Pleasure and Pain

Improving the human experience one day at a time

Pleasure and Pain: photos by Whitney G. Hess

An Event Apart Boston was wicked good

June 25th, 2009 · 5 Comments · User Experience

I had the immense pleasure of presenting at An Event Apart in Boston on Monday. My talk titled DIY UX: Give Your Users an Upgrade (without calling in a pro) got a lot of great responses.

Here are just a few:

And I really loved this one:

It’s so amazing when you can have an impact on people’s thinking, and as a result of your influence they go back to work approaching things in a different way or with a renewed sense of purpose. I was trying to light a fire under people to take responsibility for the user experience of their products and services no matter what their official title, and I hope that’s the effect I had.

Not everyone loved the talk, and that’s okay. Some thought it was too focused on the success stories and wanted to hear more extrapolated how-tos or step-by-step instructions. I can definitely understand why, and I’ll do my best to better incorporate that the next time I give the presentation.

I want to thank Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer, and the whole An Event Apart team, for inviting me to present and allowing me to be part of such a wonderful event. It was truly one of the most terrifying and satisfying moments in my career.

Endless thanks to Jared Spool and Orian Marx who guided me throughout all the preparation.

And lastly, to Danny Wen and Shawn Liu, Roz Duffy and Matthew Marco who generously offered their stories and their time, and provided inspiration to follow in their footsteps.

There were several other people whom I interviewed for the presentation, but unfortunately did not have enough time to include their stories. I will be posting more about them here on the blog, so stay tuned.

Though I don’t know how helpful my presentation will be without the voiceover, a lot of people have asked for it so now it’s posted on SlideShare. As soon as I can record a podcast, I’ll sync it to the slides. Enjoy!

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