Two days of workshops, three days of intensive talks and my brain is swimming with all the things I’ve learned and interesting discussions I’ve had. This is my humble attempt to gather my thoughts and put them down in blog form.

First, I’m going to say that if given the choice of only attending one conference a year, I would still choose this conference. It’s one of the more inexpensive conferences to attend and as Karl Fast said during 5 minute madness, it is designed by us for us. We only have two selected speakers and the rest are submissions sent in the by the community. It’s a great space to see what is happening in the user experience realm. On an individual basis, we spend the year solving problems and creating great user interfaces for our clients, on this occasion we get to compare those experiences and learn about some great new technique that will improve how we do our jobs.

Dissension in the community
I think the biggest struggle we faced during this conference was the split between the more mature members of our community disagreeing about the need to evolve or face dissolution of our community. To add to these statements of protecting our profession was the consortium that took place to discuss the potential need to incorporate a content strategy track into the mix. The thing I love about our community is that regardless of the passionate disagreements during sessions and on twitter and crowdvine is that it was still a love fest of people who appreciate the offerings that each person gives. Like a family we will continue to agree to disagree and still genuinely like each other at family functions. This discussion alone makes me happy to see we are all so passionate about what we do. When it comes down to it I will try to find the best solution for my client whether it’s called Information Architecture, Information Design or User Experience Design. Honestly, my name is Lori and I’m here to help. The end.

Pre-Conference Workshop Fun
Fred Beecher and I paired up to teach a reduced session of the advanced Axure class which gave us an opportunity to run through some of the really cool features that Axure offers, but not spend as much time as we would have liked doing the exercises of the more complex functionality, discuss the planning process and just generally be Axure geeks. It would be really cool to do a two day workshop of only advanced functionality and have all of the people who sign up bring their current prototypes to practice in. Maybe next year.

Conference Sessions
I’m not going to exhaustively review all the sessions I attended, but I do want to highlight a few.

The opening plenary by Michael Wesch on how we don’t just shape our tools, but how they shape us was a great way to get the conference started. Check out some of the videos he’s made on You Tube:
The Machine is Us/Ing Us
A Vision of Students Today

One of the more touching examples he provided during his talk was the One World Project and if you want to see a similar talk that he gave check out An Anthropological Introduction to You Tube.

Michael Wesch really provided a lot of thought provoking material on what we can do now and how that helps us reflect more on ourselves.

Nate Bolt’s discussion titled Portable Research: Observing Users on the Go gave me some great ideas for making the user testing I do more relevant to the data and the clients viewing that data. He did some interesting work on the go with a live stream that allowed the client to dial in at any time and also send instant messages to clarify any questions to the participant. I do love creative solutions to problems.

Fred’s discussion on integrating prototyping into the design process gave some great tips for the “what when how and why” of prototyping. Those of us at Evantage already drink the Kool Aid, so it’s a great representation of a practice we’re hoping to encourage elsewhere.

Whitney Hess made some excellent points about selling yourself and making your image more public. Her presentation finally convinced me of the importance of public discussion about some of the cool process and work we do within the Twitterverse and on this blog. The feedback and opportunity to learn is a great reason to start and continue the conversation. This blog entry is my first on the Evantage blog and I’m diving right in.

Jessie James Garett’s closing plenary discussed the limitless potential of our profession. It was unifying and thought provoking and a lovely end to the 2009 IA Summit.

There is always a great mix of the practical and ideological at the IA Summit and while we may not always agree, it’s a great community to be a part of. I would highly recommend checking out the presentations on slideshare (they are tagged ias09, ia summit 09). At some point the presentations should include the audio as most of it was recorded during the sessions - it’s just a matter of pairing it to the presentation. Mostly, I hope to see you all there next year.

Tags: IA Summit 2009