UX Australia News

A few weeks ago we asked for your ideas on what we should do with our spare presentation timeslots.

There were some great suggestions, including panels, discussions, slideshow karaoke and repeated sessions. There was a fairly strong ‘no’ to a design slam, and most people agreed that short talks would be good.

So that’s what we decided: 4 x 10 minute presentations in each timeslot.

Rapid presentations after lunch

Here’s how it will work on the day.

• We have four empty timeslots – one in each room after lunch on each day.
• Each timeslot will include four 10-minute presentations.
• We’ll get presenters to load their presentations onto one computer so there are no delays.
• We’ll monitor time very strictly.
• We’ll also try to put similarly-themed presentations together – and we’ll discourage moving between rooms as it is very distracting to presenters!

We’ll choose what to include by asking all attendees to vote for the ones they want to see.

Types of presentation

We don’t have any particular criteria for these presentations, except that they must fit within 10 minutes.

The presentation may be a:

• mini case study
• big idea
• new technique or method
• poetry reading
• product demonstration (your own or someone else’s product)
• critique of a product
• sales pitch

Ultimately, the audience will choose what will be included. If they decide to have 40 minutes of sales pitches…well, that’s probably unlikely.

You don’t even have to have a slide presentation. You could talk about an idea, show off something on the web, demonstrate a physical product.

Just make sure your idea can be communicated clearly in 10 minutes – and not by talking faster!

How to get your presentation included

Here’s what you have to do to be included:

By midnight 31 July 2009 (AEST), send an email to donna@uxaustralia.com.au, with the following:

• Title of your proposed presentation
• Description, in 50 words or less (make this crystal clear – people will use this to make a choice about whether to vote for you)
• Bio, in 25 words or less (or a link to one online)

You may submit more than one idea.

Voting will be held 3-9 August, and we’ll notify everyone on 10 August.

Submitting and voting are restricted to people who are registered for the conference. That is, you may not submit until you are registered (which is a good idea anyway, as everyone who registers in July goes into a draw for some awesome prizes).

And the final fine print: Presenters of rapid sessions aren’t paid and don’t get free conference passes. Just in case you were wondering.

A few weeks ago we asked you to help us design our conference badges. We were sick of useless, unusable conference badges and we know a lot of you were too. Our only criteria were that the badge identify the wearer to others and hang from a lanyard.

We had six entrants submit 42 images. There were two long discussions about requirements, on Matt Balara’s first version, and on his redesign.

Matt Balara won the competition

The competition winner is Matt Balara. He triggered the discussion about requirements (on Flickr and on Twitter) and iterated the design based on the feedback.

Matt will get a one-year subscription to Saasu (one of our fantastic sponsors).

We’re using Tom Voirol’s badge

We decided to use Tom Voirol’s design, which was based on Matt’s, with an upside-down schedule at the bottom.

Tom will get a subscription to an Optimal Workshop product (who are also a fantastic sponsor).

Special thanks

Thanks to the other entrants – all were exceptionally good and novel.

Jaan Orvet

Jaan Orvet’s design includes stickers for your computer or to put on yourself, and would be printed on recyclable card. The design was also beautifully annotated (below is the unannotated version):

Andreas Carlsson

Andreas Carlson’s design is cut into the shape of UX, and also would be printed on recyclable card. The design was also beautifully annotated:

Jessica Enders

Jessica Enders created a design without a lanyard – instead using a set of modular, reusable magnets:

Marc Nothrop

Marc Nothrop provided a lot of variations on a theme and included QR codes plys a personalised web page, building a bridge between the virtual and the physical:

Thinking of the environment

This year we are going to use plastic holders to contain the badge. Conferences use them because they work – they are robust & can take 3 days of wear and use. We will collect them for re-use and recycling at the end of the conference.

We’ll explore how we can avoid plastic for next year’s conference – we need to play with materials and production to make sure they are robust and wear well. The only card-based conference badges I have used were great, but stickers peeled off easily and they looked pretty ratty after 2 days handling. We want to avoid that, so will play with the idea for a while.

Thanks

Again, thanks to all of our entrants, and to everyone who contributed to the discussion about what makes a great conference badge. We hope this is useful for other conferences.

We know that lots of people know they are going to attend, but leave it until the last minute to register. Man, that’s stressful for us – it’s so hard to make plans for an unknown number of people.

So we have a cunning plan to help you help us - free stuff!

Register before 31 July, and you’ll go into the draw for:

• A licence for Axure RP Pro
• A 1 year subscription for Saasu
• An annual subscription to any Optimal Workshop product
• 2 copies of Bill Buxton’s book Sketching User Experiences
• 2 signed copies of Donna Spencer’s book Card sorting: Designing usable categories
• A brand new USB card reader

You don’t even have to pay straight away. Register now and pay any time before the conference.

If you’ve already registered this month (July), thanks – you’ll go into the draw automatically.

Register now for UX Australia 2009

… what would you like to happen next?

You see, we have a few slots in our conference schedule that we haven’t yet assigned to anyone – or anything. We’ve thought of some ideas, but we haven’t decided; and we know there are a lot of smart folks out there who’ll have some great ideas to share with us. Here’s what we thought of (and kept) as ideas:

• 4 x 10 minutes per speaker; no slides. Stand up and say something interesting, insightful, inspiring; but do it without props.
• 4 x 10 minutes per speaker; 10 slides, no stopping – auto-forward each minute. Present the core of an idea – a great way to test the waters or get people thinking about a concept.
• 45 minute ‘mini-workshop’ – with just one (maybe two) targeted exercises.
• 90 minute design slam: a mini design challenge where (random) groups of 8-10 people rapidly sketch, prototype & present their response to a problem.

What do you think? Do any of these strike a chord, or did we just pour a bucket of cold water over your head? Got a better idea?

Early-bird registration closed earlier this week. We had promised to enter everyone who registered in a draw for some terrific prizes. The winners, and the prizes, were:

• Rob Scherer: Copy of Bill Buxton’s Sketching the User Experience, courtesy of Microsoft
• Susan MacGillivray: Licence to Axure RP Pro, from our sponsor Axure
• Stephen Holmes: 1 year subscription to Saasu, from our sponsor Saasu

Congratulations to the winners and thank you to our sponsors for the prizes. We still have prizes to spare and will be using them for other promotions and door prizes at the conference.

How we drew the winner

We (the organisers) don’t all live or work together, so doing a physical ‘out of the hat’ draw wasn’t going to work. Instead we used a random number generator – all our registrations are numbered so that gave us an easy way to ‘draw’.

Here’s the input panel (we had 55 registrations):

And here’s the result:

Just in case you were wondering…