UX Brighton 2012: What's a developer doing at a UX conference anyway?

Yesterday I had the very great pleasure to spend my day at the Corn Exchange, Brighton as an attendee of UX Brighton 2012. As a developer, this felt like it was a bit of a stretch to explain to Argyll why they were giving me the day to go (Thanks!) but I found it a really interesting and thought inducing day. I believe that more developers should go to these kind of days - days which aren’t about the technology side specifically, but cover the human factors, and give an opportunity to think about the touch-points with humans of the systems we design, whether those are ourselves (I’m thinking of error logs/error emails/self-notifying systems specifically), people internal to the business, or those consuming our systems.

As usual, my mind map notes are included below. Also as usual, any errors are probably mine and not the speakers:

Alex Wright - The Web That Wasn’t: Forgotten Forebears of the Internet

Mark Backler - Designing for Natural User Interfaces

Guy Smith-Ferrier - Mind Control Your Computer

Ben Bashford - All is Full of Love

Sriram Subramanian - Beyond Multitouch: Ultrahaptics & Multi-view Displays

Jim Kalbach - Human Factors in Innovation: Designing for Adoption

Mike Kuniavsky - How designers will reinvent manufacturing

Karl Fast - Deep Interaction

An excellent day with a just-right number of attendees - enough for interesting conversations, not so many to be overwhelming, some familiar faces who I always enjoy catching up with and with engaging speakers (I didn’t check twitter once all day!). My reading list has increased - through books and articles mentioned by the speakers - which is always, for me, the sign of a worthwhile day. Definitely one to try and attend again next year.