Overall, it was a great event. I’m always skeptical about new conferences because I’ve been to so many of them in the past that have just been a waste of time and money, but this one wasn’t either. It’s worth the price and then some. All of the speakers were excellent and well-prepared. I remember going to SXSW a few years ago and would overhear speakers joking about only preparing for a half-hour, which really turned me off to the event entirely. AEA is what I wish SXSW would strive to be like.

Here are some of my random thoughts and reflections on it from last night/this morning:

There is rarely one right way to do things. I think a lot of the speakers hit on this - they may prefer method A, but there are also methods B, C and D that are perfectly valid. I think this is where a lot of presenters at higher ed specific gigs make themselves come across as really arrogant to people who know better (which, unfortunately, is rarely the audience they are presenting to). They put things out there and describing the one way to get them done. Their way. And only their way. I find a lot of higher ed people incessantly need this justification that they are right (which they rarely get because of the reality of the culture of the industry). But this doesn’t help people when you’re presenting to them. If I wanted to go to a conference to hear about their way, I could save some money and just read their blog.

Usability tests are vitally important. I was really surprised at many of the things Jared Spool said. I think sometimes we get our heads so far into this that we forget how normal people use the web. It’s like when people ask me about product recommendations…”is such and such a product easy to use for a beginner?” I always have to be careful because *I* may find it easy, but I’ve been doing this for 11 years so my perspective is drastically different. Same goes for our users. What is intuitive to use is not necessarily for them, so we really need to put the extra effort in and test our sites instead of making assumptions.

What am I? I’m really struggling with this - higher ed often expects their employees to be everything, which means I can really specialize in anything. My title is “web producer” but that doesn’t really mean anything. I’m part designer, part developer, part marketer. It’s an odd combination. Most people only do one of those things, or are some hybrid of two of the three. It’s damn hard to try to be stellar at all three and I’m not sure its entirely possible, which scares the hell out of me because I hate failing at something with a passion.

Sometimes I need a good kick in the ass to get my head back into standards compliance. When I started at Dartmouth, there were standards issues with the properties that I’d be working on. It was one of those things that I kept perpetuating, using the “I’ll fix it later” excuse rather than tackling because - let’s be honest - it can be overwhelming to come into something and immediately have to fix what’s broken. So you avoid the problem entirely. Stuff like this motivates me to tackle the problem now rather than continue to perpetuate it.

When you’re doing a presentation, it’s really important to manage the expectations of your audience. All the presentations I saw over the past few days were great, but some speakers managed my expectations better than others by the title they gave their talk. For example, Jeffrey Veen’s talk was great. So was Christopher Fahey’s. But these were two examples of speakers getting very conceptual and “40,000 foot view” but not really speaking to what I, as an audience member, thought they were going to speak to. So I didn’t enjoy these talks as much as I did the others. It wasn’t because it was bad information - it’s because my expectations weren’t managed. I have to keep this in mind as I’m creating presentations for the stuff I’m speaking at in the fall/winter.

These guys all crib Tufte like there’s no tomorrow. That’s not a bad thing, mind you. I’m just really glad my boss introduced me to him before the conference so I knew where a lot of these concepts were coming from.

The lack of formal education in web design has created a ton of problems. I had never really considered this before, but it’s very true. It’s difficult at best to find good information when you’re just starting out and the industry isn’t taken as seriously as it could be because of it.

If Vermont Housing Data can build a kick ass site, then damnit you can too!