This past July, while attending a web design conference, I had the good fortune of being able to speak with Jared Spool, a conference presenter and leading expert in the field of web usability and user interface design. He and his usability consulting firm, User Interface Engineering (UIE) <http://www.uie.com >, had just recently assisted the University of Pennsylvania with producing a conference for web professionals in higher education <http://www.med.upenn.edu/uiconf/> that boasted presentations and workshops by top names in the field of web design and development. The scale, scope, and quality of the conference was so impressive that attendees came from all over the state, and quite a few were even from out of state. Presenters included Eric Meyer on CSS, Luke Wroblewski, Principal Designer for Yahoo!, on user interface design patterns, Stephanie Sullivan, author of the CSS layouts included with Dreamweaver CS3, and of course Jared himself on user experience.

Delighted by the success of the Penn conference, Jared offered to help produce a similar event to be held at U.Va. next Spring, and I'm excited to officially announce the beginning of that effort!

User Interface Engineering provides a significant amount of conference planning services, but as you can imagine, there is much to do on our end to pull off such a thing. Your involvement, as U.Va. web professionals and communicators, will be crucial in realizing a conference that benefits us all. If this conference is something you'd like to see happen or be a part of producing, there are a couple ways you can get involved at this early stage.

I've put together a brief draft proposal for the conference as a Google doc <http://tinyurl.com/4exxmt > that lists a few ideas for possible presentation and workshop topics. To provide UIE with some sense of which presenters they should solicit, and consequently of potential cost, they first need such a list. But, of course, the final items on that list should come from you, the top-priority audience for the conference. Please take a look at the draft proposal and edit the document to add your ideas (and let me know if editing access doesn't seem to be working). If you can, please also note whether a topic deserves a workshop or presentation and how many people out of 500 (estimated maximum for the conference) you think might attend. The document will be closed for editing at the end of the day Friday, October 17th, after which time UIE will get to work querying presenters on their availability and interest.

If you're interested in knowing which presenters UIE might tap, I've posted another Google doc <http://tinyurl.com/4h7ru4 > with names Jared has indicated are likely candidates.

The first meeting of folks interested in being on the planning committee will occur after the 17th as well, but that date is still TBD. This is the group who will handle logistics like securing a funding model, booking space, catering, publicity, setup/tear-down etc., so if you intend to join, be prepared to work! Please let me know if you'd like to join this group and I'll send another announcement out soon with details for our first meeting.

I look forward to seeing this exciting opportunity become a reality with your input and help.

Cheers,
--
John Loy
Web Designer, University of Virginia Library
ph: (434) 924-7099, fax: (434) 924-1431
552 Alderman Library
http://lib.virginia.edu