In early January I wrote an article for Mashable titled “10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design” in which I asked 20 of the most prominent leaders in the user experience community what they think is the biggest misunderstanding about what we do. I was blown away by the response to the article — the tweets, the retweets, the comments and blog posts (most of them in enthusiastic agreement).
When Jason Head asked me to speak at Pittsburgh Web Design Day, I thought it would be a great opportunity to delve deeper into the topic in presentation form (and to come hang in Pittsburgh — my second home).
Web Design Day was a total success. It was such a pleasure seeing the Pittsburgh tech and design community out in full force. The speaker lineup was wonderful, diverse and, best of all, completely fresh (as in, I’d never seen any of these folks speak before): Geoff Barnes, Jason Robb, Samantha Warren, Josh Sager, Chris Cashdollar, Val Head, and little ol’ me! It was a pleasure to meet them all and see (half) of them speak (I showed up late because my flight only got in that morning).
Jason and Val did an amazing job organizing the event. Presentations ran on time (we even ended early), there was a variety of healthy food options available for picking all day long, and the A/V system worked! (can you believe it?!). The venue, Left Field Meeting Space, is a unique, multipurpose, open, bright, comfortable, non-hotel-like space that immediately set you up for a good time. I was really impressed by the diversity of the 90+ people in the audience, and even saw a couple familiar faces from CMU.
My presentation version of “10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design” is up on SlideShare.
…and is now being featured on the homepage!
I hope it was a valuable presentation that the audience enjoyed and was inspired by, and particularly hope that it offered considerably more than just the article itself. I look forward to hearing feedback from Web Design Day attendees in the coming days.
Huge thanks to Jason and Val for giving me the chance to join the Pittsburgh community. It was a blast!
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Hey Whitney, I was wondering where I could find one of the images you used in the presentation. The one that's a user experience board game.
Thanks
It's a great presentation.