SXSW: Contextual Web Session Recap

This morning was a session at SXSW named "The Contextual Web". From what I gathered, most people thought the session would be about semantics, but in fact it was about using the iPhone and was very short in length – about 30 minutes. The speaker for the session was Nick Finck.  Here are my notes though there wasn’t much to capture. Nick is clearly not a marketing person based on what he displayed and spoke about.

Four Elements of Contextual Web:

• user
• task
• evironment
• technology

About half of the room of 850 raised their hand that they have an iPhone

He discusses Fitt’s Law and explains that when using tabbed navigation with an iPhone make the whole tab a link not just the text – makes it easier for navigation

Believes you should create a CSS for mobile but more important is highly optimized code for XHTML and CSS

Displays NY Times on iPhone normally which takes 30 secs but his customized version loads in 7 seconds – but he forgets that there are no ads shown in his version

He isn’t happy with the NY Times default site, but they do offer a mobile site but there’s no redirection

Likes LinkedIn as they don’t require zooming in and out

Likes Facebook a lot as he’s shown it a good bit

Pushes two books – Contextual Design and Observing The User Experience