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UX Conference Survey Results

Russell Wilson — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:56:26 +0000

The results of the User Experience (UX) Conference Survey are in!

There were 103 completed surveys and roughly 350 abandons. The most common answer for all conferences was “Don’t Know (Never Attended)” with an average across all conferences of 49 responses. The most obvious conclusion from this is that few people who answered the survey have attended multiple conferences.

The following table summarizes the responses on the whole per conference:

No big surprises here although I found it interesting that SXSW ranked as more visual than IxDA or WebVisions (both ranked balanced).

The data for each conference follows:

If anyone wants the raw data in CSV format, let me know.

UX-related Conferences Survey

Russell Wilson — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:55:17 +0000

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.

An Event Apart Chicago 2008

Russell Wilson — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:45:54 +0000

I attended An Event Apart Chicago 2008 last week and I was very impressed. The conference was just the right blend of practical and theoretical: roughly about 70/30. There were many pearls of wisdom and practice, especially from Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, Andy Clarke, and Dan Cederholm, but the key takeaway was that communication and empathy are critical to design.

This is not fluff – it’s fact. In my experience, successful design involves influencing and working with people from customers, to product managers, developers to technical writers, sales, and of course executives. And designers must be willing to subject their “favorite” design work to critique, wisely defending what is defensible and surrendering what is not to a better solution, despite the strong feeling of attachment to what they themselves created in isolation and just know to be “perfect”. I have attended several conferences at this point: UPA, IA Summit, IxDA, SXSW, VizThink, DUX, AIGA Gain, and others. AEA is now at the top of my list and I plan to attend again in 2009!

You can view (and subscribe to) my list of upcoming design conferences and workshops at: upcoming.yahoo.com