Warm Gun 2010 Conference Highlights from San Francisco

I spent two days down in the city by the bay to attend the inaugural Warm Gun conference. This conference was catering to the design community, and start-ups specifically, focusing on measurable design.

Psychologist Geoffrey Miller opened the conference talking about traits that make consumers tick. He broke down the personality traits as Intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, and extroversion. He compared some of this to the old-school Meyer-Briggs personality assessment, from which only the extroversion trait really carried over.

He associated consumers categorized by these traits to behaviors related to three types of products: practical, private pleasure, and public display. I like the thinking and the expansion of the traits, although the practical application may be more difficult.

We then had the preaching to the choir mantra of digital design: technology is being commoditized, now the user experience is the differentiator in the market. I'll agree, although the technology continues to be very difficult, but it is definitely assumed.

Jared Spool gave an entertaining talk on the value of design. Some of his key points: the iPod has 75% market share in spite of inferior technology due to iTunes and product design; Apple has become the most successful phone and retail company (makes more $$/sq. ft of retail space than Tiffany's - what?) due to design.

On the social front, several speakers covered a wide variety of topics from social behavior, marketing, and of course, the approach to social service design. Apropos with the release of The Social Network to theatres. The contention that all software is social - way overreach. However, the points about the initial value needing to be personal (see delicious, facebook) and complexity arising from simple systems are both well taken.

The second half of the day consisted of many presentations about designing for mobile (focus, simplify), search (fast, relevant, duh!), social, and other bread and butter design topics.

One of the more ambitious, or at least interesting, attempts was a live redesign of Amazon product views across the web, mobile, and tablet platforms. Some interesting approaches, but failed in captivating the  audience, as you might expect from watching designers move pixels around... Some good work and approaches, but hard to infuse energy.

Overall, not bad for the first time out on a one-day conference. The attendee number was reasonable, although not enough folks looking for jobs, sigh. Well, something to scope for next year. Hopefully they'll post the presentations on the site.