Usability Days 2006 - much better than last year
Klaus Silberbauer / Thursday, November 23, 2006
"Dansk IT's" Usability Days 2006 are over. A two day seminar on usability - and not a bad one either. Last year the same event ended up in nothing but sales pitches from different CMS vendors (yawn), but this year focus was in fact on usability/user centered design. The 2005 catastrophe meant that only about 80 people showed up this year and that makes me wonder if there's going to be Usability Days 2007.Among the best speakers this year was Klaus Kaasgaard (VP of Yahoo! User Experience Research) who talked about web trends for the years to come (and just in case you've been living in a cave the last year: The keywords are social, participation, community, sharing). Quite inspiring.
Also, Eric Reiss gave a good performance on user experience in general.
Several cases on usability and user centric design were presented: TopDanmark (insurance company), VELUX (the ones with the roof windows and one of our clients), and The Ministry of Finance (hey - also one of our clients :-). All of them very well presented cases.
I and a colleague did a two hour hands-on workshop on personas. Two hours aren't much for a workshop, but we managed to have people put together their own "tween"-personas for a fictitious e-commerce case. I think it went ok - but who am I to judge. I'm eagerly awaiting the feedback forms.
So, that concludes two weeks of me talking. Last thursday I gave a presentation on tools for user centred design at Creuna's own usability seminar and friday I did the same presentation for most of my colleagues. This week I did a presentation on Web 2.0-trends as a part of another Creuna event for our clients. These things are fun to do but they sure take up a lot of time, so I'm looking forward to getting some work done the next couple of weeks - the kind of work that out clients pay us to do.
Klaus, Thank you for the kind words, glad you liked my talk. I thought we all had good discussions and I am glad that I attended most of the conference. Eric's presentation alone made it worthwhile.
As a participant in the personas workshop I can safely say, well done! We could easlyli have spendt much more time on the topic, but for the time we had it was beneficial.
Reiss was indeed a boon for the confenrence, but your segment, Klaus K, was by far the most inspiring. Thank you!
I do share Silberbauers concerns for next year, but I wonder if the succes of this year wont spark new will and drive (read: finacial prospect)within the host organization?
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