On Blogging Australia

Well, it’s been announced - the first ever UXAustralia Conference. I’m proud to be one of the organisers. The inaugural conference is on 26-28 August 2009 in Canberra, Australia - my home town

What is UX? Basically, it’s a contraction of User eXperience - and it takes in interaction/interface design and usability. More than that, it is about the total user experience - how we use computers (and other tools) to complete tasks, whatever those tasks are.

I’ve been in UX and IA (Information Architecture) for a long time now - well over a decade if you count my first brush with it in a professional situation. It is one of my passions, and this conference gives me an excuse to work with some very talented people (my partner Donna Spencer, and our friends Steve and Danielle Baty) and do some cool stuff.

What does this have to do with bloggers and blogging? In its purest sense, blogging is about communication. I have something to say, so I write it, and if you think that you might like it, you read it. For effective communication to take place, two things need to happen: you need to find the stuff you need, and you need to be able to utilise it - find the stuff, use the stuff. Without this, effective communication cannot take place. Appropriate user experience techniques can help you to:

• choose (and design) templates that support effective information seeking task completion (i.e. help people find the stuff) and presentation (help the template not get in the way of real people actually reading the post)
• evaluate blog platforms for things that get in the way of the most basic “find the stuff, use the stuff” tasks
• give a good practical illustration of some fundamental principles of cognitive psychology - how people make decisions and why your concept of “it works for me” may not be universal

Make no mistake, UXAustralia is not a conference specifically for bloggers - it is more that professional/business bloggers can benefit in a direct way from understanding UX principles and techniques, and every blogger can benefit from knowing a bit more about how people find and use information.

So… onwards and upwards to August 2009 in Canberra