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An Event Apart Boston was wicked good

June 25, 2009 by 4 Comments

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!

DIY UX: Give Your Users an Upgrade (without calling in a pro)
View more presentations from Whitney Hess.

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About

Whitney Hess is a coach and writer helping product teams and senior leaders make better decisions through the principles of user experience. She believes empathy builds empires.

Follow @whitneyhess

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  • jasonrobb

    Oh my, those are great slides! Can't wait to thoroughly flip through them and look up those books. I love how you interject the books through the whole thing, that's great.

    Thanks for posting the slides, even without the audio they're quite helpful. I'll say, most people say that slides should not contain bullets, but for the people who missed a slide (or the whole thing like me) they're invaluable for sharing the gist of the message.

    Well done! Hope to see you in Boston again next year! Jeffrey and Eric better invite you back. They need you, and could use more UX people at AEA.

  • http://www.orianmarx.com/ Orian Marx

    I agree with jasonrobb that the book interjections are great… I'm looking forward to picking them up.

  • http://twitter.com/jasonjmp jasonjmp

    Thanks for sharing Whitney, would love to hear the audio. We have been big fans of Harvest for over 2 years now, and being a UX shop ourselves, we are fascinated by the the behind the scenes look.

  • Pingback: Pleasure and Pain » See you at An Event Apart Chicago