Reviews: Conference Reviews

The UX strategy tribe gathered once again for the UX STRAT 2014 conference in picturesque Boulder, Colorado, at the foot of the magnificent Rocky Mountains. After a day of pre-conference workshops on September 7 at the beautiful Hotel Boulderado, the main conference convened for two days, on September 8 and 9, just one block away at the lovely Art Deco Boulder Theater.

In this review, I’ll provide an overview of the conference, covering the same dimensions as the star ratings to the rig<>ht, and Jim Nieters and I will review four of the workshops that took place on Sunday, September 7.

Organization

Organization
Content
Presenters
Proceedings
Venue
Hospitality
Community

Paul Bryan, producer of UX STRAT 2014, who is shown in Figure 1, did a great job of organizing another excellent and enjoyable conference. I was really glad that UX STRAT 2014 was again a single-track conference, so all attendees could share a common experience. As Paul promised in his UX Strategy column on UXmatters, “UX STRAT 2014: Focusing on UX Strategy,” “Experienced UX strategy professionals will present their approaches to guiding UX projects, products, and programs.” This year, Paul decided to dispense with panels and vignettes, which allowed more speakers more time for in-depth explorations of their topics. In my view, these were good decisions. Read More

An IA Summit 2006 Seminar: Presented by Peter Morville

Peter Morville, co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web with Lou Rosenfeld and author of Ambient Findability, presented a very informative day-long lecture on the subject of information architecture (IA). He discussed many basic concepts as well as best practices, so his presentation would appeal to both beginner and intermediate IAs. Read More

Organization
Content
Presenters
Proceedings
Venue
Hospitality
Community

This year, SIGCHI celebrated its 25th annual Computer/Human Interaction (CHI) conference. CHI 2007 took place at the Convention Center in San Jose, California, USA, on April 28 through May 3, 2007. Its theme: Reach Beyond. The organizers asked us to “reach beyond …our comfortable methods and praxis; beyond our exciting and innovative technology; beyond our established scientific frameworks and reputations; beyond the common ground of professional and national cultures; and beyond our far-flung social networks.” To what?

Opening the conference, Mary Beth Rosson, Conference Chair, said, “HCI folks are in the middle of everything now, and we’ve earned that.”

While Design Community Co-Chairs John Kolko and Bill Lucas brought us Bill Moggridge’s remarkable opening plenary, “Reaching for the Intuitive,” and the exceptional interactive session “Who Killed Design?” I still found the overall amount of design content at CHI 2007 lacking. This was particularly disappointing, because the conference convened in the heart of Silicon Valley—world center of the technology industry and home to many UX professionals. If ever there were a CHI that should have been centered more on practice than academia, this was it. Read More