SXSW Interactive 2010 was the first SXSW conference I had attended since maybe 2000. And my experience way back then was that the conference was largely aimed at people who were either new to the interactive industry or were trying to get into the interactive industry. And also for people who wanted to get trashed on someone else’s dime. Not that there weren’t industry experts on the panels back then, but every presentation, largely at the insistence of those in the audience, had to be dumbed down for beginners. You couldn’t casually mention CSS without someone interrupting, with “Can you explain what CSS is?” So when I finally went back to SXSWi, I was pleasantly surprised by the topics of the panels and the level at which many of the presentations were given. If you were attending a panel on data visualization, no one interrupted asking what a spark-line was (some credit also goes to the fact that questions have been handled more formally in recent years, SXSWi etiquette has evolved.) In 2010 I heard many people speak on subjects I hadn’t heard anyone talk about, not even on the many design blogs I read. I rarely if ever walked out of a panel because it wasn’t interesting.

At SXSWi 2011, I walked out of more than a few panels. Perhaps by not going to SXSWi for many years, and with expectations set low, SXSWi 2010 could do nothing but impress me. And by being so impressed at SXSWi 2010, SXSWi 2011 was destined to let me down. But I don’t think so. This year’s interactive conference was in many ways a re-run of 2010’s. A lot of the topics were covered, such as marketing using social media, “gamification” of the user experience, and location based services, were all covered in-depth in 2010 and 2011. I know those topics are still trendy, but they were covered well last year, I don’t need to spend hours in the Austin Convention Center again this year listening to largely the same stuff.

Some of the panels just failed to deliver at all. As much as I liked Steve Krug’s books, I don’t want to hear an hour-plus long reading of them. I’ve read the books; I didn’t pay for a badge to hear Krug re-read them to me. I also am very much not interested in hearing sales pitches instead of panel discussions, which seems to be very common. Instead of hearing industry experts reveal what has and hasn’t worked for them, I get to hear about their patented process or suite of software that their company is peddling. There were also a few panels that failed due to poor presentations. I won’t name names here, but I went to a couple panels where the presenters could not stay on topic. One presenter actually worked vacation photos into their slides. It was as if the topic of their panel was the last thing they wanted to talk about. Other presenters just failed to offer any practical application of the concepts they were discussing, instead dealing only with vagaries.

And finally there were the panels that were mis-named, poorly described in the program guide, or revised at the last minute. A couple presenters actually commented on what they had wanted the title of their panel to be and what SXSW decided it should be. Apparently SXSW likes names and descriptions that are “sexy.” This led to panel names that were misleading if not outright wrong. Lately, I’ve been going back and listening to the audio of many of the panels I missed and have realized that I went to a lot of the wrong panels. I skipped some and went to others, because the names and descriptions led me astray. As a side note, it’s great that most of the panels were recorded and posted to SXSW.com, it would be even better if they were available for download and were paired with the slides that go along with them.

On another side note, everyone needs to stop saying things are “dead.” The web is not dead, Flash is not dead, the desktop computer is not dead. Enough with the hyperbole. I really don’t want to hear about how location based services are “dead” at SXSWi 2012. Technologies change, evolve, and yes, they sometimes die (remember Macromedia Shockwave?) but it never happens overnight and even technologies that lose popularity linger for years before they disappear.

This post reads negatively, I know. SXSWi trys to cover the entire online industry, or rather the collection of industries, media and technology that make up whatever “Interactive” has become. SXSWi goes wide instead of deep, and maybe I’d just be better off going to one of the many conferences that focus more on what I’m interested in, user experience design. I now need to convince someone to start a UX conference in Austin, so I won’t have to pay for (or convince the company I work for to pay for) a plane ticket and hotel accommodations, along with the price of admission.