UPA 2009 in Portland - Day 2

This was a really long day. But a good one. I started off with a great talk from Susan Weinschenk on crafting presentations. It focused on telling a compelling story and was very engaging and fun. I went to it because I was following her talk with my own talk on presentation slides and I wanted to make sure I knew what she was covering to ensure that mine didn't overlap too much. Her talk was full of tips about giving the presentation itself. I was safe.

My talk was about how the slides you present affect your credibility and influence. I structured it so that it would be kind of an "evaluation" session where we'd evaluate slides from real findings presentations. It was kind of an experiment. I wasn't sure how it would go. In retrospect, I would have done a few things differently... I would have offered more examples of good slides and best practices to counterbalance with the not perfect examples I used. Some people in the audience loved it. Others hated it. I guess I can't feel too bad about that type of reaction.

Later in the day, I gave my talk on Research Traps. It went very well... (slides are up on Slideshare). This was pretty much the same as the talk I gave last fall, but this was a much shorter speaking window. I had 30 minutes and it filled the time, but it wasn't too rushed and the audience seemed to get a lot from it.

I went to a talk on having a "Field Day" at Yahoo... kind of a customer intimacy experience for non-UX people based on the "Hack Day" concept. It was pretty cool. Mark Wehner and Tom Wailes talked about how they got multidisciplinary teams of 3 to go into the field and spend time with a customer, focusing their interaction on something that interested themselves. Then, they returned to the office and constructed posters to illustrate their most interesting insights. They had 2 minutes to share what they'd learned and prizes were awarded for good research behaviors (best artifact, best quote, best poster, etc). Very nice twist on "teambuilding".

I also went to a talk from Peter Roessler, from Salesforce.com, about a Graffiti wall that they'd put up to collect qualitative data from target users at a user conference. It was kind of cool. They had moderators man the wall so people could come speak to them if they are "auditory" thinkers, people could draw if they were "visual" thinkers, and... could collaborate on answers or not. Kind of cool. Got me thinking about some of the benefits of collecting data in public spaces.