UX Australia News

We’re really pleased to announce that registrations for the 2009 UX Australia conference are now open. Phew!

We’re a little late on this one, and, well it’s an interesting story. You see, early on we figured that this part of the whole business of running a conference was an important one. We’d all attended conferences previously where the registration process was flawed in small or large, irritating and down-right frustrating ways. (The last conference I attended lost my registration completely!) So we wanted to make sure that the process of registering and paying for the conference, and pre-conference workshops, was as painless and easy as we could make it.

Our initial thought was that we would look to see what other conferences were doing – good or bad – and see what we could learn from them about good process, systems, and the like. We reached out to people we know who organize conferences, and looked at their registration systems – the things they loved and hated. We eventually came to the conclusion – as had a few others – that to get the registration process just the way we wanted it we would need to develop one ourselves.

Which is what we’ve done. Unfortunately, in doing so, we also needed to put in place our own payment processing for similar reasons. We could possibly have used an existing conference registration system, and plugged in the payment gateways that come with them, and saved ourselves some pain. But we’d just have been shifted that pain onto you, and we weren’t prepared to do that.

It’s been the payment gateway, and all the financial agreements that go on behind the merchant accounts for accepting credit card payments online, that have held us up. We’re sorry for that, but we hope the resulting system is better for it.