If you are interested in getting involved in Experience Design, one of the best ways is to attend a few conferences. In addition to the regular sessions, the tutorials available are fantastic resources.
Through my career, I have been to many. Like with most things, some are better than others. To help you sort out what might fit you best? Here is my list of favorites. I am sure you have opinions. Feel free to add a comment with your thoughts.
Best conference for an interaction designer is the IXDA Conference. This is a great interactive conference with tons of good speakers. This is a popular one and fills up quickly. For example, if you want to go in February 2011, it is already sold out.
The best conference for Usability Testing and User Research is theUsability Professionals Conference. The UPA started as a group of people from the CHI community who wanted to focus on practical techniques rather than academic research. It has been a consistently good conference. (Note: UPA is now UXPA)
For inspiration across multiple disciplines, it would be hard to top TED. TheTechnology, Entertainment and Design conference is a bit hard for most people to attend. Fortunately, many of the best TED talks are now available as online videos. And recently, TEDx conferences have been hosted in many places around the world. I went to last years TEDxNASA and thought it was a great event.
Along the lines of TED is GEL. At Good Experience Live, people share great stories from across the many disciplines that contribute to creating fantastic experiences. While I have not yet made it to GEL, I have had the chance to watch some of the videos online. I definitely want to attend.
Another one I have not yet managed to attend, but really want to, is the User Interface Conference. The team at User Interface Engineering do a fantastic job of lining up the best speakers in the interface design community. Really, Jared, I will get there someday. For now, I have been attending the UIE Virtual Seminars. These are a great way to hear many of the speakers you would see if you went to the conference.
If you are looking for the latest academic research that may lead the direction for future interface improvements, then the CHI Conference may be what you are looking for. CHI has been around for many years. At one point, it really was the conference to attend. While many more are available now, this is still a great one.
Of course, there are many more. The DMI design management one is great if you want a more marketing oriented conference. You might like Siggraph if you are really into how pixels make it to the screen. One of my all time favorites isn’t even a conference, but it is pretty hard to top the Disney Institute for learning about collaboration and process.
I hope the list is helpful. If I missed your favorite conference, feel free to leave a comment and let me know.
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