southwest

Good user experience comes from good employee experience

Creating good User Experiences (UX) over and over again means creating first good Employee Experiences (EX - I'm trademarking that!). That's the lesson from Southwest airlines according to an NY Times article about retiring co-founder Herbert Kelleher:

Over the years, whenever reporters would ask him the secret to Southwest's success, Mr. Kelleher had a stock response. "You have to treat your employees like customers," he told Fortune in 2001. "When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us."...

[W]hen … Read more

ArcAttack brings singing Tesla coils to the masses

When you think of things related to science, music may not make the top of your list.

But the folks involved with a small collective called ArcAttack would like you to change your associations.

ArcAttack is all about one thing: building singing Tesla coils and crafting entire musical performances around them. For some time, at events like Dorkbot and other geekfests, the team--Joe DiPrima, Oliver Greaves, and Tony Smith--had been pulling off straightforward demonstrations of their creations. But they were synchronizing the machines to other people's music and not adding much in the way of their own innovations besides … Read more

Cheap = good

Isn't it interesting that in the latest airline quality rankings the top three spots were taken by low-cost carriers? JetBlue, Southwest and AirTran ranked the best while overall the industry had its worst ratings in twenty years.

Just goes to show that providing a leading user experience does not have to mean premium price. All three are relative start-ups compared to the likes of United and American, and they have been able to structure themselves (and therefore their) costs based on lessons learned from the older airlines.

Nevertheless, with issues like number of passengers bumped per flight, amount of … Read more

Digerati discuss future of tech conferences

It seems that the future of tech conferences is on a lot of people's minds these days.

On Friday, I ran a story here about how to survive and thrive in the so-called "Conference 2.0" era. The idea being that even as a multimedia backchannel made up of live, online chat on services like Twitter, IM, Meebo, and others proliferates at conferences and makes audience members feel empowered to demand more direct participation in keynotes and panel discussions, it doesn't have to be a disruptive force.

In fact, experts I talked to for the story … Read more

How to survive the next-gen confab

There's no fighting it. Conference 2.0, as some have called it, is here to stay.

The term refers to tech confabs where audiences communicate about what they're witnessing via a vibrant backchannel on Twitter, blogs, IM, and other forms of live media.

But while this new form of conference interactivity--where audiences are using the online tools to demand to be heard--may best be known for ugly scenes at South by Southwest this year or at Gnomedex last year, there's no reason participants can't turn the emergence of this backchannel into something positive for everyone.

If … Read more

SXSW Sketchnotes

Designer Mike Rohde attended several panels at SXSW Interactive last week and created 34 pages of sketchnotes for them in real-time, captured in a Moleskine sketchbook:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohdesign/sets/72157604109069527/

And here's his post about them with a little more detail:

http://www.rohdesign.com/weblog/archives/002768.html

What I like about this unique format of panel transcripts is that it shows how rich those on-stage conversations actually were. Sometimes you find yourself in the audience, passive and wondering if the discussion on-stage is really all that meaningful to you. Well, it is -- … Read more

SXSW wrap-up: or how to link 3 panels in 3 synthesizing steps (+bonus)

Since the SXSW conference buzzword was convergence, Chelsea Holden Baker of Frog Design looks back at convergent themes of three panels in three synthesizing steps, and a little bonus at the end:

Blood Sweat and Tears: Great Design Hurts

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) and Michael Lopp (Apple), made the case for cultivating discomfort as a designer: "Are you willing to be an asshole?" We took a trip back through the iconic designs (like IBM) of Paul Rand and examined the allure of the Apple logo (whether rainbow-striped or white, what makes it sexy is the bite. It's … Read more

SXSW presentations I wish I'd seen

This year's South-by-Southwest Interactive seems to have reached a kind of critical mass, with lots of smart and opinionated people converging around a rapidly changing industry, creating the kind of excitement that used to be found at CES or (way back) Comdex.

Forget about Business Week reporter Sarah Lacy's awkward on-stage interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, which has been amply detailed elsewhere (although watching them might have been akin to the uncomfortable pleasure of watching a fight at a hockey game). I really wish I'd seen the panel discussion on ad-supported music. According to a posting on PaidContent.org, … Read more

SXSW: Mashing up Interactive

It's freezing in Austin (39 degrees last night....) but nonetheless SXSW Interactive is about to kick off today. There is no doubt that the conference is hitting the mainstream this year (with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg as keynote speaker and most of the big high-tech players participating). The program, which is notoriously hard to navigate, has grown even more in terms of depth and breadth.

SXSW has therefore teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub that facilitates real-time conversations around conference events while also providing an easy-to-us panel calendar. The Silverlight-based … Read more