UX-related Conferences Survey
January 29th, 2009 by
Russell Wilson
I’ve been asked numerous times to recommend conferences and workshops to designers and usability professionals.
I’ve decided to create a matrix to categorize the various events on two axes -
1) practical to theoretical
2) non-visual to visual
If you have 5min, please take the following survey and help me create an accurate matrix:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/99033/ux-conference-map
I will publish the results as soon as I have a reasonable set of data.
P.S. I may have excluded some important conferences/workshops. Please comment
if you feel strongly that a particular conference should be added.
I’d like to reply, but I’d only distort your results. I am chagrinned to admit this, but I have only attended CHI on that list.
I’ll pass along that, at Russell’s urging, I filled out the survey for only those I attended, even if it is only one of the conferences.
Thanks for doing the survey, Russ! I am glad that Allan filled it out, since knowing that someone has only attended 1 on the list is useful information. BTW, I try hard to go to as many different conferences as possible and I have only attended 5 of them.
I think getting a ranking on the conferences on different attributes is a great idea. I could see expanding the type of questions in the future. Other characteristics that people often get out of conferences are “inspiration” and “community” for example. I often hear “I go to that one every year because I know I will come home charged up and inspired to do my job” and “I go because all my friends go”.
Thanks again Russ – lots that I think we can learn about the user experience (conference) landscape here.
[...] results of the User Experience (UX) Conference Survey are [...]
The results are in! Check out:
http://www.dexodesign.com/2009/02/13/ux-conference-survey-results/
This is neat!
I’m a little confused, however. What was the wording of the questions?
I’m not sure what the non-visual to visual scale is measuring. Is it that it’s mostly lecture or panels without any visual elements? Or is it that it’s focusing on visual design versus not focusing on visual design?
That’ll help me understand what that scale means. I think I understand the theoretical to practical scale.
This comment was originally posted on Dexo Design: Design for Web Sites and Applications
Sorry Jared – the latter – focus on visual design
This comment was originally posted on Dexo Design: Design for Web Sites and Applications
I really like the topic and presentation. I think it’s really important and I am glad someone took the time to catalog all the conferences and their visual/practical orientation.
The large chart is very neat. However, as a long-time student of Tufte, I can’t help but note a couple of issues:
1) The size of bars is normalized per conference, but the chart invites conference to conference comparison. For example, IDC has 100% = 1 vote, whereas UIE 100% = 14 votes. If you want to compare conferences with each other, it might be better to consider using a consistent bar size (i.e. 25px = 1 vote for all conferences). This will also invite a nice overall vote/attendance comparison, creating multiple layers of information (macro info/detailed info).
2) The continuous scale of visual practical is somewhat confusing, as Jared already mentioned above. As I remember the questions, the 2 sets (visual and practical) were independent of each other, yet the chart makes it look as though they are related on a single scale to form a histogram.
Great work overall — I found the information very useful, and will refer to your chart when I am picking my next conference to attend.
Cheers!
Greg
This comment was originally posted on Dexo Design: Design for Web Sites and Applications
Great points Greg – thx for commenting.
This comment was originally posted on Dexo Design: Design for Web Sites and Applications