Talking About UX

Participants at the Washington, D.C. Cranky Talk Workshop for New Speakers.

Project

Cranky Talk Workshops for New Speakers

Client

The UX community

Role

Founder, faculty lead, facilitator

Problem

User experience professionals can’t expect to work in isolation and get the necessary involvement in projects; we have to be able to explain to people what we do and how we do it. Also, there is an intense interest every year in getting new speakers to submit talks for the IA Summit and the Interaction Design Association’s annual conference.

Solution

I design the format, recruit the faculty, secure the venue and craft the marketing for each Cranky Talk workshop. We generally aim for 12 participants for a full-day workshop. We’ve held free-standing Cranky Talks in Washington, D.C., Chicago and Dallas. We experimented with a variation on the workshop as a companion to the 2012 and 2013 South By Southwest Interactive Festivals, although that experiment didn’t work out quite as well as the free-standing sessions.

Cranky Talk faculty members work for free and we require no payment from participants (lodging and travel are on them). We’ve found that this gives us a tighter focus on the singular goal of every workshop student and teacher: to fully realize their own potential as a speaker.