Opera at SXSW 2008

This panel was my final one for the conference, and it was also the most technical. The panel chair—Patrick Sanchez, a systems administrator for Enspire Learning—began by outlining the technical features of the Wiimote. Those features, which I'm certain are familiar to most readers of this blog, are: a motion sensor, IR sensor, speaker, rumble, Bluetooth, and a few LEDs. While the device has a lot of functionality—panelist Chris Pittman of RFD pointed out that unlike the Xbox 360 or PS3, the Wii is completely open and hackable—there have not yet been many eLearning applications for the Wii. As an example of how easy it is to program the device, Pittman walked through a simple drawing app written in the Opera JavaScript API, and much of the discussion dealt with what applications might be possible with the Wiimote.

During the introductions, panelist Brandon Carson of Sun described why he got into eLearning. According to him, when he started at Sun their education apps were of two types. On one extreme, the user was completely passive, just viewing materials (like videos). On the other, the user merely clicked through "slide-junk." After some research, he found that most of what they were doing wasn't working because it wasn't tied to performance or business outcomes.

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I have say that I've been pleasantly surprised so far by my experience with this conference. As an academic, my conference experiences have all been academic ones, and, frankly, academic panels are a mixed bag. I've enjoyed some of them, but most academic panels I've seen are under-prepared and don't stick together very well. However, halfway through SXSW, I've not yet been to bad or uninteresting session.

This high-spirited panel was no exception. Before it began, the chair, David Parmet,—the owner of Marketing Begins At Home—organized the audience into a wave, while Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com sang "Feelings" and spent the entire panel sketching comics and tossing them into the crowd.

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When I saw this presentation on the schedule, it piqued my interest because I recently finished reading Magic and Showmanship: A Handbook for Conjurers, a book on how magicians can use the techniques of actors to improve their shows. The book was useful to me because—in general—it is about how to get an audience's attention, a skill that is useful not just for magic, but for presentations and writing as well.

The presenter was Jared Spool, the Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering. Similar to the multi-functionality of Magic and Showmanship, Spool's claim is that the techniques of magic can be used to improve experience design.

The presentation was divided into acts. The first act focused on the role of mental models. According to Spool, an illusion is created by separating the experience of the user from the experience of the designer. One example of this difference in action for design is Disney's Haunted Mansion. While the user experience of the Haunted Mansion is dominated by ghosts and other frightening encounters, its designers think about trolleys, mirrors, and speakers. Similarly, when a computer user deletes a "file," there is no file, just a bunch of 1s and 0s, a reality that is hidden by designers. The principle of illusion, as it applies to experience design, is focusing on the

division between the simplicity of the user experience and the complexity of what is actually happening.

Most users are interested in simple experiences, so designers should work on hiding the complexity of the processes that make up that experience.

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