Well, I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.

The bad news is, if you’re thinking about attending, you better register very quickly. We only have 10 more full-conference spaces open. After those 10 spaces are gone, we’ll stop taking registrations. (We will still accept registrations for a few of the full-day seminars which have a little room, but most will be closed out quickly.)

The good news is, once we get those 10 registrations, you won’t have to get another email about this conference until next spring. (Yay! – Unless, of course, you’ve signed up, then we have all sorts of things to tell you to prepare for the event.)

If you’re thinking about registering, you want to go right now to the conference site and pick your sessions. I’m betting the conference will not remain open for more than a few more hours.

If you can’t come to this year’s conference, don’t fret. We’ve got amazing plans for 2007 and I think you’ll find all sorts of ways to take part.

Thanks for helping us make this conference a success.

At the conference, our bookseller brought all of the latest books on usability, product development, web design, development techniques, and user interface design. The most popular books were:

Call to Action: Secret Formulas Improve Online Results
Our good friends and User Interface 10 Conference speakers, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, have written an excellent book describing Persuasion Architecture, their methodology for convincing users to take action and help meet site’s business objectives.

Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design
The always brilliant and witty Eric Meyer provides a practical, hands-on book guiding readers through several CSS projects that teach designers about each of the different aspects of CSS.

Ambient Findability
Peter Morville has written a wonderful new book that offers a great discussion of how we find things, whether in the real world or online.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave a wonderfully received spotlight plenary at UI10, outlining the main factors that contribute to a flow experience. In this seminar book, Mihaly introduces the concept of flow, describing the optimal psychological state associated with high levels of satisfaction and fulfillment.

The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightening for the Web
We’ve been huge fans of the CSS Zen Garden site, so it comes as no surprise that we love Dave Shea’s and Molly Holzschlag’s book. It’s a great way to see the power of CSS and how you can solve a myriad of complex problems with straightforward techniques.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
In his bestselling book, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that there’s a key point where products, messages, and behaviors can spread just like viruses: the tipping point. At UIE, this book has provided us with huge insights into how word-of-mouth marketing works.

We have all of these great resources on our bookshelves at UIE. I highly recommend you check them out.

UI 10 Trip Report October 2005

By Huiping Iler, WTB Language Group

I am always curious what the smartest people in the industry are reading. While I look up to those smart ones, sometimes I wonder who they look up to? Who do they read and who do they listen to?

Some time in 2004 after reading a book called Content Critical, I concluded to myself that the guy who wrote the book Gerry McGovern is one of the smartest people in the web business today. So when an opportunity came up to hear him live in a two-day seminar in San Francisco, I jumped at the chance. During the break, I approached Gerry and asked who he read and admired in the web business today. He thought for a while and spit out two words, “Jared Spool.”

Those two words cost me a few thousand dollars and brought me to the UI 10 in Boston.

Jared turned out to be a delight to listen to – witty and insightful. In his keynote speech, Jared talked about the intuitive side of usability research. According to him, there are very gifted people who possess great instincts on what makes a web site work.

Jared used an example of a research project he was doing, looking at financial information resources, such as the Wall Street Journal. He had spent a great deal of time interviewing investors, day traders and business people to find out what content they were interested in. This was to help organizations like the Wall Street Journal identify “hot content” that holds strong interest for its readers. Jared had narrowed down a handful of key areas through his research. At a Web Graphics gathering, he entered a casual conversation on the site with a designer named Gong Szeto. In a matter of minutes, Szeto left Jared speechless by outlining the areas that the site needed improvement, covering almost everything that Jared learned from his months of interviews.

So how did Gong Szeto know? Through research? No. Great Intuition? Yes. Jared Spool compared such instincts of Gong Szeto to the chicken sexing trade. Apparently it is extremely difficult to tell the sex of chickens before they are six weeks old. But it is very important in the poultry industry to separate the sexes. Those who can do it largely rely on intuition. They cannot really explain why they can do it. In the case of Gong Szeto, he instinctively knew what a financial information site like Wall Street Journal needed, even though he couldn’t quite explain in words how he knew.

One thing I noticed about great speakers is that they are superb at using analogies to explain complex ideas. If Jared’s analogy of chicken sexing left me a lasting impression, Gerry McGovern’s use of analogies went even farther by making their way to my dreams.

After I came back after the UI 10 event, for a couple of nights I kept dreaming of coming down an escalator. As I came down, I would see a huge sign that says “Trains Tickets Toilets.” In my dreams, I kept asking myself, “what are the trains, tickets and toilets of my web site?”

In Gerry’s session, he compared a visitor to a web site to the experience of coming down an escalator at an airport. People’s attention span is very short and they need information fast. It is the web editor’s job to identify the key tasks of the site visitor and present navigational choices that facilitate task completion. Getting on trains, buying tickets and going to toilets are key tasks. Someone asked, “what about tracks?” While finding tracks may be “A” task, it is not important for most people (maybe for those suicidal). Design for common tasks, not for exceptions, says Gerry.

My final observation is that a key theme dominates the UI 10. That is the theme of knowing your customers. Whether it is usability research or information architecture, the speakers are telling us how important it is to get to know your customers. It is very simple, and it is the underlying principle of almost every session. Come to think about it, usability is really about finding out what the customers want, isn’t it?

The founder of marketingprofs.com Alan Weiss once said to me, there has been nothing new in business for the last several decades. The principles of marketing and business remain the same. A shop keeper from one hundred years ago could have told us how important it is to know your customers. But in year 2005, we are still listening to the brightest of business minds teaching us the same principle.

Don’t Make Me Think; Or, What I Learned at the User Interface 10 Conference
By Marymoore Patterson

Don’t Make Me Think! is the title of a book by Steve Krug, which I bought at User Interface 10, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 10-14. It’s also what the conference was about – creating user interfaces, primarily Web site and application interfaces, that are so usable, users don’t have to think about them.

Most attendees were Web designers, developers, usability experts, and information architects. Some of the same themes ran throughout the lectures:

• Usability testing is much more effective if done on a small scale throughout the project rather than in one big test at the end.
• Iterative design, based on user test results, is vital for success.
• User tests are a powerful tool for getting buy-in from all team members, including management, especially if they view at least some of the tests live.
• Prevention in the earliest phases of design is much more effective than any usability testing after the fact.
• User tests can be conducted very cheaply.

Humor was woven into almost all of the lectures. “Our job is just funny,” said Hagan Rivers, who gave a full-day class on Deconstructing Web Applications. Humor may be a means of survival for usability experts, who must juggle the often widely varying goals of developers, designers, executives, and users. Ms. Rivers was the first, and for a long time the only, interface designer for the Netscape Web browser, and is currently a leader in Web application design and usability.

In one of his several presentations, usability guru Jared Spool, the mastermind behind the conference, described a classic usability success story. An online office equipment discount store called him because 70% of users were canceling purchases when they reached the credit card input page. The company spent $100,000 implementing encryption security, incorrectly believing this to be the cause of the problem. One user test, as well as subsequent tests, showed that in fact, users just didn’t want to submit their credit cards before they knew how much shipping would cost. The company moved the shipping page to appear before the credit card page, and revenues rapidly shot up.

One of the hot topics at the conference was Ajax, a new tool for transferring data between the server and client on-the-fly, eliminating the need to reload pages every time a link is clicked or data submitted. The coming year should see a rapid implementation of Ajax, in both dramatic and subtle ways. Currently, Google uses Ajax in its map application (maps.google.com). Unlike other online maps, at least until now, Google’s allows you to glide smoothly to new views while the rest of the page remains static. Ajax is one of the components of the up-and-coming Web 2.0, a concept that involves developers combining unrelated Web engines to create new applications. (The most-cited example is www.housingmaps.com, in which Silicon Valley engineer Paul Rademacher combined Google’s map with Craig’s List real estate listings to create an application for people trying to buy or rent real estate.)

I’ve also gotten a ton of emails. Just a few I’ve gotten:

Brandon:

Just wanted to drop a quick note to say thank you for putting on such a great event. I brought back many valuable ideas to my company.

Marjorie:

Thanks for the great conference. It was my first UI gathering and I was very impressed. Great sessions, good food, really friendly crowd, informative.

Daniel:

Thank you for a well organised, informative and energetic conference.

James:

I really enjoyed UIE 10. I would recommend this conference to others.

Robert:

Amazing conference. I learned a lot and really enjoyed it. Now to put it to work.

Mike Madaio blogged about the conference, as did Matthew Oliphant and our own Josh Porter (here and here). [I did that just because Jakob wouldn't like it. ]

What did you think of the conference? Post a comment and let us know!

If you attended, you can expect the last little bits to come your way in the next day or so. We have some presentations to send out and we’re tying up loose ends (such as awarding the $100 Amazon gift certificate from the conference evaluation drawing).

If you didn’t attend, stay tuned for a quick wrap-up of some of the emerging issues and where you can find more information about what happened.