Every week on The UX Blog Podcast, Nicholas Tenhue interviews user experience professionals about current trends, hot topics, and their careers. Subscribe on your favorite podcast player!
Donna Spencer, Conference Organizer of UX Australia, has worked with a wide range of client types, including government, telecommunications, insurance, retail, not-for-profit, and higher education. She's worked in UX for over 18 years and has written books on information architecture, card sorting, and writing for the web. She regularly teaches workshops, mentors startups, writes articles for online magazines, and is a technical editor for Smashing Magazine.
As a conference designer, Donna co-organizes and runs UX Australia, a successful user experience conference that started in 2009. Good conferences are very carefully designed. Donna selects topics for presentations, combines them into a coherent flow, seamlessly integrates ways for people to interact and learn from each other, and figures out how to make them work in physical space. Over the last five years, the conference has grown from strength to strength and now consists of two single-day and two multi-day conferences every year.
In this episode, we hear Donna talk about:
- The art and science of designing a conference
- 2016 conference attendees
- selecting topics for presentations
- combining presentations into a coherent flow
- how to design the flow of people and their interactions between conference talks
- the physical space and layout of conferences
- the importance of social events from a conference design point of view
This year UX Australia will be held 23-26 August in Melbourne. For more details on UX Australia, you can visit the conference website at uxaustralia.com.au
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Conference Images
more images are available at uxaustralia.smugmug.com
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