Earlier this year, Roundarch sent a team to the SXSW Interactive Festival, a yearly gathering of digital creatives, visionary technology entrepreneurs and everyone in between. While there, members of the Roundarch team were asked to give their perspective on industry and technology by Level 3 Red Couch, an online video site that interviews industry leaders. Here’s Roundarch Engagement Director Saurab Bhargava’s take on where the industry is and where it is headed.

Paul Annett‘s panel “Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design)” was one of the few that stood out for me. Not only was his content compelling, but he’s also a great presenter and story teller. His years of experience as an amateur magician no doubt contributed to his skills on stage. The talk was a showcase of websites that are doing some very clever CSS/Flash tricks to create more engaging user experiences.

You might look at some of his examples and go “OK, that’s pretty neat, but this is more like an easter egg and is not really essential to the overall goal of the site.” To put it in terms of ROI and business value that a client can understand, you need only look at what his company ClearLeft has done for their product website Silverback. Back when the site first launched, it was a only splash screen for an upcoming product with very little info about the product itself. However, detail oriented web designers noticed that when you resized the browser on the Silverback website, the vines in the background had a parallax effect creating the feeling of 3D. In a short amount of time, designers were blogging and tweeting about what essentially amounted to nothing more than an easter egg for a website, resulting in tremendous traffic, to the tune of over 100,000 hits. To top that off, a very large percentage of that traffic signed up to hear more about this phantom product without even knowing what the product was about, solely because of this little effect. Several other sites now implement a similar effect hoping for similar results. Small little hooks can have a tremendous amount on the bottom line.

Here are some of the examples that stood out:

The dConstruct User Experience Conference website has a secret navigation up top that lets you see the progression of the site from sketches to final product through clever use of CSS.

Kyan, a web design and development agency, has a small worm on the bottom of their website. Clicking on it reveals a previously hidden underground secret Kyan labs.

I thought these next two examples did a really good job of tying together the cleverness with the core experience of the product.

The Wario Land Youtube page slowly collapses as Wario causes more and more damage. This is a very ingenous use of overlaying Flash. You think you’ve landed on an ordinary Youtube page, but as the video plays, elements of the Youtube page start to crumble and fall until all you are left with is a large pile of HTML debris at the bottom of your page.

The iPod touch ad on the Yahoo Games page gets clever by tilting the elements on the website as if they were affected by the iPod touch.

Engaging users doesn’t have to be big and flashy. A little hidden gem can go a long way drawing in people. Often times, you just need people to step through the door.

This talk given by Leah Buley from Adaptive Path was by far the best talk I’ve attended at SXSW this year. I felt that after her talk, I left with tools and ideas I could implement to practice good solid user experience design whether I am in a team of one or 30. That’s how she thought you ought to be doing UX – that her lessons applied to all team sizes. Indeed, I felt they did. Here are her slides from slideshare:

Here’s a link of the same talk presented at the 2008 IA Summit, with audio!

Subtitled: “How we messed up so you don’t have to.”

The speakers in this session included: Sandy Jen from Meebo, an online chat room, Kyle Vogt from Justin.tv, a community driven live video site, Jason Kincaid from TechCrunch, and Serkan Piantino from Facebook. All of these sites are huge in their own right and have had to deal with scaling issues. I thought it would be interesting to learn from their experience.

Don’t get married to any one technology, but don’t flirt too much.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t think ahead too much. You don’t really know what’s going to happen. A better approach is to release early and often and see what happens.
• Release incrementally. Test out new releases with small groups of users and slowly roll out. This way, you have a better idea of the load without taking everything down.
• It’s almost always cheaper to throw hardware at the problem than to have engineers spend their time squeezing out 5% more performance/optimization.
• Automate as much as possible.
• Ask users what they want. Users might not even care for a really complex feature you are about to implement. They might just want something as simple as bigger more legible fonts. – hint hint Impost blog.
• Tell your users your problem. Be transparent. If you are having outage problems, posting it on your blog and letting your users know what’s going on is better than not telling them. This makes them feel included and goes a long way towards creating a rapport with the users.
• A simple solution is almost always better than a more complicated solution.