A week ago I attended the DUX 2005 conference in San Francisco. This was the second of such conferences focusing on the design of user experiences, the first happening in the same city two years ago.

While Dan Rosenberg, SVP of User Experience for SAP, said he had felt the theme for the conference had been “Twenty-year-old practices, when executed properly, still work,” (we did hear a lot of stories from presenters that recently discovering how important prototyping, usability testing, and guidelines are,) I felt that the big theme really was “User Experience is growing up really, really fast.”

I didn’t attend the 2003 conference, but many have told me about their experiences there. They were unanimously excited, repeating that they felt the conference was seminal in their careers as user experience and interaction designers. This was one of the main reasons I wanted to come to this year’s event.

In talking to folks, I think the 2003 event was at a critical period in user experience design. The field was just burgeoning. There were dozens (hundreds?) of UX and Interaction designers, but they were all working as solo artists in environments that didn’t understand their work.

The 2003 conference brought these folks together for the first time, allowing them to see that others, just like them, existed and faced similar challenges to what they themselves faced. The format of that event supported this time: short show-and-tell-style showcases of the work many different folks were doing — an introduction into the breadth and depth of the field. That format worked very successfully to bring this community together and make it into something.

Fast forward two years: DUX 2005 decides to use the same format (5-minute show-and-tell-style mini case studies) because it worked so well last time. Except, in my opinion, it didn’t work so well.

As Bill Irwin brilliantly pointed out in his keynote, when the context changes, the artifact needs to change with it. We’re no longer in a context where this is a new field.

Sure, it’s young. But SAP, one of the largest, most conservative software companies on the planet, has a Senior Vice President of User Experience. Fully one fifth of the 425 attendees to this year’s DUX were from established industries, such as banking and insurance.

UX isn’t a fringe element anymore — it’s now a critical part of many organizations’ strategies to success. This was a point that I think was wholly missed by the conference organizers as there wasn’t one attempt to demonstrate how important user experience has become to these mainstream organizations.

Amidst the many too-short case studies, there were some real gems:

• Jennifer Fraser from Corel talked about a innovation management system that I think is really quite groundbreaking.
• Suzanne Pelican from Intuit talked about how rapid prototyping, while not new, brought innovative, successful products to market in an organization that had stagnated a little too much.
• Tracy Cohen from Avenue A/Razorfish showed how they are using collaborative tools to enhance their inter-team communication.

These presentations (and their subsequent papers) were really valuable. There were some other interesting items of note:

• Abla Hamilton from Bank of America shared how the complexities of the business world — in her case, mergers of large banks — can make the placement of a button extremely complex. We don’t really have tools or methods to help folks design amidst massive amounts of business complexity.
• Mike Kuniavsky, author of Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research, shared how simple tools like a blog, can potentially enhance the adoption of guidelines. (Though I was wondering why he didn’t go the extra step to turn them into design patterns.)
• Jan Chipchase from Nokia gave a very entertaining discussion on Nokia’s design process for innovating new ways to use Bluetooth.

There were a few things that were notable by their absence:

• AJAX
• Web 2.0
• Multi-channel experiences
• Strategic success of UX

The UX field has moved beyond the What is UX? and Who are UX practitioners? questions. From my discussions with many of the conference attendees, they really wanted to know more about How is UX done successfully?, something the conference wholly missed in their program.

The fact that 425 people registered, thus selling out the conference a month before it’s opening session, tells us that this is a very high demand area, or in the common Silicon-Valley-VC parlance, a very under-served market. It will be interesting to see how this market changes before the next DUX conference in 2007.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2005 at 7:30 am and is filed under Events, Our Community, Resources . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.