This past Wednesday (May 25th, 2011), I had the unique pleasure of attending my first ever UPA Boston event; the annual UPA Boston conference.

I think most people were calling it “mini-UPA”, but I’m not exactly sure if that was entirely correct, after seeing more than 400-500 people attending. It wasn’t exactly what I would call “mini”, by my standards.

oh, and for those that don’t know what UPA is? Here you go:

“The Usability Professionals Association’s Boston Chapter (UPA Boston) is a 501c6 nonprofit organization and is the local arm of a national organization.

UPA Boston provides a forum for usability practitioners to share techniques and experiences.

The UPA attracts a variety of people: newcomers to our field and experienced practitioners, as well as the distinguished professionals who have been defining and shaping the field of usability for decades.

The UPA also provides supportive information to senior executives, managers, team leads, and those who are usability advocates within their organizations.”

I decided it was finally high time to make it to a UPA event.

Being this was only a one day event, and it was local to Boston area … it made sense to see what was actually said at these types of events. By “these types of events”, I mean events that “user experience” experts attend. Design crowd, folks. Pretty much the people I don’t normally get too see too much at the … admittedly … developer focused events I go to.

Day 1/1
I had planned on driving in, but decided against it last minute, as I discovered that 95 traffic was going to be horrible going up to Cambridge.

Instead, I hopped on the 8am community rail into South Station. I took the Red Line from South Station to Kendall Square stop.

UPA had a scheduled Bus system running from Kendall to the Hyatt Regency Cambridge, which made it super easy to get there (instead of pulling out the mobile device to do the 20 minute walk).

Once at the venue, it was already started.

I actually missed a lot of the intro keynote type material, but I managed to pick up my badge and a workbook they had of compiled presentation material.

From there, I head into some sessions. Really, I hadn’t done my research or laid out a schedule of the sessions I wanted to see at UPA. It was all last minute … picks based on the material I saw in the workbook.

Being that I had no idea who the speakers were, I think I got an interesting mix of professionals and their talks at the conference. Here are some of the talks I attended, and my thoughts about the material (that I can recall).

Can “Smart Home” Technology Change the Future of How Older Adults Live?
This presentation wasn’t exactly my 1st choice (it was standing room only in some of the others), but it was interesting to hear about how technology is impacting the older generations, and particularly the elderly.

Several case studies of home automation were discussed. Frankly the presentation was a little rough around the edges, but it brought up some good points.

I wish the overall topic had been broader. “Smart Homes”, or “Future Technologies for the Elderly”.

To me, “Can “Smart Home” Technology Change the Future of How Older Adults Live? was just too narrow a focus to really answer the question. Maybe that was a good thing?

Rock! Paper! iPad! Comparing UX Tools on the iPad to Traditional Methods
This is what I expected it to be. A dude on stage talking about his experiences with UX Tools.

I like the audience polling aspect to the session, and the results definitely showed how hyped tablet form factor is for certain use cases when using it as a design tool. Well, at least right now, that is (yes, sometimes paper is better, and yes, sometimes a laptop IS BETTER!).

I did caught some new tools I hadn’t used before, so I’m going to take some time over the next month to download and give them a whirl. Most of the tools mentioned were already part of my workflow, though.

4 Mobile Apps, 2 Dev Teams, & 1 Enterprise Mobile Solution
Well, being the owner of a mobile and device development company, this presentation was certainly my cup of tea; even if the takeaways were limited for me.

The content wasn’t exactly exciting, but the story behind it was entertaining to hear from a enterprise company learning to cope with the needs of a fledgling mobile project … i.e. the challenges of fragmentation, etc.

Lunch (aka “Chow Time”)
Had a brief lunch with some folks and @graiz (Greg Raiz). I don’t think we covered anything particularly ground breaking in our chats, but it was fun, nevertheless … especially the “being outdoors on a sunny day”, part.

After lunch, everyone headed back to afternoon sessions.

Mobile App Design for Behavior Change
I thought this was one of my favorite sessions of the event I got to see. It’s hard to explain without going into all the behavioral research that was cited in the presentation, but it’s really cool to see some of the concepts applied to mobile apps.

The Nuts and Bolts of Running a Single Person Consultancy
As the owner of a consultancy, I wanted to see if I was missing out on any advise from fellow independents at the session.

A lot of points rung true, and there were a few new points I picked up. I put them down into Evernote, and here they are (as best I recorded them):

• Ask for Help.
• Bill by day or hour.
• Be helpful.
• Be clear about what you do.
• Be versatile.
• Be clear about deliveries and dates.
• Be easy to work with.
• Don’t get tied into too many clients.
• Don’t take small jobs. 10 hours, etc.
• Don’t respond to RFP’s.
• Learn new stuff.
• Keep your linked-in profile up to date. No portfolio. Showing live work is better.

Wrap up

Unfortunately, I had to head back before the conference was over.

I would have liked to hear more about the “Video Wall”, as well as stayed for the evening social event. Alas, it did not happen.

Perhaps I’ll get to another UPA event in the future. It’s always good for developers to get out and meet up with designers outside of the normal realms of work relationships. There is a lot to learn from both sides.

I hope to give a presentation at this group in the future. I didn’t really spot too many developer oriented talks at UPA. I hope that’s not intentional.

The cross communication between people in groups is essential, and I hate to see the obvious “digital divide” between “designers” and “developers” that inevitably happens. It’s high time this went away, IMO.

Things like UPA help that happen, through education and knowledge transfer.

Anyways … just some ramblings in a blog post from a Mobile and Device developer’s perspective.

I’m a big fan of slidedeck and have been using it for years to “host” my presentations over the years. It’s an excellent service, I recommend checking out.

As a user, however, the challenge there is that it’s more difficult to find material I’m always interested to hear about or learn more about. Search brings up a lot more material than I care to sift through, and of varying levels of quality, completeness, or correctness.

Lately, I’ve been using lanyrd to keep abreast of upcoming conferences and connect with industry professionals like myself.

As an off-shoot, I noticed that there’s a handy tie in to video, audio, blog postings, photos, and even presentations now. Very cool.

If you’re interested to read the latest and greatest conference material relating to mobile, be sure to check out lanyrd.

P.S. By the time you read this, “49″ might mean more (probably not less).

Mobile Payment is not nearly a new idea (Japan started doing it perhaps a decade ago, and it is now part of everyday keitai).

However, the adoption and more wide distribution of mobile payment has been lagging in other Western countries, including the US.

Basically our mobile sucked up until about 4 years ago. Now it’s not so bad. NFC is starting to appear in devices (like the Nexus S), and things like Square, and other payment devices (both physical and virtual) are coming to fruition.

It’s also fairly obvious that Apple is probably on the verge of inserting the NFC chips into their next round of devices as I write this as well … further driving adoption of mobile payment in the US and other places.

But, Google & partners are also making a big push with their endeavors. With the heavy adoption of Android (especially in the US), we’ll see more mobile payment into 2012 and beyond.

I think it’s going to be slow adoption in niche areas first, but I think it’s finally time we (read the “USA”) started moving beyond the physical wallets and purses, with virtual options. Don’t you agree?

Read the Google Event coverage on Engadget.

The FITC 2011 (Adobe) keynote is now available (Brought to you by Influxis).

FITC Toronto 2011 Titles from FITC on Vimeo.

The production quality on these things is awesome. They (MK12) should do a decomposition on how they went about the creation process (in fact, maybe they did at FITC, but I missed it?).