An interesting, enjoyable couple of days was spent in Canberra last week at the inaugural UX Australia conference.
There's plenty of chat about it over on Twitter (Tag: #UXAustralia) and numerous other blog write ups, especially given that it began over a week ago. I'm usually really bad with event reviews (I never end up actually posting them), but here are some highlights and I'll post a few session summaries as separate entries.
If you want a direct line to a good chunk of the presentations, check out the Twitter stream as lots of the presenters have posted links, and I understand there's potential podcast sessions in the works too as all presentations were recorded.
A selection of highlights for me included:
The atmosphere: The
atmosphere was great, very friendly, very easy going. A stuffy, suited,
blackberry-chewing conference this was not, and all the better for it.
The 10 minute talks: so much good
information in so little time. Some of these presentations were better
than the full ones, particularly Drew Smith's (@drewpasmith)
on vehicle interface design and its correlation with branding, Iain
Barker's (He'llBeOnTwitterSoon) on Pragmatism v Idealism, Stephen Cox
on Semiotics (ambitious given the timeframe!), and Gary Barber's (@Tuna) amusing piss take of common UX practices with, "The Ultimate UX tool" (which was a 95¢ pencil).
I hear Steve Collin's (@trib) presentation also went down well, and Keith Lang's (@songarver) 'Should have got an hour, maybe even two'.
The networking:
I'm not the world's best networker nor conversationalist, but still
managed to meet loads of people, and dinner was expertly organised and
well attended (Wasabi Tepinyaki in Manuka had about 25 people and
handled well by Ruth Ellison (@ruthellison).
I
also met plenty of people I've seen or been in touch with on email and
Twitter, and even missed a few people I wanted to meet, so busy was
everyone chatting away.
The badge: Designed by Matt Balara (@mattbalara),
the badge was supremely useful in quickly seeing people's names,
Twitter IDs, and also keeping track of the conference program. I liked
mine so much I forgot to take it off in the evening and found myself in
a bar with it still on. Luckily Justin Hevey had done the same so I
wasn't alone.
The Wi-Fi:
not perfect, but perfectly adequate for the time I was using it. After
some disastrous MacBook problems (details in a later post), I managed
to get my 3 Mobile Card working again, and just used that, so not sure
how things were on day two.
The hotel: The Hotel Realm
is a swish new 5-star hotel in Canberra. While the lobby and atrium may
have been a little stark if it weren't for the giant card sorting
exercise having over the walls, the hotel was nice and more than suited
to this task.
UX is on the move
Fast-forwarding to the end of the conference, there was a huge buzz
among everybody there and organisers Steve Baty (@docbaty) and Donna
Spencer (@maadonna) were rightly thrilled with the way things had gone. And as Microsoft evangelist Shane Morris (@shanemo) wrote before the event:
"This conference marks an important milestone in the increasing visibility of User Experience as a discipline in Australia. I for one think it’s going to be the start of something big."
I think Shane is right and moreover I think User Experience design is going to be the 'next big thing' in technology (if social media or cloud computing are examples of the currents). So much of what we do these days, day-to-day, is via web or online products and environments - internet and intranet.
How we interact with products, brands, services and people - our online experiences can define and determine so much. As the web becomes embedded into every strain of society, UX is well on the way to becoming one of the most important design disciplines there is.
I'm really looking forward to seeing things develop for UX Australia 2010, which is planned to be in Melbourne.
Click here to see all related UX Australia posts and reviews.
