to see that user experience (UX) has been a big topic and in demand at SXSW Interactive this year. We've built Interface Guru around user experience design principles over the last 10 years, and frankly it sometimes feels like we're alone in the jungle.

The first session track ever devoted entirely to user experience design at the conference was held on Saturday, and its opening workshop ("The Ten Commandments of User Experience") packed a large ballroom and left a line of people standing outside. It had tough competition, too: the keynote address was going on at the same time.

Judging from the Twitter feed for the session (at #uxsxsw - thank you to presenters Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave for hacking the 18-character official hashtag and shortening it), many participants were disappointed in the introductory nature of some of the sessions.

Comments:

"(Has) the UX community stopped thinking about new ways of doing things or am I at the wrong conference? Mostly old news so far."

"The last UX session of the day is the first where I've seen people actually walk out to move to another session."

"I agree with your twitter stream. #uxsxsw has been underwhelming - what about what's next?"

I have to admit I shared the sentiment - until I took a closer look at the program. Specifically, the ubiquitous pocket schedule everyone relies on to keep track of what's going on at SXSW.

If you look closely at the events on the schedule, each session has a small circle, square, or diamond next to it - indicating the session is either beginning, intermediate, or advanced. The two sessions people complained the most about had circles next to them, indicating they were basic introductions to the subject matter.



I only discovered this because I happened to open my pocket guide to the front for the first time during the conference, and stumbled across the key to the symbols, which only appears on the first page.

It's a classic fail: Assuming your users are going to look at your information in a linear fashion and understand that icons have meaning, without labels to guide them.

I've conducted an informal survey since, asking my fellow conference attendees (especially those who complain about a lack of relevance or depth in sessions) if they knew that the symbols in the schedule meant something. I've yet to find someone who noticed this helpful bit of information.

Once they realized the importance of the iconography, people I've spoken to have said they would have been able to use this information to narrow their selection of sessions to something more relevant, creating a more positive user experience.

Think about all the thousands and millions of dollars it takes to put the hard stuff together for one of the biggest conferences in the country: assembling panels, printing conference materials, advertising - the list goes on and on. Only to have many of your customers' satisfaction with your product come down to a few inexpensive labels and icons on a piece of paper.

What's YOUR fail?