Speakers from this year’s UX Week conference provide career advice. I think my advice is clearly the best:
To be successful in today’s industry, UX professionals should have really killer paisley shirts. Some people will tell you that it’s more important to have good hair and straight teeth, but in my experience, a really good paisley shirt will really take you places.
I played truant from UX Week this morning to meet up with Mike for a coffee and a chat at Cafe Vega. We were turfed out when the bearded, baseball-capped, Draplinesque barista announced he had to shut the doors because he needed to “run out for some milk.” So we went around the corner to the Code For America office. The place had a layout similar to what we’ve got planned for the new Clearleft building so I immediately starting documenting it with pictures (although it probably looked like I was just trying to sneakily take pictures of Tim O’Reilly).
After catching up with Mike, I rendezvoused with Jessica back at the hotel and we headed out for lunch at Mel’s diner. The espresso milk shakes there are a must-have on any San Francisco trip I make.
Then it was a race against time to try to get to the Mission Bay Conference Center to catch Sophia’s talk at UX Week. She ran the gist of the talk by me yesterday and it sounded great. Alas, I missed the first half of it, but what I caught was reaffirming much of what I was hammering home in my workshops yesterday.
UX Week wrapped up with the inimitable Ze Frank. As I said to Peter afterwards, he’s always reliable but never predictable.
Having said my goodbyes and my thanks to the lovely UX Week people, I met up with Jessica again for a feast of sushi at Hana Zen, right by the hotel. That’s three nights in a row that we’ve had really good asian cuisine downtown: Thai, Chinese, and Japanese.
We finished the evening in good company at the home of young Master Ben, observing the ritual of games night, sipping beers, and resisting the temptation of the cheese.
Tomorrow we depart for Chicago. Farewell, San Francisco; lovely to see you again, as always.
As predicted, today’s schedule of two back-to-back half-day workshops at UX Week was indeed quite exhausting. But it was also very rewarding.
Every time I run a workshop, I always end up learning something from the experience and today was no exception. The attendees were a bright bunch with lots of great questions and discussion points.
Once the workshops were done, I felt pretty exhausted. Jessica and I had a quiet night sampling the culinary delights of M.Y. China conveniently located just across the street from our hotel so I could collapse into bed at the end of the day.
Tomorrow I’m going to be spending all day teaching workshops at UX Week: two back-to-back half-day workshops on Responsive UX. So today I took it easy in preparation for what will probably be a knackering day tomorrow.
Jessica and I moved from Tantek’s place to a downtown hotel near Union Square; like I said, despite the fact that UX Week goes on for four days, they only provide speaker accommodation for three, guaranteeing that speakers won’t be around for the whole event. Very odd.
We checked into the hotel, grabbed some sandwiches and sat out in Yerba Buena park, soaking up some sun. It was a bright blue clear day in San Francisco. After that strenuous activity, we went for a coffee and strolled along Embarcadero, finishing the day with some excellent Thai food …just a harrowing walk through the Tenderloin away.
Now I’m going to fret over my workshop material and have a restless night of stress dreams. Wish me luck!
UX Week kicked off today. It’s a four-day event: one day of talks, followed by two days of workshops, followed by another day of talks. I’ll be spending all of the third day doing workshops back-to-back.
Bizarrely, even though it’s a four-day event, they only offer speakers three nights of accommodation. Seems odd to me: I would’ve thought they’d want us to stick around for the whole thing.
So, as I don’t get my hotel room until tomorrow, today I had to make my way from Tantek’s place in the Haight all the way over to the Mission Bay Conference Center—a fairly long MUNI ride. Alas, that meant I missed Steven Johnson’s opening talk. Curses!
Fortunately I did make it time for Ian Bogost’s talk, which was excellent.
In the afternoon, I walked over to Four Barrel, the excellent coffee shop that was celebrating its fifth birthday. They had a balloons, a photo both, a petting zoo, games, and best of all, free coffee. Tom popped by and we had a lovely time chatting in the sun (and drinking free coffee).
Seeing as I was in the Mission anyway, it would’ve been crazy not to have a mission burrito, so a trip to Papalote quickly followed. Best of all, Erin popped by. Then, as we were heading home via Dolores Park, we met up with Tess. Just like I hoped!
I’m going to be in the States for most of this month.
See, I’m speaking at An Event Apart DC in a couple of days, which is the first week of August. I’ll also speaking at An Event Apart Chicago in the last week of August. With such a short span of time between the two of events, I figured it wasn’t really worth flying across the Atlantic, flying back, flying over again, flying back again…
I looked around to see if there were any other events going on in between the two Events Apart and saw that UX Week was happening in San Francisco right before the Chicago AEA. I offered my services for a workshop, they readily accepted, and that sealed the deal: August was definitely going to be spent stateside.
My travel plans within the States look like this:
If you’re going to be in any of those locations, let me know and maybe our paths can cross.
Bye, bye, Brighton. See you again for the first week of September.