Top 5 words heard repeatedly at SXSW so far

One thing’s for sure: It’s a lot sunnier here in Austin at SXSW than it is back at Emma’s Nashville office … also, they have lots more retro neon signs here than Music City. And don’t even get me started on the cool bike cabbies (think overgrown tricycle, with room for three passengers). As for what’s happening inside the conference, here are the top five words I’m hearing so far (and a few other words to go along with them).

1. ITERATE: Don’t just do it once; keep reworking it. Daniel Burka, formerly of Digg, and Rob Goodlatte from Facebook talked about making iterative improvements to their products. One interesting point for us at Emma is that they talked about redesigning the registration process all the time – in most situations, users will only go through registration once, so it doesn’t affect everyone already using the product.

2. EXPERIENCE: Get to know your users, their needs and motivations. And do it early enough that what you learn can influence your design decisions.

3. FAIL: It’s OK to make mistakes — just be sure to learn from them. One person said that failure is when you don’t feel proud to show the work that you’ve done, while another described it as the thing that keeps him up at night because he didn’t do enough. A big theme is that all of the people who create something feel like it’s their fault if it doesn’t work. There’s no blame game here — it’s about taking personal responsibility. In a different session, the Gmail engineers talked about when Buzz launched: Many of the engineers felt so personally responsible for the problems that they slept in the office until the job was complete.

4. PSYCHOLOGY: We’ve heard so many examples of how to influence people and how they feel as they use your site and product. Referencing books like Nudge and Buyology, presenters talked about creating trust and using positive reinforcement in this ad-saturated environment. (They said we may be exposed to 5,000 branding messages a day.)

5. OUTLET: As in, “Have you seen an outlet? My battery is dying.”

And as a bonus round of SXSW info for you, people are all abuzz about the iPad and issues about mobile. As the mobile business grows, of course, people expect to have smooth, desktop-like experiences on their phones and in other mobile environments. One way for user experience teams to think about this is to pay attention to all the things that will make someone not want to use your product ever again. A speaker from Google UI mentioned that he believes mobile Web will be bigger than apps, even though everyone is more excited about apps now. If you really want to think freaky mobile thoughts, think of all things the phone could do without ever coming out of your pocket.