UPA 2009 in Portland - Day 1

It doesn't really feel like day 1 of the conference, since the past two days were tutorials and workshops and lots of meet and greet time. I stayed up last night talking until past midnight with old colleagues/friends from the Bell Labs days. That's one of the great things about conferences... catching up and sharing memories.

This morning the conference kicked off with a talk from Jared Spool. He's usually entertaining, but I usually don't completely agree with what he has to say. Today, though, was a different story. He was talking about how the field needs to grow and change. He pointed out that usability is not the same as user experience, and that as a field we need to transform ourselves. He talked about how we need to move from being just "usability practitioners" who smooth out the bumps to being "user experience professionals" who focus on delivering delight through the end-to-end experience. (Preaching to the choir).

Then, he talked about the difference between critics and coaches, and encouraged us to "Stop alienating people!" (wow, this from Jared???). He shared some research about successful and not successful teams. How successful teams were flexible and relied on tricks and techniques, whereas unsuccessful teams relied more on methods and dogma. Very entertaining and oh-so-true.

He talked about how we needed to broaden our skills and to specialize more deeply at the same time.

He talked about 3 core UX attributes (for teams):

• Shared vision of the future of the product
• Regular feedback by observing customers
• Rewarding failure.

He said that it was our job to curate the failure process because "risk-adverse organizations produce crap." Okay... it was Jared.

Jared also did two STAR moments in his presentation (aka very entertaining parlor tricks):

• He had 40 people in the audience fill out a survey then use their bodies to plot a visual graph of their data for the audience (we did similar things at VizThink this year and now I'm a big fan)
• He had someone hold up a 67 foot string to illustrate a proportion and opportunity chart. Very dramatic illustration of the 3 inches of string representing the number of people who generated 80% of revenues versus the 67 feet representing people who come to the e-commerce site...

I went to several other talks during the day, but I'm much too tired to summarize right now. I'll get to it later... tomorrow I have 2 talks and will upload slides and commentary as soon as I can.