Jeanette Verster Photography

It was Day 2 of the Tech4Africa conference that I blogged about yesterday, and today was just as fantastic as yesterday… in fact I got more out of more of the talks today than I did yesterday.   I think I chose the right stream for me for every slot today, but I must admit that I was tired by the end and skipped the last session.

There were many more highlights than yesterday, but not as many WOW moments, if that makes sense.

I attended the Social Media panel discussion first.  It included Walter Pike, Alistair Fairweather, Jannie Vermeulen from FNB, Mike Stopforth from Cerebra and Andy Hadfield (who had to run out yesterday because his wife had a baby, how cool is that?).   And kudos to Sam Wilson from Women24 for joining the panel after tweeting “Guys? Men and women behave differently re social media. So why only men on panel? #tech4africa #socialmediaelephant” Btw, it was the first time I’d met her IRL… and she rocks!

One of the parts of the conversation that I enjoyed the most was the banter about whether every industry must be in Social Media spaces, and I tend to agree that not everyone should take part visibly, but every single company does need to listen at least.  I reckon that this panel would have carried on for hours if they’d been allowed to

One of my favourite parts of the day was the second talk in the business stream, which was a UX design panel led by Allan Kent (it was also really awesome to meet him IRL), and including Rian van der Walt from Yola, Basheera Khan from Playnice.ly and Mike Lewis from Origin. Loved what they did with redesigning the PayFine site, and the way that they did it.  I thought that the way they explained the process of UX design was also awesome.  Their presentation has been published on  Slideshare and blogged about on the Elezea blog.  One of the parts I found interesting was the content strategy, and the way that they planned the content, including all the detailed text, before they designed any of the wireframes.   That often gets left way too late in the process. I also think that they were right when they said that they think that the art of Content Strategy is going to developed more and more in the near future.  And kudos to PayFine for being in the audience to listen to them critting their site.

Oh and then I carried on in the UX vein, and attended the Andy Budd talk about UX.  Loved what he said about experiences on websites not being as good as they could be, and that web design needs to take learn from the way that the top hotels and restaurants approach client experience. Not that Dustin Diaz agreed with his examples though, and thought a lot of them were too cluttered.  I completely agree with how Andy responded by saying that you need to use the right design experience for the site in question… and he compared that to how people accept a doorman in a hotel, but cringe when there’s a doorman or greeter in a store.

Then WOW, the key note speaker, Clay Shirky, just blew me away.  Yes, yes, I’m one of the few geeks that haven’t seen his TED talks before, or in fact, any of the countless videos on Youtube apparently, even though I did know a bit about him… so I was enthralled by what he said.  One of the take home points for me was when he said that you have to know when you’re designing or planning for extrinsic (financial) motivation or intrinsic (culture) motivation, because if you mix them and too tightly, it could be damaging.

Alex Hunter‘s talk about brand was also fabulous! In fact, I had one fantastically fabulous day!! My favourite bit from that was when he said that if you keep it real for your users, you’ll be able to change the world. He also backed up what was said in the first session when he said that you can’t build brand loyalty on a crap product… rather to spend the money fixing the product than trying to market it. If you have a good product, then you’ll have natural brand evangelists.

It was a fantastic event!! Well done to Gareth Knight for putting it together, and I really hope it’ll happen again!!  One change I would request though… please add our twitter handles to the name tags… I had to constantly explain that I’m Jenty!

See the full set of 2010 photo-a-day photos on my Project 365 Flickr Set.