Web 2.0 Expo, Final Day and Notes from yesterday

Yesterday began with several good keynotes, one of which wasn't the Adobe Keynote as you can tell by my previous post.

I began my session track with a design strategies talk called Hit it Hard! (With the Pretty Stick), or something like that. Jenny Lam spoke about why aesthetics are important and the idea of designers and developers working simultaneously on projects... together. I was pleased to have that thought reaffirmed since it's something that I've been preaching since I began my career as a digital media designer.

She went on to talk about a Standford study which showed that 46.1% of people base their trust of a Web site on its design and aesthetic beauty. It is important to recognize that aesthetics communicate purpose and character as well as looking good. This isn't really about warm and fuzzy, it's about gaining viewers. Humans are, for the most part, very visual and we love looking at things that are beautiful.

One last thought that I'll take a moment to share is about prefab design and design by committee. Ms. Lam spoke about allowing designers to do what they know how to do, which is to design. As designers, we understand what makes things beautiful and many of us understand the idea of form in harmony with functionality. It is this expertise and creativity that should be culled from the designer and that designers should be allowed the freedom to do what they were trained to do. The idea of designing by committee will ultimately end up as an aesthetic failure. I'll be blunt about this. I've always believed it was my job to be creative and marry form with function. It bothers me that many of us (designers) are forced to design by committee under the perception that it has to be politics as usual because someone might not be happy with the result. This is one of the few fields where the experts, in some way or another, get told how to do their jobs. I'll leave it at that.

The other thought was prefab design. Let's just put it this way. People know when you have a prefab design. They can see the lack of craft and care and the design will not ring true. In the end, it will hurt your brand.

My next session was a Virtual world type session called Money for Nothing: User-generated Virtual Goods with Cary Rosenzweig, CEO of IMVU. Some of it turned out to be simple promo for IMVU. He did talk about the IMVU economy and the idea of consumers as creators. This really parallels what Linden Labs has done with Second Life, but on a smaller and more controlled scale. I haven't tried IMVU, yet, because it is PC only.

Cary brought up some points that I found intriguing. 70% of IMVU users are female. 60% are over the age of 18, but still within their 20s and 60% of users are from the US. From what I know about Second Life, the age demographic is older, which says to me that as a university, we may want to invest in looking at IMVU as another platform on which to promote ourselves to students.

It looks as if there are a few more controlling factors in IMVU. Avatars always have some type of covering, as far as I can tell. Virtual sex and sex type animations are not allowed, which I think makes it a much better/safer environment. And the purchase of virtual goods is more centralized within a catalog, rather than individual storefronts around the virtual IMVU grid. I'm interested in this model and think it might be worth exploring.

The final session I attended was the High Performance Web Sites talk with Steve Souders of Google. His presentation focused on some relatively technical issues, which I won't go into here, but his main point was that the speed at which a page/site loads is still very important to the user. In fact, it is the most important factor as to whether or not a users stays on your site. He also mentioned that Google is using the speed of a web page's load time as a factor in their search rankings (although it's one of 200 things they look at and it's not a really high priority).

He also presented his predictions for the top 10 things that need to happen on a large scale for speed and performance to get better on the Web. Here they are in simplicity:

10) Sites will be fast by default (server side speed enhancements)
9) People will have more visibility into the browser and what makes it faster
8) Consolidation (of tools, metrics, services)
7) TCP and HTTP will need to be looked at and optimized
6) Standards (I'm so happy to see this... I love standards for all things web)
5) Industry Organizations (professional groups, training/cert., standards bodies)
4) Data (Internet performance archive, network parameters, DNS times, Cache)
3) Green (Web Performance Optimization [new niche business, btw] is green. Consider this: By optimizing their site/servers, Shopzilla was able to cut their servers down to half of what they had. Netflix was able to cut their bandwidth consumption by 50%. Both of these things lower your power consumption and carbon footprint. By default, optimizing your site/servers is a green initiative.)
2) Mobile (metrics, long poles, root causes of speed loss, solutions and best practices)
1) Speed will be the differentiator between devices, vendor selection, reviews and user loyalty. In short, speed will affect the attractiveness of a site.

Well, that's all for now. Hope you've enjoyed this. If I have time and internet, I'll post more at the end of our conference sessions.