Today was terrible … the weather was nasty (cold and rainy) and I forgot my badge at home.But one of the more interesting panels was the Design Eye for the South By.

In it a group of designers, got together to redesign the current SxSW website. I really loved the concept they came up with, which was to personalize the site for each user and throw in a social networking component to it, sounds cliche but read on …

For example, you’d log in and the navigation would look something like this

PEOPLE | EVENTS | PARTIES

Which really encapsulates the main things you come to SxSW to do

• meet people
• go to events/films/shows
• go to the parties to network

On the events page, you could add events to your schedule. And on the parties tab you could pick parties you were interested in. The parties all came with Google maps too. I thought it would have been cool if they had something like that for the events … to help you find the rooms for each one. But they did the thing for free, so one can’t be picky.

What I really liked was that because of the social networking component, you would login and be able to find people you met and “friend” them.

Then you could view their profiles and see what events they were attending or what parties they were going to be at. Usually (people won’t admit it) that actually affects your choice of the things you’re going to see or parties you’re going to go to.

Of course my imagination started to run wild at this point. Say you were stuck in a sleep inducing session, you could hop online and link directly to a friends meebo chatrooms of his/her session, to see whether theirs was more interesting, and make the gametime decision about whether to ditch your session for theirs.

I also thought It’d be cool if you could just keep your profile and re-use it every year for registration and payment etc …

The whole presentation was very good natured and funny, and the design was very simple but effective.

Hopefully SxSW takes them up on their design offer, because adding events to my SxSW schedule, they way the have it currently, is a pain and a half. 

The results of their work will be posted at Designeye.org