In January, I started something new at VMware: a monthly series of UX tech talks.  This was a direct outcome of VMware User Experience 2011 (vUE 2011), which I created and led last year.  Its goal was to get our internal VMware user experience community together for the very first time.  It was a rousing success, with nearly 60 people from all corners of VMware attending.  One of the things that we learned as a result of vUE 2011 was that we wanted more opportunities for us to come together and learn from each other.

I just sent out the series of invites for the 2013 UX tech talk series, which made me think about all of the tech talks that we’ve seen in 2012. It’s been quite an awesome mix of topics. Take a look at this:

• OmniGraffle for designers
• Designing on the edge of chaos: An introduction to complexity science and how it can influence your approach to design
• User experience the “Mad Men” way
• Design for mobile
• An introduction to Adobe Muse and Adobe Edge
• UX summer intern projects
• A designer’s guide to learning about our users
• How do you know when your design is done?
• The odd couple: user experience versus user interface?
• Disney imagineering
• Visio for designers

This tells me a lot about my fellow user experience colleagues across VMware. We’ve talked about some very hands-on topics, like how to use tools and how to conduct research, as well as some topics intended to make us think about what it means to be a user experience professional and how we can learn from other areas.

I also went back and looked at the conference reports that I get from our meeting conferencing tools, and the UX tech talk series had awesome turnout throughout the year.  Even better, the invitation list has only expanded as more and more people have become aware of this and wanted to have the opportunity to learn more. We started out with about 30 people at our first tech talk, and have only grown from there.

The 2012 tech talk series has been an amazing success, and its success is attributable to so many people. There’s Lisa, who stepped in to help me run this series when it turned out to be a lot more work than I had anticipated! She’s done an awesome job of helping to line up speakers, giving feedback to speakers when they practice their talks, and keeping everything moving. There’s also my team’s assistant Joan, who works behind the scenes to manage the logistics of all of this (which is a surprisingly involved and time-consuming task). And, of course, there’s all of the tech talk speakers who have offered their experience and expertise to the VMware user experience community.

I can’t wait to see what UX tech talks we do in 2013.  And there’s vUE 2013 in the works too …