On Monday, I had the honor and privilege of presenting a new talk at An Event Apart Boston 2011, titled Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX. This is my third year speaking at AEA and it never gets less exhilarating — and terrifying!

My presentation description:

The visual principles of harmony, unity, contrast, emphasis, variety, balance, proportion, pattern and direction (and others) are widely recognized and practiced, even when they aren’t formally articulated. But creating a good design doesn’t automatically mean creating a good experience.

In order for us to cultivate positive experiences for our users, we need to establish a set of guiding principles for experience design. Guiding principles are the broad philosophy or fundamental beliefs that steer an organization, team or individual’s decision making, irrespective of the project goals, constraints, or resources.

Whitney will share a universally-applicable set of experience design principles that we should all strive to follow, and will explore how you can create and use your own guiding principles to take your site or product to the next level.

Giving a new presentation for the first time is always nerve-wracking, and it’s particularly challenging when you have so much admiration for the conference organizers, fellow speakers and caliber of people in the audience. An Event Apart is a fantastic conference and a very special group of people. I still find it hard to believe I’m a part of it.

Huge thanks goes out to Jeremy Keith and Luke Wroblewski for their fantastic summaries of my talk, as well as to Virginia DeBolt who covered it over at BlogHer.

Last but certainly not least, thank you to the 30+ folks who attended my dry run of the presentation last Wednesday at New Work City, for all of their incredibly valuable feedback on how to make it a better, more impactful talk. And to Scott Reynolds and Adam Connor for their tireless attention to detail.

I got some great feedback on my presentation via Twitter that I’ll capture here for posterity:

I’ll be giving this talk again at several more conferences this year. Check my Speaking Engagements page for the latest.

• “Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX” featured on Core77
• I’ll be speaking at An Event Apart 2009
• My DIY UX talk is featured in InformationWeek
• See you at An Event Apart Chicago
• 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design — the presentation

I have the distinct pleasure of speaking at the first ever Interlink Conference in Vancouver, Canada on June 2-4, along with a stellar lineup of people I can’t even believe I’m included with: Samantha Warren, Steve Fisher, Gavin Elliott, Jonathan Snook, Brian Hoff, Ethan Dunham, Frank Chimero, Patrick Lauke, Meagan Fisher, Simon Collison, Sarah Parmenter, Dan Rubin and Elliot Jay Stocks.

Interlink is organized by Shawn Johnston, a talented web designer based on Vancouver who wanted to shine a light on the community in Canada. This smaller, boutique-like conference will feature two days of workshops flanking a single-track day of sessions. Evening events include a dodgeball tournament, movie night, Canadian brew pub, and a 3-hour interactive discussion on The Web Font Revolution.

I’ve been incredibly impressed with Shawn’s passion and attention to detail, especially considering this is his first event. It already feels different than a lot of the other conferences I attend, and I’m eager to see what happens.

Register for Interlink and use the promo code “SPEAKER” in order to get $100 off your ticket. I hope to see you there!

• Where is Whitney in 2011?
• Photo of the day: Warning: Movie longer than flight
• My Interaction 09 recap on Boxes and Arrows
• Get a 15% discount to DelveUI in NYC
• Hanging out at IxDA’s Interaction09

Money is a topic that most people dance around because they don’t want to be rude, or tacky, or misunderstood. But if we avoid talking about it, we avoid learning a very essential part of our business and our industry. In order to thrive as a professional community, we need to have a strong handle on our financials, and a comfort discussing them openly with clients and colleagues alike.

I’ve advocated this for years, and tend to be the person my friends come to when they want straight talk about money. So imagine my excitement when Marc Hemeon asked me to join him at this year’s SXSW Interactive to help facilitate a Core Conversation that he called “Breaking Taboos: Pros Get Real About Money Matters.” I didn’t even have to think twice before I said Yes.

Our goal is to get people talking about money, and Marc and I are the people to do it. I’m coming at it from the independent consulting angle, regularly needing to speak frankly with prospective clients about budgets and with existing clients about getting paid. Meanwhile, Marc is at a major milestone in his career and will be talking about money from the perspective of a startup founder. Formerly the Design and UX Lead at Digg, Marc was until recently the Director of UX at Oakley while on the side he co-founded fflick, the Twitter-based movie review site. In January, he and his co-founders sold fflick to Google, and now he’s a designer at YouTube as part of the acquisition deal.

Some of the questions we hope to discuss are:

For Indies

• How do I know how much to charge?
• When do I ask to get paid?
• Do I need a contract?
• What should I do if I don’t get paid?
• Do I need to incorporate?
• Do I need an accountant?
• Do I need to separate my business and personal finances?
• How do I pay myself?
• What are the tax deductions I should know about?
• How should I be keeping track of my expenses?

For Founders

• How do I share ownership with co-founders?
• How do I decide how much equity I deserve?
• How do we determine how much we should get paid?
• How do we determine how much money we need to raise?
• What form of company should we incorporate as?
• What should we be willing to spend money on and what shouldn’t we?
• How do we pay personal and business taxes?
• How should we determine what our company is worth?
• How do we know when it’s time to sell?
• How can we negotiate for the best sale price and conditions?

The description, time and location details are below. I really hope to see many of you there — and please don’t sit quietly. The more people who participate, the more we’ll all learn from each other.

Breaking Taboos: Pros Get Real About Money Matters

Industry All-Stars tackle the subject that we’re all most curious about but causes us the most discomfort: what, when, and how to charge for our work. Learn their inside tips on how to charge your clients, when trading work for equity makes sense, and how to avoid common client pitfalls. Stop cheating yourself and learn that you deserve to be paid in full for doing work you’re passionate about. Our work has the power to make enormous amounts of money for our clients. Let’s take a good hard look at the value we provide and how to ask for and receive value in return.

Negotiating your rate for a project is the difference between being a starving artist or successful freelancer or studio. Creatives fall prey to lowball offers, promises of future work, and other forms of wage penalties in fear of losing a potential client. Learn how the pros have created successful freelance businesses and startups by not compromising their rates and standards. Understand how they attract the big name clients and avoid the bad clients. We’ll also explore potential benefits and risks of working for stock.

Lawyers, doctors, accountants and other professionals typically don’t experience angst, guilt, or wishy-washy boundaries when stating their rates and neither should we. We see standard billing rates across many industries. We’ll take a look at the role a standard billing rate would have in the creative services industry and how such a standard would be upheld and implemented.

Breaking Taboos: Pros Get Real About Money Matters
Friday, March 11, 2011
5-6pm
Marriott Courtyard Austin Downtown/Convention Center
Rio Grande A

• Where is Whitney in 2011?
• Client Matters: Needs + Resources + Location + Schedule + Budget = Scope
• I Popped My Cherry at BarCamp Philly
• What are you worth?
• Who is Gradon Tripp’s mentor?

I thought I did a lot of traveling last year, but what I’ve got planned for 2011 already blows 2010 out of the water.

There are 10 cities on the itinerary so far, and I’m sure there will be more to come. It’s exhausting when I stop to think about it, but then I remember just how fortunate I am to get to do it all!

Gallivanting around so many different cities, experiencing all the local foods and brews, spending time with old friends and meeting new ones. It’s a great mix of work and play — but all pleasure.

I already went to Boulder in early February for IxDA’s Interaction ’11, and last week I was in San Francisco for a client workshop followed by 500 Startups’ first ever Inbox Love.

So where will I be headed next?

Austin, TX

March 10-16
SXSW Interactive
Core conversation with Marc Hemeon — Breaking Taboos: Pros Get Real About Money Matters

Los Angeles, CA

March 24-28
Visiting family and relaxing

San Diego, CA

March 28-30
Visiting friends and relaxing

Denver, CO

March 30-April 3
IA Summit 2011
Learning and UXing

Portland, OR

April 3-6
My college roomie @supergreek is in the Portland Opera

Boston, MA

May 1-4
An Event Apart – Boston
Speaking

Vancouver, Canada

May 31-June 5
Interlink Conference
Speaking

Atlanta, GA

June 22-24
Atlanta Web Design Group
Speaking

Tel Aviv, Israel

September 2-9
UX Israel Live
Speaking

Washington, DC

October 23-26
An Event Apart – DC
Speaking

That’s all I got for now! As always, my speaking engagements page is kept up-to-date, or you can follow my adventures on Dopplr.

If you live in any of these cities or are going to be at these events, I’d love to grab a local beer with you when I’m in town. Just make sure to let me know in the comments or on Twitter @whitneyhess.

Hope to meet you when I’m in town!

• I’m speaking at Interlink Conference 2011 in Vancouver, and you should come
• What I Did on My Summer Vacation
• Around the World in 80 Days
• See you at An Event Apart Chicago
• I’ll be speaking at An Event Apart 2009

Last weekend I had a Skype catch-up session with my good friend Dan Szuc. Dan runs the usability consultancy Apogee HK, and his team is producing the first ever UX Hong Kong on February 18, 2011.

Apogee HK started at the end of 1999, and by 2003 Dan realized that there was a need for a user-centered design event in China — which as we all know is experiencing a period of rapid growth. UPA China was founded in 2004, with Dan as its president, and that same year they organized the User Friendly conference in Beijing.

By 2007-2008, the term “user experience” started circulating throughout the practitioners in China, and Dan and his team started pondering an event for attendees to dig deeper into these topics. After having attended UX London, UX Australia, and UX Lisbon, Apogee HK decided to produce UX Hong Kong on their home turf.

The inaugural UX HK will take place just after the Chinese New Year at the Innocentre, part of Hong Kong’s Science & Technology Parks. They offer incubation for startups (Philips Design is located there), and have been the venue of Apogee’s UX workshops for last 2 years.

UX Hong Kong is association-independent and will feature 5 speakers with a focus on topics relevant to the local market: experience strategy by Steve Baty and Janna DeVylder; design research with Steve Portigal; mobile with Rachel Hinman; and the essential UX toolkit with Gerry Gaffney.

Each session will run for 30 minutes followed by roundtable discussions. The second half of the day is a deep dive into one of the morning topics, chosen by attendees when they register. A local jazz band will be playing in the morning and during meals.

On the second (optional) day, attendees get the chance to explore Hong Kong together, eating traditional dim sum (yum!), taking a ferry to the outlying islands, and walking, relaxing, chatting, and socializing with the speakers.

So far, people have registered to attend from Japan, Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, UK, Australia, and Russia. There are a target of 100 attendees, with the belief that “small is beautiful” and a goal to create an intimate, fun, non-conference-like setting.

I wanted to tell you all about this incredible opportunity to be a part of what will no doubt be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I can’t make it there due to poor timing, but I hope one of you can — and will let me live vicariously through you.

Please be sure to share this with anyone you know who lives near Hong Kong and might have an interest in attending!

• I’m Speaking at Pittsburgh Web Design Day
• My Rejected Submission to Interaction11: What Lessons Can We Learn From Soap Operas For Designing Experiences
• My Creating a Culture of UX workshop at UX London
• Essentials to Designing a Conference
• I’ll be speaking at An Event Apart 2009

I’ll be giving my DIY UX talk at Web 2.0 Expo NY tomorrow morning (session page), and later will be leading a conversation session on The Value of UX for Startups.

If you see me in the halls of the Sheridan today, tomorrow or Thursday, be sure to say hi. I always love meeting new people.

Enjoy the conference!

• Find me at Web 2.0 Expo NY this week
• I’m Speaking at Pittsburgh Web Design Day
• Hanging out at IxDA’s Interaction09
• Where is Whitney in 2011?
• Web 2.0 Expo NY: Lane Becker’s “Customer Service is the New Marketing”

Rejection emails from IxDA’s Interaction11 conference have begun to circulate this morning.

There were 300 submissions for the lightning sessions and only 30 slots, and no doubt rejecting 90% of the speakers was an extremely tough task. I don’t take it personally at all that I was included among them.

Many people in the industry whom I consider to be my heroes were also turned away; I hope they submit their ideas to other conferences so that I can get the chance to see them! Given the high caliber of submissions to Interaction11, I’m even more excited to attend the conference to see the sessions that were selected — they must be extraordinary.

I wanted to share my submission with you to get your feedback on how to improve upon it. Do you think this is a good idea for a session and something you would want to see? Could I have done a better job with the description or title?

I’d like to iterate on it and submit it to another upcoming conference. I think it would be a lot of fun, and it’s something I really want to spend the time researching and thinking about.

What Lessons Can We Learn From Soap Operas For Designing Experiences

Soap operas have been in existence for more than 80 years, have told the world’s longest stories, and capture an intensely loyal fan base of millions. What lessons can we learn from their format and structure to captivate and transport our own users? How can we make use what theorist Steve Neale refers to as their “chance meetings, coincidences, missed meetings, sudden conversions, last-minute rescues and revelations, and deus ex machina endings,” as mechanisms to engage people in the interactive space? What design patterns can we apply to our own work?

In this talk, I will share the findings of my research into the history of soap operas and their relationship to interaction design. I hope to spark attendees’ interest in the genre as a source of inspiration for the experiences they create, and a deeper understanding of the emotional touchpoints of those experiences.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments! Thanks so much in advance for helping me make this better.

• My Interaction 09 recap on Boxes and Arrows
• Gel conference videos now online
• Hanging out at IxDA’s Interaction09
• Find me at Web 2.0 Expo NY this week
• Conference Twittering

I had the distinct pleasure of presenting at An Event Apart 2009 in Boston and Chicago (read about my experience), so imagine my delight when Jeffrey and Eric asked me to reprise my talk this year in Minneapolis and San Diego!

AEA attendees are a tough crowd — they’re already smart, successful and very well-informed on the latest and greatest the web has to offer — so teaching them something new and getting them to think about something they haven’t before certainly isn’t an easy task. To say I was scared, despite having done it twice before, would be the understatement of the century. I was terrified. In fact, I was shaking when I woke up, and nauseous up until the moment I hit the stage.

Giving the same talk two years in a row can be particularly troubling because everyone in the audience might have already seen it the year before! Or at least that’s what I told myself. Everyone already knows this stuff. Everyone is smarter than me. Everyone is gonna think I’m ugly. Yes, these are the things I kept telling myself.

Much to my surprise (again), the talk was a hit. I’d made a few tweaks since the last time I gave it, so the updated slides are posted below, along with tweets from the audience.

Thank you so much to everyone who cared enough to listen, who took the time to come up to me afterwards and offer their thanks. If I can encourage just one person to start bringing their users into the design process, then I feel like I’ve done my job.

If you were in the audience and enjoyed the presentation, please tell me about it in the comments. And if you didn’t enjoy it, I definitely want to hear from you as well. I practice what I preach, and continuous improvement is very much a part of my life. So help me!

Great notes on DIY UX

From Luke W
From Marc Drummond
From RedMonkey
From Recursive Awesome
Twitter stream from A Feed Apart

Slides

Tweets

Photos

Amazing pics from John Morrison, David Rutledge and others.

• An Event Apart Boston was wicked good
• What REALLY happened during the IA Summit (#IAS09)
• Twitter talk at the IxDA NYC Recap of Interaction 09
• DIY UX at An Event Apart Chicago 2009
• Evaluations of my STC Summit 2010 talks

A few months ago I wrote about my experience presenting at STC Summit in Dallas — my first time speaking at an event outside of UX and web design.

Yesterday I received the evaluations of my two talks — 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design and Evangelizing Yourself — and I’m quite pleased with the results. Sharing them with you is my way of staying honest and holding myself accountable to make the presentations even better.

The comments are far more important to me than the scores, since they help me tweak the content and style for future gigs. My goal is to continually improve the clarity and effectiveness of my presentations to ensure I’m doing my best to help people learn, and scores alone just don’t give me enough information to go on.

Of course I would have liked to have received feedback from more of the attendees, but the way STC Summit conducts these surveys doesn’t really encourage it — evals are filled out at computer stations in the hallway, instead of on paper at the end of each session.

So if you attended either of these sessions at STC Summit and didn’t complete an evaluation, please feel free to post your feedback in the comments!

All feedback is worthwhile and I’m thrilled to have gotten such glowing reviews overall.

Just for a point of reference, the average score for all conference speakers who were evaluated:

Content: 3.96/5.00
Delivery: 3.94/5.00

10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

According to room monitor counts, approximately 75 people attended your session. You received 23 evaluations and your scores are summarized below.

Content: 4.30/5.00
Delivery: 4.39/5.00

• Easy to follow, simplified explanations. Topic is well situated in the wider context.
• I really enjoyed this session. I learned a few things… and learned a couple of ways to deal with some misconceptions and objections
• Whitney did a great job and I really like her strong advocacy for making UX part of the process, not just a checkbox item on the project plan.
• I may have picked the wrong session. It seemed too focused on a small part of what our users run into – installation. Our product is not installed via a disc. We install it for our customers. But our product covers such a large part of their every day work, I wanted tips to help make it easier for them to do thier jobs.
• Concise and informative.
• Whitney rocks in spite of the rude people in the audience griping about her age.
• Great information about an area that many technical communicators are moving toward. It’s great to see some younger, non-tech comm presenters bringing in new ideas. Great job, Whitney!
• Ms Hess is an outstanding speaker and well-versed on the topic. The presentation seemed a bit “automatic,” but the Q&A session was fluid and that’s where she really shone. She handled the audience deftly, even the participants who were outright rude and questioned why she was there. She graciously and patiently answered questions that were clearly answered in her presentation, which showed much more maturity than other, older member presenters have shown. An absolute delight, and I’m thrilled STC invited her.
• I liked her use of references to books and quotes by experts in the field. The amount of information communicated from the one hour talk has grown exponentially.
• Brief, but useful. The Q&A was a good opportunity to elaborate on some of the themes and ideas presented previously.
• A speaker who delivers personal insight very well, making the whole thing interesting.
• Good UX, practicing what she preaches. I learnt new stuff, got links to look at, and enjoyed what I heard.
• Slides were very hard to read – white and red on black is not good for slides in a large room.
• presentation was short, but the speaker left time for some good Q&A afterward.
• A breath of fresh air for the Summit!
• I really like her speaking and presentation style. But it felt like she didn’t really understand or hasn’t really had much contact with technical writers. It seemed like there was a disconnect somewhere that led to a weird vibe in the room. I really hope she presents at future conferences.
• Whitney is a very articulate speaker and comes across as at ease on the podium. The session content was exactly as described, and I learned a lot. Thank you!
• Great session! Gave me lots of food for thought as well as thinking of user experience in other ways than just software.
• I learned a lot. This session was a very good value, and was presented well.

Evangelizing Yourself

According to room monitor counts, approximately 64 people attended your session. You received 17 evaluations and your scores are summarized below.

Content: 4.59/5.00
Delivery: 4.41/5.00

• Super presenter! By far, the best speaker, IMO.
• Whitney personally made an impact on me and hit home on many of her “issues” regarding confidence, speaking and overall desire to improve herself. She spoke honestly, candidly and was sincere and down to earth.
• She knew her material and knew herself and was confident in her delivery contrary to how she may have felt ;-)
• A true inspiration and look forward to watching seeing and hearing her speak in the future.
• Intriguing approach. Thank you for a thought-provoking session.
• I’m not sure the message was any different than what would have been offered by anybody in any other profession, but it certainly resonated with the audience.
• loved her presentation. at the end there was an opportunity for a group question and answer session, but she opted to do the Q&A on a personal one-on-one basis, which i think was a mistake. she should have addressed questions as a group. overall, whitney has an engaging voice with a perspective that many people at the summit definitely needed to hear. i loved that she was at the conference.
• Excellent session!
• This is clearly Whitney’s topic of passion – when a speaker can do a presentation without looking at her notebook or the screen and knows exactly when to click Next – and it’s still custom to the audience – wow. And she wasn’t on autopilot – this was an emotional, humorous, honest presentation, and everyone in that room left changed for the better. Maybe not immediately, but at some point, the lessons will begin to influence them.
• Even though I already knew a lot of this, it was a great reminder. Each point was right on! I didn’t find much to disagree with. Awesome job.
• Emphasised how give and take works in the world of ‘self-promotion’ and highlighted how important social media are going to be (already are) in this field.
• Entertaining and well-presented.
• Great presentation and content; LOTS of content very well and persuasively presented; good reminder that folks need to be ‘reminded’ of the obvious stuff!
• a great pep talk and shot in the arm! her personal story made the familiar lines have impact. enjoyable way to end the day.
• I found the content useful, and Whitney’s delivery was refreshing. How often do you hear the word “fuck” in a professional presentation? I was not offended, but I can see how some might have been.
• Ms. Hess and her info were quite impressive for someone so young. She is fortunate to have figured it out so early! I’m just beginning to struggle with similar issues/concepts and I’m more than twice her age. But her courage spoke to me directly and I hope some of it will help push me forward. Good job.
• She might want to work on her voice quality – it seemed a bit monotone and hoarse-sounding sometimes.

Thanks to everyone who evaluated my sessions, and to the fine folks at STC Summit for inviting me to join in all the fun.

• Rejected by EuroIA
• Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX
• Awesome Email of the Day: Evangelizing Myself
• I’ll be speaking at IA Summit 2009 in Memphis
• Web 2.0 Expo NY: “Content Matters” panel moderated by Liz Danzico

I attend a lot of conferences. Okay, more than a lot — an ungodly amount. Just check the Conferences tag on this blog.

Attending them is a ball, inspirational but tiring. Speaking at them is a privilege, stressful but rewarding. Organizing them…now that isn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy.

Why? Because it’s a thankless job, completely takes over your life for the better part of the year, and tests friendships, business relationships, and your sanity.

I have watched many great people go through it, and it ain’t pretty. Blood, sweat and tears isn’t just an idiom — or a band. It’s real, and it hurts.

• Russ Unger chaired the 2009 IDEA Conference (and is coming back for more in 2010)
• Alan Houser chaired the 2010 STC Summit
• Bill DeRouchey chaired IxDA’s Interaction 10
• And Jennifer Bohmbach chaired IA Summit 2010 (the inspiration for this post)

Note: I’d be remiss not to mention Jared Spool, who chairs two conferences each year via his company User Interface Engineering, Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer, who chair An Event Apart, and Brady Forrest and Jen Pahlka (and now Sarah Milstein) who chair Web 2.0 Expo. Amazing people, all of them. The major difference is that they each have a production team, and conduct these events as a part of their businesses. The people I’m referring to in this post are entirely volunteers who do this work on top of full-time jobs.

Jennifer published a blog post yesterday titled My Voice and the IA Summit. In it she discusses how she made decisions on the speakers, the keynotes, the theme. She briefly mentions the personal toll it took on her life. But what struck me most of all were these two lines:

Organizers are not seen as thought leaders but rather administrators. And in general administrators don’t have a voice because they are busy doing things behind the scenes.

The experience left her feeling silenced. And from watching other people go through this process, I know she isn’t alone in feeling this way. The phrase “behind the scenes” is accurately used to describe the organizers of an event because they are felt but not seen or heard. If they do their jobs well, they don’t exist to us (the viewers, the attendees, the participants) at all. And it can be a very emotionally jarring realization for someone who has sunk their entire life into making this thing a success.

If you’ve read this blog for any significant amount of time, you probably already know that I enjoy the glory. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I appreciate the attention for my hard work and extreme passion. I want to be a recognized leader. Chairing a conference does not give you that, and so it should be no surprise that I would never take on that responsibility. But I have a tremendous, unwavering respect and appreciation for the people who do, and it’s important to me to recognize them here.

These people are the unsung heroes of our industry. A lot of us like to talk; they act. They bring us together in the same place at the same time to learn from each other, to further our careers, to inspire us to do better work and live fuller lives. They feed us, they house us, they comfort us, they free us from making any decisions for three days beyond What awesome session should I go to right now? And yet we complain when the coffee is bitter, and the room is too cold, and the speaker had too many words on his slides. How often do we take the time to say, Holy shit you just completely transformed my career! If they hadn’t given us a mecca to travel to, we’d just be wasting away behind our computer screens doing the same old bullshit we always do — just like we’re doing right now.

So to the generous, tireless, self-effacing, methodical, scrupulous, fervent, true torchbearers of this community, I bow before you.

If you build it, I will come.

• Holy crap…I gave the closing plenary at IA Summit 2010
• My Interaction 09 recap on Boxes and Arrows
• Conference Twittering
• Evaluations of my STC Summit 2010 talks
• Reaching outside the UX tribe at STC’s Technical Communication Summit