An Event Apart Comes to Washington DC
It’s one of the big ones – An Event Apart (AEA) is coming to Washington DC. The conference will feature a ton of excellent sessions by some of the industry leaders. Once again, UX Booth would like to offer our readers an insider’s discount for interested attendees.
Coming up on July 10 – 12 at the Hilton Alexandria Mark Center, An Event Apart is kicking off in Washington DC (well, technically Alexandria, but close enough). The weather is sure to be warm, the birds will be a-chirpin’, and lots of user experience design professionals will be gathered to inspire and challenge each other with their work and their ideas.
Not sure if AEA is up your alley? Here’s how the organizers explain who should attend (and why):
An Event Apart (AEA) attendees are UX professionals, developers, and designers—including interaction designers, graphic designers, and UI designers. Project managers, writer/editors, marketers, strategists, and even site owners and clients attend. Attendees want to improve job skills and make new community and business connections in an intense and fun environment. But unlike the typical conference goer, AEA attendees have that gleam in their eye that comes from the belief that through advocacy and hard work, they can make a meaningful difference.
If you’ve got the gleam, you’ll be right at home. And hey—think of all those business cards and buckets of knowledge and inspiration you’ll come back with. It’ll impress your colleagues (and maybe make a few of them jealous).
And there are definitely some heavy hitters there this year. Here are a few of this year’s sessions, and the speakers leading them.
Measuring the Customer Experience
Gerry McGovern (aka: that guy who sends me newsletters I actually read)
The best way to understand digital user experience is to measure the time and effort required to complete top tasks. That’s why the most successful digital brands, from Amazon to Google, are relentless in their focus on saving their customers time. To succeed as these companies do, we must discard our organization-centric model of production, and accurately measure task completion and time-on-task. Gerry McGovern will share a robust method for doing just that.
Designing for Understanding
Our work focuses on creating great experiences, and we rightly obsess over usability. But how often do we obsess over understandability? If someone gets through a workflow but doesn’t truly know what they’ve done or why—or, worse yet, never even starts a workflow because they couldn’t grasp the benefits of doing so—then we’ve failed as designers. In this presentation, Stephanie will draw from her work with Capital One, Ben & Jerry’s, and FastCustomer.com to show how approaches like content-first design and contextual learning increase customer understanding—and result in fewer iterations, faster learning, and happier customers.
From Research to Redesign: An Unexpected Journey
Jeffrey Zeldman (aka the guy behind this whole event)
Meaningful redesigns start with research. From competitive surveys to making sense of analytics, and from stakeholder interviews to customer research, every fact we uncover is another step in the direction of a design that solves real problems. Don’t have a dedicated researcher on your team? That’s okay! Because we designers and developers should do this work ourselves, anyway. Working with real examples, Jeffrey will show how, the more you learn, the better your designs will work—on multiple levels.
Check out the full schedule on the AEA DC website.
Expect to walk away with a ton of resources that will help in the UX day to day. For instance, take a look at the list of resources that came out of this year’s AEA in Seattle, compiled by speaker. That’s a goldmine right there.
Better get on that registration train now though – early bird pricing ends May 15. Be sure to enter the promo code AEAUXBOOTH while checking out; it’ll chop off $100 off that registration price tag.
