UX Event Follow-Up

The talks last night were so much better than I'd expected. And I can say now, I expected them to be really good. Lots of great conversation afterward, too. I was really inspired by the quality of the people in the room.

I loved Lee's comments about the design of dance clubs with movable walls. Online communities need to scale similarly, to create an initial feeling of coziness so nobody has to be "the guy dancing all alone out in the middle of the floor," and eventually to scale up as the party gets bigger, without ever feeling either crowded or empty. Lots of ways to translate this concept into virtual space. And Lee scared the dickens out of at least one new community moderator with his stories of tp shortages and loose parrots.

Emma was the only one of the speakers I didn't know beforehand. She came very highly recommended by a respected colleague of mine, so I knew she'd be interesting--but I was delighted with the unique perspective she brought, having one foot in academia and the other in consulting. Challenged by a participant with a strong research background about the degree of representation in her sample, she responded with a great statement that the purpose of design ethnography is to produce insights that lead to design innovation, rather than to produce defensible, generalized conclusions about whole population segments. This is a great lesson for everyone involved in user research, and it's a great way of expressing the difference between user centered design research and market research (a question I have to field all the time, until now with less aplomb than Emma).

Jason Carmel shared a brilliant introduction to web site optimization, and contextualized it with UCD perfectly. And holy kittens, the guy is seriously hilarious. Hilarious, that is to say, while delivering serious information.

Paul Ingram's "Invetrepreneurship" talk challenged us to step up to the plate with our ideas. Paul is himself a human Swiss Army knife, and I think the real, implicit challenge in his approach is to blur the lines between disciplines, especially between design and development.

Some great conversation followed in the panel q & a. In particular folks wondered whether social networks would adapt over time as their constituents aged or whether age segments would migrate from one demographic-focused social network to another. Obviously, today's 80 year old is different from the 80 year old of 20 years from now--how will social networks evolve as today's heavy users age and new generations emerge?

We'll certainly be hosting additional events in the future--probably quarterly. If you're interested in presenting, send me your topoic ideas and we'll keep the ball rolling.

Thanks again to everyone who attended and participated, and thanks especially to our speakers.

Comments

[Michael Grimm]

Great event Ryan, I totally agree the speakers were topnotch. Lee's comments about the movable dancefloors definitely inspired some ideas in the next design of our site.