User Experience professionals from California to Christchurch are in Canberra at the end of this week for the first-ever UX Australia user experience conference . I"ll be there reporting for online interaction design collective Johnny Holland, but in the meantime here's an intro on UX and the conference.
Locus Research interaction designer Vicky Teinaki will be at the UX conference UX Australia. She'l be reporting back on her experiences.
User Experience professionals from California to Christchurch are in Canberra at the end of this week for the first-ever UX Australia user experience conference . I"ll be there reporting for online interaction design collective Johnny Holland, but in the meantime here's an intro on UX and the conference.
What's UX?
User Experience, Experience Design, User Experience Design (they're all somewhat interchangeable) is a branch of design generally associated with digital interfaces and interactions, but can range from website usability to exhibition kiosks and anything inbetween.
To be honest, like any new word, it's up for contention, (check out the IXDA list to get an idea of the hair-splitting that can go on at times) but my favourite definition comes from Russ Unger and Carol Chandler:
"Curiosity, passion, and empathy are traits that user experience designers share [along with] a desire to achieve balance … most notably between logic and emotion ….To create truly memorable and satisfying experiences, a UX designer needs to understand how to create a logical and viable structure for the experience and needs to understand the elements that are importance to creating an emotional connection with the product’s users."
- A Project Guide To UX Design, p6
(For more on UX, have a look at UX101, a presentation I put together for product design students on user experience design.)
The UX Australia Conference
UX Australia is taking place over 2 days across 27-8 August, in Canberra, with a range of practitioner-based talks. As the website says, it is a "user experience design conference, with inspiring and practical presentations, covering a range of topics about how to design great experiences for people."
It was put together by UX practitioners (Donna Spencer, Andrew Boyd, and Steve and Danielle Baty) for practitioners, and has had a UX experience throughout right down to the design of the conference badges.
(For more about how the event was put together, check out the IA Podcast interview (iTunes) with Donna Spencer and Steve Baty.)
What's different about UX Australia?
First up, I'm not aware of any conferences that say they're about user experience design (most of them are actuallly more niche - Webstock and the Web Directions North / South conferences understandably lean towards the web, Interaction and IA Summit tend to be more about interaction design). The only one I knew of - and which seems to have died - was DUX - and UX Australia differs from this by clearly focusing on practice rather than theory.
This means that looking through the attendees list brings up some great UX practictioners. Some of the speakers I'm looking forward to seeing include Daniel Szuc, a Hong-Kong based Australian who has written some great posts about selling UX, IXDA board member, UX Matters writer and Johnny Holland kahuna Steve Baty, and a keynote from NY Times UX director Alex Wright (whom I was fortunate enough to be able to interview) to name a few.
Finally, it looks like it'll be a chance to see what's going on in UX in this neck of the woods. UX is still largely under the radar around here (I've still got to explain what my degree in product design means in the provinces!) but I have a feeling that there is some great work and people around that aren't given the recognition that they should.
