Conference Review: UPA 2007: Part II

What do you need to do to start and sustain your business?

Getting started and sustaining your business:

• Develop your Web site and collateral.
• Do your business analysis.
• Understand what it will take to cover the costs of insurance, materials, and resources, plus give yourself a salary.
• Don’t confuse the company’s profitability with your own salary. Make sure to include both in your analysis.
• Do not operate as a sole proprietor. Set yourself up as an employee of your own company.
• Assume you’ll spend some percentage of your time marketing, educating your client audience, and looking for new work.
• Unless you already have a client lined up when you first get started, you will be unemployed for a while.

How do you grow your business? What is your three-to-five year plan?

To grow your business:

• Set short-term and long-term goals. Make a one-year and a five-year plan.
• Stay in an industry niche or branch into new areas.
• Work with new technologies or industries.
• Establish, copyright, trademark, and patent methods, services, and products.
• Participate in industry organizations. Attend, network at, and present at conferences such as the UPA, STC, CHI, HFES, AIGA, vertical market chapters, and so on.
• Grow your skills and knowledge.
• Read Good to Great, by Jim Collins.

More considerations for consultants:

• fighting the consultant image—Sometimes it works to your disadvantage.
• leveraging the consulting image—Sometimes it works to your benefit. There are many examples where employees were trying to make the right decisions, but management wouldn’t listen, then management finally did listen to the same advice from a consultant.
• juggling client work
• juggling work versus home and family
• working with clients
• frustrations of project management
• frustrations of running a business
  • How do you include product development in the mix?
  • How do you deal with competitors?
• frustrations of having employees
  • How do you handle staff?
  • There is a moral responsibility to take care of the people who work for you. You aren’t just looking out for yourself.
  • Payroll paperwork involves a lot of work. It is highly recommended that you outsource payroll and human-resources (HR) management to payroll and HR firms.
  • Where do you hire staff from?
  • What do you do with difficult staff?
  • Should you offer internships and train people up or hire only experienced people?
  • What are your training policies?

Friday: Closing Plenary: Oh Them? Designing for the Other 4 Billion Users I Forgot About

Presenter: Patrick Whitney

Patrick Whitney, Director of the IIT Institute of Design, shown in Figure 1, offered the parting thoughts for the UPA 2007 conference. His talk was a call to action for UX professionals to pay attention to the needs of the people who are at the base of the economic pyramid, where over 60% of the world’s population lives on under $2 a day.

Patrick began by considering the shift that has happened in the relationship between companies and the consumers that use their products. Henry Ford’s statement in 1930s, “Give them what color they want, as long as it’s black,” reflects the old way—when producers were in control. But now, the consumers are in control. As well articulated by an anonymous Wal-Mart customer, producers have received increasing pressure to “Give me what I want, when I want it, in my style, and close to free.” But, as we move forward, we have begun to realize the huge social and economic opportunity in designing for people at the bottom of the pyramid. The question becomes how and what do you design for these markets in light of all the issues around poverty—such as lack of infrastructure, scarcity of water, no land rights, inflow of rural migrants, overcrowding, and so on. Despite these challenges, China has become the “factory to the world” and India the “business-processing outsourcing center of the world.” The growth in these countries as well as in other emerging markets like Brazil and Russia is expanding the middle class by one billion people—a community larger than the top of the pyramid, a community that cannot be ignored.

Next, Patrick examined past and current business models and the opportunities they present, as well as proposed new models based on research conducted at IIT. When producers were in control, the focus was on economies of scale, emphasizing mass production and standardization. With consumers at the center, business success is a balancing act between desirability to users, technical feasibility, and economic forces. In the more traditional models, the major growth opportunities occur during mergers and acquisitions, when companies develop new products and innovations, or when you figure out how to sell existing products to people at the base of the pyramid.

However, an innovation gap exists. Most companies know how to make things, but the hard part is deciding what they should make. The way to address this innovation gap is to take a step back and observe the patterns of daily life—live, work, learn, play. To facilitate this process, Patrick reminded us that we need methods and tools “for developing consumer insights that are as powerful as our methods for developing technology and business models,” particularly those that do not require significant financial investment.

During the China Interactive Home project, the IIT team developed field notebooks as a mechanism for conducting research remotely that yielded rich, consistent data. They could distribute these rigorously structured notebooks in a region, to people who are not necessarily trained in user experience. Teachers and community leaders who are good at talking to others could easily conduct the research, document the data through photos and text—design factors, design criteria, activities, time, people, objects, environment, messages, services, and comments—then FedEx the notebooks back to the research team. At 20% of the cost, these notebooks provided 80% of the data and a variety of insights into the product opportunities that exist in China, particularly

• buying fresh food
• families staying in touch
• helping kids learn
• managing apartments
• storage
• balancing budgets

Subsequently, they conducted studies utilizing this method in India, where the average Indian home is 12x12 feet and contains a single floor a family uses for cooking, sleeping, and conducting a home-based business. The insights from this project led Patrick and his team to iterate on their proposed business model for designing for emerging markets. In addition, they identified specific issues around the quality of and access to water, support for micro-businesses, and housing, which resulted in product or economic designs like Mobile H20, GuildNet, and StepOne Homes.

Patrick and the team at IIT Institute of Design are also working on a user insight tool that will help companies archive, catalog, and later use their research in a new culture, regardless of the particular project for which they originally conducted the research. Having a tool that captures information about the people, objects, environment, messages, and services will help practitioners determine where the breakthrough opportunities are. Patrick, let me know when you’ve finished the tool. I’d love to get my hands on a copy!

Posters, Idea Markets, and Special Interest Groups

Throughout the conference, other types of sessions encouraged knowledge exchange, active engagement, and networking. On Tuesday evening, a special poster review session took place during the welcome reception. And, for those who could not attend the poster review, the posters remained on display in the highly visible location for the remainder of the week shown in Figure 2, offering plenty of exposure and opportunity for discussion.

The active discourse continued Wednesday afternoon at the first Idea Market, where facilitators posed burning questions to participants. An Idea Market is a brainstorming free-for-all. Attendees buzz from station to station and share their ideas on selected topics. Being a session facilitators is a great way to get a quick survey of your peers in the industry on a given topic. In a short amount of time, participants generate many great ideas. A second Idea Market was held Friday morning. These are the Idea Market topics I found most interesting across the two days:

• How can we prepare the next generation of usability professionals?—Susan Kahler
• What is innovation and how do you innovate through design?—Phil Ohme
• What’s in your pattern library?—Barb Hernandez and Josephine Scott
• What makes a good usability professional?—Kathi Kaiser and Lyman Casey
• How can we optimize agile user-centered design?—Lynn Miller
• How do we design truly global products?—Kerin Smollen
• Intuition not required—What are the merits of learnable design?—Nathan Verrill
• Unknown unknowns and emerging unknowns—How can you design innovative solutions to problems you didn’t know you had?—Andrea Spray

The proactive conversations continued the following evening when simultaneous Special Interest Group (SIG) sessions engaged participants in topics like accessibility, long-distance usability testing, and other topics relevant to the UX community. In addition to the more traditional SIGs, sessions focusing on World Usability Day 2007 generated quite a bit of buzz. On Monday evening, there was a planning meeting where directors Elizabeth Rosenzweig and Caryn Saitz highlighted success stories from 2006 and shared the theme and logistics for the upcoming festivities on November 8, 2007. Following that session, everyone walked a few blocks into the heart of downtown Austin for a dinner filled with laughter and camaraderie. What a fun night! Then, on Wednesday evening, a World Usability Day 2007 kick-off event was open to all conference attendees. Since the 2007 theme is Healthcare, the session began with a panel of presenters who each shared the successes and challenges of doing usability work in the healthcare industry.

Proceedings

As part of the conference registration packet, each attendee received a proceedings CD, which contained the slides and/or handouts for each session held on Wednesday through Friday. In theory, the CD could help you to evaluate sessions prior to attending them, based on the merit of their content, not just the brief abstract in the conference program. However, the challenge is: Often presenters do not complete their final slides in time, so the content provided on the CD is out of date and doesn’t match what’s actually presented. Occasionally, presenters bring printed handouts to their sessions to help address the documentation gap. Those handouts quickly become some of the most coveted items at the conference.

To UPA’s credit, in recent years, they have created a post-conference Web site and encouraged presenters to upload their presentation files and other supplemental materials. This minimizes the number of requests for slides presenters must manage and enables attendees to relax and enjoy the presentations without having to scribble feverishly to capture the session content in their notes. However, there are still quite a few sessions missing from both versions of the proceedings. It’s really a matter of presenter discretion and commitment to ensure that they post their content appropriately. So, I’ll use this as an opportunity to remind any presenters who might be reading this review to please upload your conference materials.

To complicate matters slightly, regardless of whether all the presenters posted their slides to the post-conference proceedings on the UPA Web site, you can download the documents only if you are a UPA member. This policy, which is new to the 2007 conference, is fine for existing UPA members and 2007 attendees who joined when they registered for the conference, but for everyone else, is not helpful.

Venue

Austin, Texas (shown in Figure 3), is a “weird” little city and quite proud of it. Home to the Texas state capitol, the Whole Foods corporation, live music at every imaginable venue, and lots of tattoo parlors, it’s a perfect blend of the “everything is bigger in Texas” swagger and the self-expressionism often found in the alternative neighborhoods of larger cities. As Austin enthusiasts say, this city represents the “collaborative fission of coordinated individualism.” Because of its charming personality and accessibility, Austin is a great town for a conference.

Located next door to the Austin Convention Center and a very affordable city parking facility, the Hilton Hotel, shown in Figure 4, was the main venue for UPA 2007. Conference sessions were held primarily on two floors. While the opening and closing plenary sessions, the welcome reception, and daily meals took place inside the grand ballroom, the conference sessions, tutorials, workshops, idea markets, SIGs, vendor fair, and bookstore were spread throughout the remaining conference rooms. With the exception of meal times and networking breaks, when quite a queue formed at the food tables in the hallway outside the grand ballroom, there seemed to be plenty of space to accommodate all conference-related activities. The hotel staff was helpful and professional, and they were able to make room and equipment transitions quickly and seamlessly.

The main drawback of the venue was that the Hilton Hotel did not have enough available guest rooms to accommodate the 700 plus attendees. The reserved block of rooms sold out very quickly, and many attendees were lodged in a variety of hotels within a two-mile radius of the Hilton. There was also an problem that rendered one of the critical escalators unusable for most of the conference, creating a minor traffic flow problem.

Hospitality

Since the first three days were devoted to tutorials, workshops, and organizational business, the main conference activities did not begin until Wednesday, June 13, 2007. On Tuesday night, to kick-off the conference, there were three overlapping welcome receptions: one for newcomers, one for chapter leaders, and another for all conference attendees. A mixture of floating hors d’oeuvres and strategically located food stations offering stuffed pastries, grilled veggies, pasta, and drinks encouraged mingling among attendees, as well as visits to vendor booths.

One thing I can say about UPA conferences is that you are fed well—maybe too well. Daily, they provided buffet breakfasts and lunches, and two coffee/tea breaks that offered desserts, ranging from fruits and granola bars to ice cream sundaes, cheesecakes, and churros. All meal times encouraged networking among attendees. On Thursday, the underlying theme for lunch was volunteering. Have you ever wondered about the editorial board for UPA publications, the Body of Knowledge initiative, or exactly how the UPA selects conference presentations, invited speakers, or conference volunteers? This lunch was the perfect opportunity for attendees to learn more about volunteering and possibly volunteer to join the organizational and conference planning efforts.

Thursday night is typically the gala event for the conference. With Austin sites beckoning, this year’s gala was a bit light, including a buffet dinner and a bit of musical entertainment from a local band. Really, the goal was to get everyone out of the hotel to explore the culture of the city. There were so many options, it was hard to choose. But, ultimately, my colleagues and I spent the night singing and clapping the night away with other UPA-goers at Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar (shown in Figure 5), where old favorites like “La Bamba,” “Brown-Eyed Girl,” “Twist and Shout,” and even college fight songs were the evening’s amusement.

Laura Faulkner and the hospitality team did a great job organizing activities this year. Throughout the conference, there was an Austin booth where you could talk to a local resident to get information and ask questions about the city. In addition, they organized activities like bat-watching at dusk (shown in Figure 6), bike riding along Austin’s many rivers, hiking through other natural settings, and touring the town.

Community

I attended my first UPA conference in 2002, in Orlando, Florida. At the time, I was the sole usability professional on a team of 400+ system engineers, system architects, product managers, software engineers, and hardware engineers. Although a few of my peers understood the importance of user experience, I was in great need of a community of like-minded individuals in which I could exchange ideas, discuss new methodologies, share organizational woes, and brainstorm about techniques for institutionalizing usability. That conference and the encouragement I received there was life changing. I have always found the UPA community warm, welcoming, and supportive, and this is what has drawn me to attend and actively participate in UPA over the 5 years since Orlando.

Typically, the UPA conference attracts 500–600 attendees—a group large and varied enough to enable interesting and meaningful discourse, yet intimate enough to let you make personal and career-impacting connections. Although UPA’s focus leans heavily toward practitioners, with special emphasis on usability testing, the conference population represents a nice mix of disciplines, including ethnographers, marketers, testers, interaction designers, media designers, software developers, and managers. There’s always a core group of people who make the yearly trek to UPA:

• current and former UPA Board Members—Thyra Rauch, Paul Sherman, Susan Dray, Nigel Bevan, and Whitney Quesenbery, among others
• a pool of experts who come to share their latest work—Aaron Marcus, Larry Constantine, Ginny Reddish, Kath Straub, and more
• as well as a host of impassioned usability experts from around the world, who form the fabric of this community

This year was no different. With over 700 attendees, many of the familiar faces were there, but so were many newcomers. Not only was there an increase in the number of individual attendees, but also in the number of companies who participated in the conference activities. A dramatic increase in the number of postings on the jobs board and materials on the information tables reflected the upswing the industry has experienced in the past year or two. In addition, participation in the Exhibitor Fair, shown in Figure 7, reached a peak, with booths from companies like Fieldwork, Human Factors International, T-Mobile, TechSmith, OneSpring, iRise, Eureka Software, Intuitect, Perficient, Tobii Technology, Inc., OVO Studios, Google, UserZoom, MadPow, UXalliance, Keynote Systems, User Centric, Inc., Noldus Information Technology, and SirValUse Consulting.

While the UPA community is pretty tightly knit, I do admit that sometimes I wish we were a bit better coordinated with the CHI community. These are two very closely related organizations. This year, CHI changed their submission process. The CHI 2008 deadlines for some submissions categories were earlier than usual. It just so happened that the final day of the UPA 2007 conference coincided with the first CHI 2008 deadlines. Many senior practitioners in the UPA community also regularly participate in the CHI community. On Thursday evening and Friday afternoon, some UPA attendees skipped out on conference activities and interesting presentations as they scrambled to wrap up their abstracts in time for the pending submission deadlines for CHI 2008. Yes, you might say they should have managed their time better and completed their submissions before the conference. But there’s also an interesting synergy that could occur if the two communities were partners in a well-coordinated dance. Lessons learned from the sessions and the connections people made at the UPA conference might generate new ideas and paper collaborations that would result in very interesting submissions to the next CHI and vice versa. Since many leaders—both at the international level and in local chapters—participate actively in both communities, let’s make an effort to coordinate activities in this coming year. Call me idealistic, but I am allowed to dream.

Conclusion

I have always enjoyed UPA conferences. But now that the industry is thriving again and organizations are seeing user experience as a strategic business component, this year was particularly exciting. Reconnecting with old friends and making new ones was the highlight of my week.

During the conference, an undercurrent seemed to ebb and flow throughout the conference sessions and hallway sidebars: concern about who we are as a discipline and where we are going. I think the industry is at a critical stage. All professional associations within the UX community have an opportunity to embrace the UX community in all of its variety and a duty to help offer clarity and direction. While we came to no conclusions this week, a lot of interesting dialogue took place. In particular, I was really excited by some of the conversations I had with some of the UPA leadership during this conference. In the face of the coming identity crisis for usability, as we expand and diversify our collective body of knowledge, I think our leaders are asking the right questions about where we are going as a field, what communities within user experience UPA seeks to serve, and how they can optimize their offerings for practitioners—not just at the conferences, but during the in-between months as well. I’d like to suggest they give increased attention to the UPA Body-of-Knowledge initiative, as well as to organizing special conference tracks or persistent SIGs for designers, UX managers, and UX consultants, as well as to SIGs on hot topics like green awareness and socially responsible design.

With this in mind, I look forward to next year, when the UPA will host two conferences. UPA 2008 will take place June 16–20 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, and UPA Europe 2008 will be held in Torino, Italy, in the winter. With the themes Holistic Usability and Usability and Design, respectively, UPA is on the right track. I am sure the conference chairs, Allain Robillard-Bastien, Kate Caldwell, Michele Visciola, and Silvia Zimmerman, and their conference planning committees will organize two great events. 

Photographs by Joi Roberts and Ron Yoder.

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Conference Review: UPA 2007: Part I