Seeing this number I decided to do a random sampling of four other clients accounts and they had 1.25%, 1.5%, 4.4%, 11% of their traffic from iPhone visitors. Some of these sites have a large of amount of visitors from iPhones.

What does this mean to you as a business owner with a website?

• If you are using Flash on your site, find a way to make it work without it. ‘Degrade’ your site gracefully so iPhone (and now iPad) users don’t experience a big blank spot or are unable to use or navigate.
• Another option is to create a mobile version of your site so it works well (and more quickly) on mobile devices.
• If you are in the middle of designing or building a website, look at your audience and decide how many of them are likely to use your site from an iPhone, iPad or similar device. If the number is significant – avoid using Flash or make sure you have an alternative – your users will thank you and the numbers of iPhone and iPad users are growing.

Note: Since this site primarily is targeted to a marketing audience, I’m intentionally not getting into the HTML5 versus Flash debate. If you want to do that, feel free to post a comment below or via a reply to me on twitter.

Why are people complaining?

Well, one reason is because people like to complain. But there are legit reasons as well. This year, SXSW crowd-sourced some of the sessions topics and speaker choices, so people voted on some of the sessions and we ended up with some weird titles and topics. That’s ok though, because with 10 or sessions going on simultaneously, you always have a lot to choose from.

Apparently a lot of these weird titled sessions sucked. I don’t know, I didn’t attend any of them. I think the problem is actually a little deeper, it’s with the audiences that attended them and what they are trying to learn.

The tale of two conferences…

Interactive / UX / Design Conference

This was my first time attending SXSW and I had a great time. I learned a lot and it was a whirlwind of amazing activity. If registration for next year was open right now, I’d book it. Yes, I was that impressed. I attended several great sessions, one or two good sessions, and one truly awful session.

First and foremost, I’m an interactive director at Spoke, I manage design, brand and user experience for the sites and campaigns we build. Being a geek, I attended tech, interactive, user experience and designer type sessions that appealed to my geeky nature. Overall, my goals in attending SXSW were:

• To learn things I can use for our clients at Spoke, both in interactive marketing and social media.
• To meet people that I’ve only talked to through twitter and deepen relationships that were established online.
• To recap my experiences on this blog and drive traffic to this site.

I had a great geeky time and from a random sampling of comments on twitter and friends there with me who do what I do – I think they did too.

Social Media Conference

I’ve read and heard complaints from people who attended social media discussions, panels or crowd-sourced sexy titles that failed to live up to the hype.

I think there is an obvious reason that the Social Media sessions suffered – the people complaining are probably doing it right to begin with. They have either heard the content before, or they think they know it all already. Let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of new tricks in social media day after day. Some general rules apply (and don’t change very often):

• Engage with people.
• Interact.
• Don’t be a jerk.
• Don’t use it as push marketing tool.
• Have compelling content.
• Have a consistent brand voice.
• Gain an audience, not just followers.
• Try to get stuff to go viral (those sessions always crack me up, because viral usually happens organically and no one can predict what will and what won’t and every expert I’ve met has said the same thing).

Do these sound familiar? They should, because interaction on social media is pretty much the same as interaction in the real world (make it personal, develop relationships, don’t just yell at strangers and hope they listen).

Sure there are case studies to learn, funny stories to share, adversity to deal with and plenty of other reasons to go to social media sessions, but these topics can be less compelling if you’re a professional. Maybe experienced social media session gurus, jedis and ninjas don’t get as much out of the sessions because the content is often just preaching to the choir?

The Alternative?

A few friends who purely work in the social media world went to SXSW to meet people, make connections, blog and party and didn’t attend any of the sessions. Guess what, they got exactly what they wanted to out of SXSW, had a great experience (unless they got turned down for a VIP party) and will be back doing the same thing next year.

So if you find the content of sessions not up to your high standards, blow the sessions off and go to the blogger’s lounge and meet some people. Hopefully you’ll gain some new insight.

As for me… next year I’ll be learning about some geeky new way to control your mind using only a browser… and at the end of the day we can meet up at the next party.

Lead! When was the last time you saw a statue of a committee?

Claiming your website is easy to use is like a restaurant claiming that their food is edible.

Cennydd Bowles

The first session was led by Cennydd Bowles of Clearleft, Ltd and was called simply Beauty in Web Design. This session was the first session of the first day of SXSW and included these wonderful quotes above. Cennydd’s point was that there are no works of art in web design, no truly revolutionary sites and as designers (visual or UX) we can all do a bit better.

Bowles talked through a bit of the history and psychology of good design. For instance, humans are always judging beauty innately, it’s not a learned behavior (it’s something you can watch a baby do) and the three types of beauty:

• Universal – everyone sees it
• Sociological (example of model’s now vs Milo’s Venus), changes with society preferences
• Subjective – personal opinions – beauty in the eye of the beholder

This session really emphasized how good UX design isn’t just making the site usable and Cennydd’s point was we should be pushing limits and trying to do something new. I agree completely with this sentiment and as you’ll see during the next post, I talk about one of the reasons why website design is becoming too consistent due to content management systems.

What’s Next?

So South by Southwest (SXSW) is famous for launching twitter, making twitter popular and last year for the launch of geo-location tools Gowalla and Foursquare. What’s this year’s big application or tool?

Zip. Zilch. Nada. Sorry to report that nothing is really hot besides the aforementioned tools (twitter and geo-location). Geo-location apps Gowalla and foursquare are really big this year, with both releasing new versions in time for SXSW. But nothing else has generated a ton of hype. I’ll search back through tweets from hash tags to see if there is anything new that I missed.

I’m not disappointed or surprised, because it’s hard to live up to that hype year in and year out. There has been a ton of great sessions thus far, I’ve met a lot of great folks from a variety of disciplines, but I haven’t met the next killer app.