This wasn’t the first time I’ve presented in Denmark, but it was the most fun. A packed room of over 100 people came to hear about Fast, easy usability tricks for big product improvements (slides, PDF) at GOTO in Aarhus, a developer-centric conference that has never had a user experience track before.
That evening I also got roped in to meeting with the local HCI chapter to talk about discount mobile usability techniques. It was supposed to be an interactive discussion just prompted by my slides, but Danish reticence won out and so the sharing session turned into a monolog. Apologies to the audience members that I bullied into sharing their experiences :o)
Many thanks to Trifork, who hosted the conference, and especially to Janne Jul Jensen for inviting me to talk (and also giving a great talk herself). I was particularly impressed by the way the conference organizers collected attendee feedback after each session. A member of the conference crew would stand at the exit holding an iPhone showing one third of the screen red (with a frowny face), one third yellow (neutral face) and one third green (happy face). Audience members just had to touch the relevant third of the screen to “vote” on the session. I ended up with 91% green, 9% yellow, which tells me there’s room for more UX content at future GOTO conferences.