Rich Spinabella

By Attending the UI Conference, Sitewire's Rich Spinabella Reduced His Team's Development Time

Rich Spinabella, Principal User Experience Engineer
Sitewire, an interactive advertising agency
Attended UI10, UI11, and UI12

What do you do at Sitewire?
I focus on the user experience, particularly in the area of conversion. I help define requirements with clients, develop the personas for the project, and design the site and page layouts.  Throughout the client engagement, I work with creative designers and developers to ensure we stay true to the desired user experience.  I'm also involved with QA and user testing on the tail end. 

What key UI Conference learnings have you incorporated back in your office?
At the three UI Conferences I've attended, I took back great ideas and concepts that I've shared with my colleagues. For example, after attending Luke Wroblewski's seminar, I worked the content into a training series for the development of staff. By sharing this information with other staff members, I freed up at least 20-30 programming hours and dramatically reduced the cycle time on projects.

Did you experience any other highlights from the conference?
I find the UI Conference is the best gathering of industry experts and peers.  The networking opportunities are excellent and it's been the best place to hear from my peers and experts on new techniques, ideas and tools.  Every year, I renew acquaintances from previous years and I find that very rewarding.  Because of this conference, I also learned about other exciting tools that have helped me personally, including the iPhone and Mac Book iMac.

I also like the combination of full-day seminars and 90-minute sessions throughout the conference.  The full-day seminars really allowed me to dive deep into the content and gave me concrete tools to take back to the office. I also enjoyed the 90-minute sessions because it allowed me to hear new and different speakers.

Who do you think would benefit from attending?
This conference is beneficial for both people new to the industry and for those with extensive experience. I have newer folks from my company attending and I’ve recommended it to people from other companies.  If you are involved with user testing or user experience, it’s a must. Even development folks can profit from this conference.