A few months ago, I proposed to my manager that we needed to do an offsite.  After many discussions and a lot of work done to clarify goals, a conference was born.

VMware’s user experience community is diverse and distributed, much like our extensive product portfolio and our overall development efforts.  My user experience team focuses on vSphere, vCloud, and related products, and is the largest group of user experience people.  There are other user experience people sprinkled throughout the company, sometimes just in ones and twos, other times (especially in the case of an acquisition) a larger team of 5-10.  With such a distributed team, we often don’t have a lot of interaction with each other.  In the case of acquisitions, I noticed that my team tended to have the same set of questions when we heard about a new acquisition:

• what does this new acquisition do?
• how do they fit into VMware?
• who are their users?
• do they have a user experience team?
• how do they create their user experience?

When new acquisitions came on board, or when I heard about a user experience person working on another team, I got into the habit of reaching out to them and offering to have lunch if they’re local or a phone call if they’re not.  In doing so, I learned that they had the exact same questions about my team.

In thinking about how to solve this problem, a conference was born.  We named it vUE, which we’re pronouncing “view”¹, and it is the first-ever gathering of VMware’s user experience community.  The major goal of this conference is to answer those questions that all of us have had about our applications, the users of those applications, and the processes that create those applications.

Michael Lopp has a great post at Rands in Repose about off-sites² called Fred Hates It.  In it, he describes three types of off-sites, and why a team member named Fred might not like that off-site.  This post came long after I was already deep into the planning stages for vUE, but it’s helped me to articulate my goals and keep my focus.  One of the types of off-site that he identifies is “we need to understand who we are”, which is exactly where we at VMware are today.

To help reach the goal of understanding ourselves, I’ve set up a program structured around the types of activities we all do as a user experience community.  There are six technical sessions, each of which consists of very short presentations centered around a topic.  Our six topics are as follows:

• users (who are our users?)
• user research (what do we do to understand our users?)
• design process (how do we design?)
• design collaboration (who do we work with as we design?)
• visual design (how do we make decisions about our visuals?)
• data visualization (how do we present large complex sets of data?)

Every attendee was invited to present on one (or more) of these topics, and the majority of our attendees have stepped up to the challenge.  I’m one of the very few people who will be there but who isn’t giving a presentation.  I hope that everyone will forgive me for bowing out, and I really would like to be able to talk about my research, but leading vUE has taken enough time that I just can’t put together a technical presentation too.

The overall response to this idea has been overwhelming.  There are user experience people travelling here from Sofia, Herzliya, and Sydney, not to mention Seattle and Colorado Springs.  As I’ve been talking to my fellow UX people about why we’re doing such a thing, the response has universally been one of excitement and support.  These responses have only gotten stronger as people from outside of Palo Alto have been confirming their attendance.

We’re now one week away from the start of vUE.  Even just getting together so many people from so many corners of the company is a success.  The sessions and presentations that I mentioned above are intended to be the starting point for future conversations.  This is one way for us to know who else is working on mobile projects or data visualization.  As I’ve been organizing this, I’ve learned a lot about my fellow UX colleagues here and have already been able to introduce people who are working on similar problems.  That’s just my efforts: I can’t wait to see what I’ll learn next week when we’re all in the same room together and sharing what we know.