Austin, TX – The dropdown menu, famed hero of web designers since HTML 2.0, was remembered in a solemn ceremony held at SXSW Interactive in Austin on Monday, March 14, 2016.
Walking the streets of Austin, Texas, surrounded by those creating the cutting edge of digital culture these past five days has been amazing. Overwhelming and tiring, but amazing. But as I look back on the experience I realize that something was missing at this year’s SXSW Interactive. And this “something” is not some minor detail – a ball dropped because someone wasn’t paying attention in a planning meeting. No, this “something” is so substantial that I felt – to steal a phrase from modern theology – the absolute presence of its absence.
One of the hallmarks of SXSW Interactive is its startup culture. In past years people came to Austin in March to launch their new app, their new software platform or their new device. Twitter was launched here in 2007. Foursquare launched in 2008. In 2012, Highlight used SXSW to break into the spotlight. Last year, the social video platform Meerkat made its debut. But as I marched the aisles of the Trade Show and walked the downtown grid I didn’t see any new app or platform trying to make a its big splash as SXSW. There were a few, small marketing efforts made by a few local startups (most notably, a troupe of folks waking the streets in heat to toe purple bodysuits) but nothing on the order of what I have experienced in the past where the hallways were buzzing with the name of the latest app or platform.
I take the presence of the absence of major app launches and platforms at this year’s SXSW as a sign of the maturing of the mobile and digital marketplace. The major digital platforms are established and performing quite well (Twitter excepted, but it will survive – we all rely on it too much). Facebook, Google, Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter and a handful of other large platforms have filled the marketplace and continue to innovate based on analytics. Since these platforms meet the broadly expressed needs of the user community (either implicitly or explicitly), there doesn’t appear to be much room for whatever the next big thing might be, if there is a next big thing.
The tone and content of many of the conference sessions reflected this shift. When digital culture was in the midst of technologically disrupting the pillars of the world economy, living fast on the expansive bleeding edge of innovation, the sessions were all about the now, what is next and where things were rapidly going. But once you are in a more mature place the conversation sounds different. As novelist and futurist Bruce Sterling noted in his closing address, SXSW is like a woman who has turned 30. She is married, has a child, a job and a mortgage. She doesn’t talk like she did in her early and mid 20s about possibility, disruption and adventure. She has to a job to maintain, bills to pay and a child to raise. She’s more concerned about nurturing what she has created rather than venturing for that next horizon of possibility.
So, there were a host of sessions throughout the week on improving user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX) within existing platforms. In an excellent session that imagined itself hilariously as a funeral for dropdown menus, two lead interface designers gave us 35 (yes, 35) reasons why dropdown menus make for terrible UI design. For each of the reasons, they proposed more intelligent and elegant ways to create better app interfaces. For example, there are instances where dropdown menus can be replaced by sliders to improve user interaction. In other cases, dropdown menus can be replaced by typing. Why scroll through 50 options on a dropdown menu when all I need to type is “TX”? Dropdown menus can even be offensive in some cases because they lock you into set options, as anyone who has recently completed a form using an ethnicity dropdown menu may attest. The gist here is tweaking (or overhauling) to improve user interfaces and not developing entirely new products.
The chief marketing officer of BuzzFeed, Fred Cooper, shared with the SXSW crowd their latest innovation – an advertising platform. Just like every other social news/content platform on the planet, BuzzFeed is now leveraging its strategy and its data analytics to help brands launch their products using its approach to sharing social content. Clearly there is no surprise here. Like it or not, the inevitability of every news or content service is to become a marketing platform – creating a dangerous blurring of the lines between advertising and news. As with conversations about improving user interfaces, this wholly unoriginal announcement from the keynote stage at SXSW is symptomatic of the maturing of the industry.
There were also a number of sessions about gender and ethnic equality at this year’s festival. A panel of women who are leaders in technology, including Megan Smith, the United States’ Chief Technology Officer, discussed “Elephant in the Valley,” a survey of over 200 women in Silicon Valley. This survey pulled back the veil on the gender equality issues rampant in the “boys club” in the technology sector. In-house conversations within technology companies are slowly moving the needle, but the panelists rightly noted that there are many miles to go before women in technology can trust that they will not be treated as “less than.” Another session addressed the response of Millenials to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, talking about racial privilege and the need for constructive listening and understanding across racial divisions. Finally, I noted previously the panel of women in marketing who discussed the ongoing need for brands to share stories of female empowerment as opposed to continued objectification. These conversations are absolutely vital, but they are not discussions that you have when you are blazing the trails in search of new territory. These are conversations that arise when you are settled and trying to figure out the lay of the land.
The founders of Yik Yak, Tyler Droll (25) and Brooks Buffington (25), represented Atlanta-based technology businesses as part of an honest conversation about their now three year old app. When it launched, Yik Yak embodied the spirit of the wild west of technological disruption. They developed this app while students at Fuhrman University to address feature gaps in the Twitter and Facebook environments. Twitter and Facebook require profiles to establish a platform for conversation, but this personalization gets in the way of truly open conversation. Anonymity, they held, was the key to unlock a new horizon of open and engaged conversation and authentic community. Once launched, the app spread like wildfire, but then the issues of anonymity quickly arose. Geo-fences were quickly set up around schools, a reporting protocol for malicious posters was put in place, and a strategy for sharing user data with authorities was created. The now 25 year old founders celebrated the positives of their evolving platform during this session, but the SXSW audience quickly reminded them of the potential for harm baked into the anonymous architecture of their app. Surprisingly, Droll announced the implementation of handles in the interface, designed to allow communities to connect more personally if they so choose. He also tried to set at ease concerns of university leaders and parents in the audience by referring time and again to their responsiveness to reports of abuse by users and filters used to remove content from the interface. Usernames, filters and more robust reporting systems all point to a maturing process within Yik Yak that is indicative of the broader culture of SXSW at 30.
As noted in my previous post, just because SXSW Interactive shows signs of maturing doesn’t mean it was devoid of innovation. There is obviously still work to be done, great problems to solve, and communications structures will certainly continue to evolve. The trends traced here simply indicate that this may be a season for figuring out what we have created and how to best leverage it. This is healthy, but it does mark a shift in the SXSW Interactive culture and possibly in the culture of innovation as a whole. Is there room for the next Facebook or even the next Google? Have these data-driven resources become too big and too knowledgable to fail? Or will one of the Big 5 (Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) fail and set off a revolution along some new trajectory? Nobody knows, but it is clear at least to me that the “absence of the presence” of any major app or platform launch marks a shift in the climate of SXSW Interactive.