If you work with ubiquitous computing, digital signage, out-of-home media, or any variant of the Analog Web, you’ll learn techniques and design patterns that will help with your work now, and get you thinking about where our work will change in the future.

We’ll be covering the following questions:

1. How does our environment affect our memories?
2. How can design patterns improve traffic control, yield management and peak load issues in the real world?
3. Which social media marketing techniques will be applicable in mass advertising campaigns?
4. How will ambient media & time-shifting behaviour change the requirements for creative briefs? How can social cues be shifted through time and space to drive collective behaviour?
5. How will face recognition make digital signage campaigns more measurable than online marketing?
6. How are consumers’ emotional relationships with objects changing, and how can we create stronger calls to action using computer-identifiable objects?
7. How have user-centered design principles been used to change our attitudes and beliefs?
8. How can environmental control have a greater impact on people’s behaviour than overt messaging?
9. As public spaces expose APIs and people gain greater control of their environments, how will public landscapes change?
10. How do we prioritise? Which information presentation techniques drive the most behavioural change? How can we better determine which behaviours we want to change?

We need your votes to make this happen, so if this topic interests you, please vote for us.

Nicky Smyth, a design strategist with the BBC (who’s keynoting at Eyes on UX in Finland,) and I are putting together a great panel to explore this at SXSW10.  (Your vote here would be truly appreciated, so please give us a thumbs up!)  We’re very pleased to be speaking with:

• Patricia McDonald, Business/Planning Director for BBH Labs, who  heads up the agency’s work with Levi’s
• Alexander Grünsteidl, founder of Digital Wellbeing Labs, formerly of Apple and Ideo, now a thought leader in future retail
  

They have, between them, in-depth knowledge of  the Fashion industry (spanning from haute-couture to the high street,)  New Media, UX and future media research.

You’ll leave the session with a better idea of how to position yourself, some new thoughts on innovating your business model, and a few new design tricks. Here are some of the questions we’ll be covering.

1. What commercial considerations do Agile processes regularly skip & how do these affect decision-making?
2. How do fashion designers push out quick designs with confidence that there will be demand? How can we accurately predict user demand with limited user input?
3. How will design processes for wearable computing lead the way in fashion, product design and augmented reality?
4. How will increased specialisation in product design change the client/agency ecosystem?
5. Why are most product designers and design agencies poorly positioned for a mature New Media industry?
6. How can you get a product to market in two weeks and get it right?
7. How do muses and movements create commercial demand in fashion, and how can they be exploited in product design?
8. How can you manage cannibalisation in your business model? How can cannibalisation become a strategic advantage?
9. How can you identify inaccurate feedback and market research?
10. Why should your market positioning dictate your business model?

If you’d like to see this at SXSW, or would just like to support us, please take a minute to vote for us here. Thanks!

Recently, I was helping my friend  set up her website. She’s an artist and illustrator, and was resisting the suggestion that the website design is far from her top priority, even though the design has been holding up the entire process until now. She has a unique style and a very fun, human way of communicating. But as she puts it, so far her great work and ability has been kept “hidden under the bed.”

I’ve seen this happen with all kinds of freelancers and service businesses. We let our professional perfectionism overturn our business priorities. From our current perspective, we feel the only way for our website to communicate the quality of our work is for the website to be an example of our work. A writer toils over the website copy, the photographer over the site imagery, and meanwhile there’s no site, and no new clients!

So even with such a clear goal of gaining clients as quickly as possible, why is it so hard to prioritize? Why is it hard to single out the priorities that get us to our goals the fastest?

To dependably identify the highest leverage activities, there’s are established ways of thinking:

1. Take baby steps. Start with the bare minimum you need to get your first customer. It may be that a more hastily designed site might not land as many customers, but it will land some. More imporantly, it will land them sooner. Consider that once you have client #1, you’ll have a bit more cash and time to invest in your site.
2. Begin at the end and work backwards.  Imagine when you have loads of clients, and an established reputation. What will be the most important aspects of your website? Chances are they will be your portfolio and the description of your methods. Basically, the things that communicate your expertise. Remember, it’s not our websites that represent us, it’s our work that represents us.  When you’re busy with client work, imagine how you will communicate your expertise very quickly by keeping things simple.
3. Consider the customers perspective.  Ask any freelancer who keeps website stats – people go straight to two places: About Us and Portfolio, and some move on to contact. Once someone is on a site, all other content is basically ignored.

I suggested to my friend, as I do for many startup businesses, that a blog with a template design actually offers a greater payback at a lower cost. A blog allows you to focus on the getting the message out. The website’s measure of success is the number of clients she wins, whch depends on how quickly it gets them. Promotion and content are the key factors here.  Within a few hours, she found a suitable template and had begun populating it with her work.

If you’re having trouble getting your website or social media started, Stay Connected has an Online Quick Start service, which can get you online within days. It’s a high leverage service that stays focused on your strategic goals, and uses high quality but  free, open-source resources to make progress quickly.