Bruce Sterling called it right: It's spring break in Austin for the geek set. (Of course, his 10-year-old daughter is already blogging and a little bored by the whole thing.)
The afternoon keynote speaker, Kathy Sierra (probably best known for her O'Reilly book "Creating Passionate Users") is talking about merging technology and cognitive science. She's got the crowd -- about 200 (a mix of mostly coders and designers) -- laughing about how bad the user experience is these days. Case in point: Type WTF into Excel, and get...nothing.
But the real problem? All our apps have Asperger's. They can't read our faces, movement, tone or anything.
To counter this problem, she's got a slew of questions for designersto consider when developing products. The crux: Give the user a way toexpress himself. Sierra spices up what's essentially a basic how-tosession for common sense interactive design with what seems to be hersecret sauce: gratuitous pics (roughly eight) of dogs, kittens, andsquirrels mixed in with some fun questions.
And, really, how would you answer the question, If you saw a mandrowning and you could either save him or photograph the event.... Howwould you tag it in Flicker.
