Congrats to UXnet!

UXnet, the non-profit network that "formed to make connections between people, resources and organizations that represent user experience" announced earlier this month that they incorporated, i.e. became more formally organized.

Congratulations with this bold step are in order. I am glad to see people like Keith Instone, David Malouf, Whitney Quesenbery and Richard Anderson, lont-time contributors to the field, on UXnet's first Board of Directors.

I am confident that they'll continue to promote co-operation in our field: I feel represented.

Wanted: Experience Designer for Info.nl

Last week, at The Web and Beyond we let the word out for the first time by placing an advertisement on the conference job board, but now that it is mentioned on our website, it is formal:

Info.nl is looking for an Experience Designer (in Dutch).
Since the vast majority of our clients and almost all of our websites are Dutch, being fluent in that language is a prerequisite, so I am not going to translate the text.

I am glad to see our team needs expansion; it is a recognition of the fact that our skills are becoming more important to clients in our market.

If you are an experience designer with some years of experience under your belt and are willing to work on the design of interactive, online applications for an established full-service web agency in Amsterdam, or know of someone eligable, let me know.

Next up: EURO IA

It's not even a week after the previous conference or the next one pops up: the deadline for submissions to the EURO IA conference is later this week.

This year's theme is "Building Our Practice", a nice follow-on from last year's "Building Our Community". With this year's international IA Summit in Vancouver being the success it was (almost 600 IAs turned up), and the unexpected high number of attendees of the Italian IA Summit (300 registered Italian IAs), I am sure this pan-European IA conference will attract a large audience too. Of course it helps to have Peter Morville keynote the event. He is one of the authors of the IA Bible, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, as well as Ambient Findability, the latest succesful IA book.

I intend to submit a panel proposal focussing on IA methods and deliverables and their place in development methodologies. I have one fellow Dutch IA in mind as a panellist, plus one or two international ones, but am open to suggestions for other knowledgeable contributors.

Help me create a good proposal, and I'll buy you a Berliner beer! (No, that is not me in the picture and yes, I know that Warsteiner is not a Berliner beer. But you get the picture, right? Now think of a panellist, quick!)

The Web and Beyond very successful

As the program-co-chair I am happy to report that this year's SIGCHI.NL conference The Web and Beyond was very successful!

We had over 600 registrants (more than UPA! and more than the IA Summit!), most of them showed up, and we had people register at the door. When the conference was supposed to start, we still had people waiting in line outside the Tuschinski Theatre, so we started a little late.

Jared Spool and Jesse James Garrett each gave excellent keynote speaches and after lunch we had a wonderful set of parallel sessions.

In the one I moderated, I tried to give as much room as possible to the two participants. Bill Scott, curator of the recently launched Yahoo! Design Pattern Library showed the groupings behind their collection. Martijn van Welie, long-term writer of Web Design Patterns focussed on reasons why what Yahoo! is doing isn't really new, but worthwile still. In the discussion it became clear that both pattern collectors would like to see more co-operation, and that both encourage other designers to document their work in the same fashion.

The attendees came back together for the closing keynote by Steven Pemberton who claimed that Web2.0 is the culmination of work that was prepared by W3C members for years and years.

In the closing panel, our guest futurologist Justien Marseille from The Future Institute was somewhat overpowered by the quick and witty replies by both Jared and Steven, but the overall feeling was one of anticipation: future online applications will have better user experiences if we follow the speakers' recommendations.

I thank all presenters, all SIGCHI.NL volunteers, but especially my fellow organizers: Boyd de Groot (my program co-chair), Tjeerd de Boer (chairman of the committee), Vera Sjardijn (location manager and more), Corné Verbruggen and René Vendrig (on-site registration), Rob Willems (volunteers), Diurre Okma (side events), Bram Donkers (sponsors), Elma Wolschrijn (PR), Arjen Liefting, Kars Alfrink and Jeroen de Bruin (Website), Yohan Creemers (online registration), Martijn Klompenhouwer (SIGCHI.NL website), and others. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it!

Pictures will be posted on Flickr, using the tag "twab2006".