Qu'est ce que SXSW Interactive? / WTF?

Pendant cinq jours, je couvre le festival South by Southwest a Austin. C'est en gros "L" Evenement du moment dans le domaine des nouvelles techno, des nouveaux medias, de l'avenir du web. L'industrie des jeux videos egalement, que je laisse un peu de cote.
Je couvre donc cet evenement en anglais et en francais. Je blogue donc ces jours ci sur des sujets assez divers mais relatifs aux themes du blogging, social media, networking, wikis, open source, web design, user-generated content.

Deux posts plus bas, vous trouvez ici une interview sur le vif realisee apres le premier panel, Celik parle de l'evolution des sites de communaute et de networking.
Ci dessous, la paneliste Kathy Sierra, specialisee dans la recherche cognitive appliquee aux technologies emergentes.

Kathy Sierra merges technology and cognitive science

how do you do when the user is frustrated in front of his/her computer?
Are the "Help" and FAQs options enough?
Sometimes the Help assistant is not efficient. Overwelhming and complicated.
What happens if the user can't express what he is really feeling to a computer?


When people say they are passionate about a tool, they lie. They are not. They are passionate about what the tool enable them to do.

What do we want to achieve? We want the computer to become like a human. In real life, if someone looks confused when you are talking to them, you ask them questions: "what are you confused about?". We need some kind of dialogue.

Why have "WTF" instead of FAQs?

Get user to the right context ASAP
Then give him an understandable set of questions

ask couple of questions to your user: narrow down, give the user a way to express him/herself to the machine in a way that is more human.

The frustrated user doesn't hate the machine really, he hates himself because he feels he can't do it, that he is stupid. the advantage of having a human in front of you instead of a machine is that the human can notice when the user is lost or doesn't understand and eventually reexplain.

The need is to be able to look up the information quickly and the one we need.

How do you enable a computer to do that? to be more user friendly, to be more human like?

Studies show that you can slightly change the language in order to become more conversational. Like use abbreviation, or using the "you" in a sentence makes a big difference.

FAQs are not written for real people.

So often, we get down sitting in a backroom working and we don't think to the impact of our work. we don't think of how we are changing people's lives.