10th IA Summit in Memphis: Reflections
This was my 5th time attending the IA Summit, I’ve always loved this conference because of the vibrant community it gathers and how people are quite open and generally warm. This time, what I bring back is mostly some deep thoughts that question how I’ve been managing my web presence and my career in general. As I put on my previous post, I saw many people giving great presentations that included things I’d been thinking and even talking about for the last few years. This leaves me with a bittersweet feeling as on one hand it’s great to see how much of a visionary I’ve been and how my intuitive thoughts are later proven to be right on track. The sour part is that I’ve not been loud enough to capitalize on my thoughts, although I did put my ideas out there, I was not heard by the community and they have just reached similar conclusions after longer roads.
One of the highlights of the Summit was Whitney Hess’s presentation on how to put your name out there. She did a wonderful job. I had heard her name a couple of times before, I met her last year in the Miami Summit and later made an important impact with her article on the 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design. On her 1st IA Summit presentation, she made some great recommendations, some of which I’ve started to apply immediately.
- Ditch any excuses not to blog
- Find a short sentence to describe what makes you special. I’ve defined mine as: “I find patterns where others can’t”.
At the same time, her presentation Evangelizing Yourself also made me realize that I’m not the only one in a similar position: there are several great people that have been members of the IA community for a long time and have some great ideas, yet are quiet and fly under the radar. Whitney’s presentation was a big encouragement for us to come out of our shells.
My poster presentation went very well, there were always people around me and they did not give me a chance to look at the other posters. I got enough people to participate in the mapping survey that some patterns started to emerge. There was a lot of confusion on how to draw the map, but I think that the results I got, plus the comments people gave me, were strong enough feedback to see that the topic is interesting to many people, and it even has some uses that I had not envisioned, so it seems like I’ll be working on this the next Fall term. Big thanks to everyone who marked their dots, I’ll be putting my results here soon!