Gartner Web Innovation Summit Notes, Day 2

On the second day of the Gartner Web Innovation Summit, I unfortunately had to miss a number of sessions – had some conference calls and some briefings with folks at the conference.

There were a few good ones I did get to, though.

First was titled “User Experience: The Next Wave” and was Ray Valdes’ take on the core value of user experience and “usability-centered design.” He had some great general principles for how organizations can take advantage of scientific, measurable approaches to usability to get beyond the “I like the blue one” design process to many still follow.

He also pointed to some of the key fallacies about “usability-centered design” (I still prefer user-centered design as a term):

1. Usability testing (“validation”) has to be expensive
2. User-centered design has to explode the project schedule
3. Users like the system we designed the old way, therefore we don’t need to change
4. Having a customer-focused attitude replaces doing formal design

He closed by talking about some of the new technologies and approaches (social software, new interfaces and input modes), and how really the primary challenge (and answers) remain mostly unchanged: solid strategy, best-practices in design, and a constant feedback loop with actual testing.

The second talk I saw was titled “Strengthen Your Governance Strategies for the Wave of Web 2.0 Technologies” and was by presented by L. Frank Kenny.

He talked about all the new kinds of endpoints into the enterprise which characterize web 2.0 – mashups, rogue service endpoints created to connect to outside services, users consuming outdated versions of corporate web services, etc.

Ultimately he argued that the current generation of mashups and syndication feeds probably don’t necessitate new controlling technologies for most enterprises – they can be governed by existing CMS systems, firewalls, filters, and the like.

He suggested that organizations should consider taking advantage of some of the new services which monitor social networks, the blogosphere, wikis, and forums – services like brandimensions, cyveillance, and webclipping.com – what he called “Brand Protection” as an emerging market.

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Last session of the day was the Yochai Benkler keynote about which I wrote earlier.

I missed, unfortunately, the “It’s the Web, Stupid” presentation by David Mitchell Smith and Gene Phifer – based on the presentation slides (which attendees get access to but I can’t share) it looks like I would have enjoyed it. Here’s how they describe the presentation in the agenda:

Although the Web 2.0 name is popular and represents the Web of today, the world seems hungry for 3.0, whatever that is. While Web 2.0 suffered from being perhaps overly broad, the special interests driving 3.0-mania have the opposite problem – they are often too focused. We’ll look at the future of the Web including the semantic Web, the mobile Web, the virtual world Web and other candidates for “3.0.” Regardless of what the next big buzzword is, the Web will remain one of the major catalysts in technology and one of the major sources of innovation.

Anyone reading this who did see that session care to comment on it?