I recently attended User Interface 10, the week-long conference put on by Jared Spool and the good people of User Interface Engineering. Although one of the more expensive conferences, it is one of the few fully focused on User Interface Design and is highly recommended for anyone in the field.

The highlight of the conference for me was the opportunity to meet and network with a ton of great people in the industry. Thanks to Kyle, Philly-area folks met up on Monday night for dinner and established some great connections for the rest of the week (and hopefully beyond!). It is invaluable to attend skill-specific conferences such as this one — networking with people who think about and do the same things you do on a daily basis is not always this easy to find.

As for the conference itself, it consisted of three full-day workshops and one day of 90-minute workshops. Attendees selected full-day workshops in advance and could pick from a variety of 90-minute sessions Tuesday.

My favorite of the day-long sessions was Gerry McGovern’s “How to Design a Task-Based Information Architecture: Essential Tips for Creating a Fast and Convenient Website”. Although the title was a bit misleading — it probably should have been called “Editing Content for a Fast and Convenient Website” — Gerry’s dynamic, funny and passionate presentation style had me on the edge of my seat all day. Even though I don’t directly manage the content on my (professional) site, I do work with these teams on a regular basis and I was able to pick up a number of good ideas.

On Monday I attended Marc Rettig’s “Getting the Most Out of Prototypes”. This session was actually a little disappointing. Rettig doesn’t really deal with web prototypes, and although the majority of the room works in the internet space, he really didn’t tailor his presentation for building prototypes for the web — instead it was more focused on kiosks, ATMs and tangible product design. We did end up designing ATM screens for the practical exercise, which showed me how powerful paper prototyping can be. With just three mini user tests, we got some great feedback — but outside this exercise, the presentation was a little too abstract to take much away.

On Tuesday, the featured talks day, it was great to get a refresher on Molly Holzschlag & Eric Meyer’s CSS prototyping lesson. Last year their full-day session was the clear highlight for me, and although it was pretty much the same content, I always pick up a trick or two when interacting with these two great minds. I would, however, like to see some new examples (when was the last time anyone went to excite.com?)

The last day, Thursday, I went to Jared Spool & Joshua Porter’s “Web Site Usability 2005: The Big Picture”. This was actually three shorter talks combined into one day, with Jared giving two and Josh giving one. Jared led off the day with a presentation on disseminating UI information, which I found quite insightful and appropriate as a UX designer who is clearly outnumbered in my organization. Porter’s presentation was on Web 2.0 and just gave a brief overview of some of the interesting new technology that is starting to propagate throughout the industry, mostly AJAX and mashups such as housingmaps.com. I actually hoped it would be a little more technical, but I suppose only a small portion of the audience is involved in this kind of coding.

Overall, another solid UIConf. The presentations had high points and areas for improvement, but the networking opportunities were the real winner for me. Big ups to all my Philly folks out there.