Jeff Beckham

The ratings and feedback cards are in from the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival, and my panel on “Designing for Convergent Devices” did … OK.

The panel scored 3.86 (on a five-point scale). The average overall rating for 2007 was 3.68, and the average rating for panels on Sunday, March 11 (when my panel was held) was 3.64.

So it scored slightly above average. There’s a large group of panels that scored 4.0 and above. I think our rating was just about right - the presentation went smoothly, but there’s definitely room for improvement.

I asked event director Hugh Forrest for forward me the written comments and I’ll publish them here when I get them.

UPDATED: The panel got an average overall rating of 3.86, while the moderator (me) got an overall rating of 3.46. Here are the comments from the panel:

too general, nothing new. Too much time spent on marketing.

more concrete examples, please - both good & bad.

interesting. Moderator asked good questions.

not enough time. Would like to hear more about workflow.

didn’t know who the other companies were other than frog, zannel.

obtuse, no focus.

moderator wasn’t very on the ball, but lots of good info this session.

great!

AT&T promo wasn’t necc. Many of the panelists were very salesy esp from frog.

great & informative.

not techy enough. It was basically “beware of your screen size”. oh. Wow.

a little too much talk about the panelists companies.

frog panelist was the best presenter, no story given from other panelists.

only about 10 mins of usable info, most from burton.

frog speaker was the only one who actually spoke about the topic.

concise, clear info on a relatively new & potentially complicated subject.

panelists pitched their companies too hard, w/ t he exception of denise & david.

issues a bit random, some panelists were too salesy.

everything was great. They just had a hard time w/ the projector.

wish it would have delved into the more technical considerations.

good job communicating the basic ideas/fundamentals of this complex topic.

frog presenter was great. The others were pitching their products vs. discussing topic.

good panel to get the day started. Make it a req. to put all presentations online.