Usable Products' User Experience Benchmarking Training
12 April, 2007: New York, NY, USA
8 May, 2007: San Francisco, CA, USA
Usable Products teaches private tutorials. User Experience Benchmarking is a quantitative way to compare user interfaces, either the same UI over time or UIs from competing products. Benchmarking allows one to rank product usability through user preferences, time-to-complete, and success rates. Usable Products Company has produced both commissioned (private) and syndicated user experience benchmarks for the past four years, and this course teaches our methods through lecture, anecdotes, and hands-on group exercises. Delegates from Google and Cisco have attended this course, so you'd be in excellent company!

MEX: 2 – 3 May, 2007, London, UK
MEX is Marek Pawlowski's annual Mobile User Experience conference, held in London (http://pmn.co.uk/mex). This year it's on the 2nd/3rd of May. It is a two-day strategy forum for "leading minds in mobile telecoms." I have spoken at and attended the last two MEX events, which I found inspiring. This year I will be one of the facilitators, who will each lead discussions within a group of approximately ten delegates throughout the two-day conference. Readers of this list are entitled to a £100 savings. Email me to receive this discount on your MEX registration.

MAPOS USA: 26 – 28 June, 2007, San Francisco, CA, USA MAPOS USA is Informa's annual forum for Mobile Applications and Operating Systems. This year is the first that it will be held in the US. It is the most interesting mobile technology conference for UI designers, marketers, and solution providers. I will be chairing a panel on "Widgets: Mobile’s Door to a PC-Like Experience and Development Ecosystem… or simply Marketing Spin?" I will also run a full-day workshop after the conference for delegates interested in "Widget Frameworks and the Mobile User Interface: How to Succeed, Today & Tomorrow." Readers of this list are entitled to a 25% discount on MAPOS USA registration. Please email me for the conference brochure and also to register with the 25% discount.

Mobile HCI: 11 – 14 September, 2007, Singapore
Mobile HCI (http://mobilehci.org) is the annual academic conference for Mobile Human Computer Interaction. I have submitted two tutorials and an industrial case study, and plan to submit a panel for consideration by reviewers. This event is the only academic conference devoted to HCI for mobile devices. With keynotes by Songyee Yoon, VP Communication Intelligence at SK Telecom, Donghoon Chang, VP of Mobile User Experience Design at Samsung Electronics, and Prof. Masaaki Fukomoto of NTT DoCoMo's Frontier Technology Research Group, this event should draw UI designers, developers, marketers, and executives from all over the world. It is comprised of papers from students, professors, and industry participants. Papers are of varying quality, but the tutorials and workshops are truly forward-thinking.