Convince Your Boss: Usability Week 2009 Conference

Overview

San Francisco

New York

Sydney

Edinburgh

FAQ

Convince Your Boss

Exhibitors & Sponsors

Convince Your Boss

Attending this conference offers several key business benefits.

High ROI

Many case studies show that, on average, improving a website’s usability doubles key business metrics, such as conversion rate or lead generation. Improving an intranet's usability typically raises key performance indicators by around 90%. Spending a few thousand dollars, euros, or pounds to learn how to achieve these results is cheap indeed.

Most attendees register for 4 days of seminars. Spending 2% of the work year on usability training is nothing compared to the time your team can waste arguing design issues around the meeting room table. Better to make the decisions faster, based on real data and sound methodology.

Even attending all 6 days would be only 3% of the work year; attending a single, specialized seminar would be only 0.5%. Either is a tiny investment compared with the business benefits of better user experience.

Long-Lasting Job Skills

This conference focuses on practical skills with proven effectiveness across many projects. The enhanced work productivity you’ll achieve from learning these skills will be valuable for years, because human interface lessons typically endure.

Why? Because human behavior doesn't change nearly as fast as technology, which is one reason the ROI is so much greater from usability training than from lectures about the latest fad. The latest programming trick won’t matter next year, but the insights you learn at this conference will. So, you'll continue to reap returns from your investment across many future projects.

Facts, Not Opinion

Our courses are based on real studies of real people, showing which designs work in the real world, and which don't. We tell it like it is, and don't shy away from saying that a famous company has a failed website, if that's what the data shows.

In contrast, most industry conferences feature company representatives gushing about the greatness of their own projects. These claims are often unfounded, because they’re based purely on that person's opinion about his or her own work. And, in any case, company representatives are unlikely to report honestly about stupidities in their design or negative reactions from their customers.

If you want objective, third-party analysis, come here.

Motivating Experience

In many companies, being a user advocate can feel very lonely. When you attend this conference, you’ll be energized by the experience of networking with hundreds of kindred souls who care just as much about usability as you do.

You’ll leave with new ideas, practical to-do lists, evidence to help examine your designs in new ways, knowledge to create usable designs, information to convince your company's usability resisters, and examples to inspire the rest of your team.

Experienced Speakers

Our speakers have presented many times to audiences all over the world. They give good talks, or they wouldn't be invited back. But they aren’t worn-out, "professional speakers" who speak at every event in the field. Our presenters spend most of their time doing actual work, meaning that they have plenty of war stories to illustrate their topic.

The speakers are world-class experts with many, many years' experience from a wide range of projects that go far deeper than the current fashion. This brings a perspective you simply can't get from people who know only this week's fads.

In many cases, our speakers are actually the pioneers who invented the methods and conducted the research that everybody else simply reacts to. Why waste your time on hearsay from secondary speakers at less-prestigious conferences, when you can come here and get it straight from the original source—and ask your questions to the people who actually conducted the research?

High-Octane Knowledge Transfer

Our speakers know enough about their topic to fill up at least five times as many hours as they’re given. They’ve thus made the tough calls to prune their material to the essence.

Yes, you could surf the Web instead, but you could easily waste a week and not collect as many key insights as you’ll gain in a focused, one-day seminar. Reading random bloggers doesn't offer you anywhere the same learning effect as a planned progression of instructional activities that prioritizes the day according to each topic’s importance.

Experienced Audience

Our conference participants are amazing—hundreds of user experience professionals gathering in one place for a week to meet and share experiences. The halls buzz with discussions among people from all types of organizations, from small businesses to the world's biggest and most famous companies to local nonprofits and enormous government agencies. Regardless of their organization’s size, all attendees work on user experience and care passionately about design that works, rather than simply looks good. Discovering the lessons learned from countless other teams who have dealt with the problem you’re currently facing is one of the conference’s greatest benefits.

See also the list of companies and organizations represented at recent conferences and in-depth interviews with conference participants.

Vendor Neutral

We are not beholden to vendors. Yes, exhibitors pay to come and show products that we hope you’ll find interesting. But aside from a booth, we don't give preferential treatment to anybody.

At many conferences, the featured speakers are from the companies that paid the organizers the most money. Not here. After all, we need to preserve our ability to say that a technology sucks if that's what our user testing shows.

Inspiring Learning Environment

We’ve run usability conferences for industry professionals since 2000. Each year, we collect copious audience feedback about what was good and what needs improvement. Through iterative design, we’ve evolved the event to optimize networking opportunities and hands-on learning of practical material that you can take home and apply to your own project the next week, because that's what participants have told us that they want.