The past week at the User Interface 13 Conference was focused on challenging the way traditional usability testing, site reviews, and information architecture projects are done. A significant amount of time was also spent challenging traditional views on design standards. The conference was four days of educational sessions from 8:30am to 5:30pm. As with any conferences, some sessions were excellent, others good, and all had their moments where participants were lost. However, for the most part, attendees all had very positive things to say about the sessions when discussing them in the hall or over dinner etc.
I've been to this conference before and again this year I found only a few nonprofits and associations at the
conference. Most of my time was spent with folks from power utility cooperatives, PayPal, Fidelity Investments, Yahoo, Geico, publishing companies, and other large retail operations like Target. Also, it was interesting that participants were from all over the globe. I sat with professionals from San Diego, Denver, Columbia (South Carolina), San Francisco, Switzerland, Netherlands, Canada, and Australia who were all in Boston for this particular conference. Considering there were only about 500 attendees, that's a pretty large geographic spread. UIE, the company that puts on the conference, certainly knows how to market it well and make you feel like if you can't afford to miss it. Check out UIE's web site and their virtual seminars, I think they have a lot to offer. I know we are tweaking our usability testing methods and reporting structure as a result of some of what we learned at UI13.
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