interaction design

In May, I had the pleasure of attending the IXDA NYC's "redUX", showcasing some of the talks from Interaction 11 conference earlier this year (where possible, I've linked to the video from the Interaction 11 session).

Ray DeLaPena (@rayraydel) did an excellent writeup of the talks in Big Apple Redux Recap, so I'm going to focus on the talks that I could relate to the most (and they were the ones where I captured the most notes).

Marketing is not a 4 Letter Word by Megan Grocki

[video]

Many folks, particularly designers and developers, have a negative reaction to the word "marketing".

Megan says, "Marketing is like matchmaking". You want people to know about your work, your portfolio, your company or your product. It's a nice little ecosystem where something that is well designed gets promoted, and then you're more likely to get more work like it.

Who is doing marketing right? The Disney experience is immersive and enchanting and when you get home, they remind you to book your next trip! Netflix has great branding and also immersive. It's pretty easy to spend ages in their site rating, reviewing and being shown suggestions for things you might like. I agree with both those examples. Megan also cited Zipcar as a product with excellent user experience.

What are the ways to organize comments on sites that have lots of comments, and threaded comments, and intense debate? How do you deal with the volume of comments?

For some work on the Economist we reviewed a couple of current formats that feel cutting edge to us - after all, if you're the online host of the "severe contest" you'd better have a good way of presenting some of the viewpoints in the contest.

Gawker - Preview, but hide the replies

Gawker has threaded comments and hides the replies inside of a little info bubble. The bubble has a +/- toggle that lets you dive into each thread. The bubble shows the number of replies inside of it and gives you the names of some of the people who participate in the thread. It would be great if it could show names of people based on karma, or my friends or some other relevancy rank.

Slashdot - Tag and Vote on comments, Hide

Slashdot.org has been doing comments and online reputation longer than almost anyone else. They have a system of karma and users above a certain karma get to vote on comments and categorize them as "Insightful," "Funny" or other descriptive terms. They then hide comments below a certain threshold by default and let visitors see comments below a threshold if they want.

Digg - Vote on comments, Alternate layouts

Digg also has voting on comments and then will hide comments with a low ranking by default. It then can show comments threaded, by oldest/newest, by most popular or most controversial. In the default threaded view Digg also will show "6 replies, best has 18 diggs" to give you an indication of the level of quality of the conversation inside of a thread.