Last week I had the pleasure of hopping on an airplane and flying 3000 miles to attend the User Interface 13 Conference.

Guess what. It was well worth it, so I wanted to write a quick post thanking Jared Spool and his exceptional team at UIE for putting on such a valuable and efficient event. All of the sessions I attended were top-notch, but I just want to call out a few.

Jeremy Keith from Clearleft gave a home run seminar on “Bulletproof Ajax”. I’ve been to all-day Ajax seminars in the past, which were good, but Jeremy is a step above the rest in his knowledge, experience and seminar structure.

Luke Wroblewski’s “Content Page Design Best Practices” and Scott Berkun’s “Why Designers Fail and What to Do About It” I found especially motivating. These guys back up what they preach with tons of experience and are very entertaining as well. If you get a chance to attend one of their sessions at a conference, take it.

Then, of course, there is Mr. Spool. I could write a book about him. Don’t worry. I won’t. Jared’s vast knowledge gleaned from research in the field of User Experience is the core reason this conference is so worth it. Any team would walk away with new ideas on how to better serve their customers/users after attending Jared’s talks.

He’s pretty damn funny too.

All in all the UIE conference was terrific. I strongly recommend you check out next year’s event.

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Some quick stats from the SXSW Interactive Festival, to give you some idea what it was like:

• Verbal NDA’s given, between Lance and myself: 6
• Movie stars seen: at least 5 that we know of
• Tradeshow schwag items gathered, each: about 500,000
• Tradeshow schwag items that were actually cool: 3
• Best - but least effective - tradeshow schwag item: magnetic buzzing balls handed out by a company whose name I can’t remember
• Internet-related company founders, coders, financers, and top executives seen: hundreds
• Best sessions: Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, talking openly about how the company reached the success it has; Jared Spool, illustrating with magic tricks the importance of illusion and magic in meeting users’ needs; Guy Kawasaki, moderating a panel discussion on social media.
• Lance’s top memories: meeting Guy Kawasaki; dinner at Vespaio; screening “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”.
• My top memories: Seeing Helen Hunt speak; watching the Zappos.com team appear out of nowhere to hand out hundreds of rain ponchos when the weather turned bad
• Minutes of boredom: 0

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