Last week, I chaired the first (but not the last) VMware User Experience (vUE) conference.  Throughout my planning and scheming to get vUE going, my goal was simple.  Since this was our first time getting together, we had to have the opportunity to actually take advantage of it.  We had to be able to learn about each other, to share with each other.  Every decision came back to that question: how does this get people talking to and learning from each other?

The first idea that I had was to have everyone do a quick introduction of themselves.

Hi, I’m Nadyne Richmond, I’m a researcher, and I’ve been here for a year.  I work on projects all across VMware.  So far, I’ve done research on vSphere, vCloud, vCloud Director, Horizon, Zimbra, Aurora, and some things that don’t have names yet.  Outside of work, I’m currently reading Reamde by Neal Stephenson.  I live in downtown Mountain View with my husband and our two cats.

But then I imagined 60 of those, and thought that there was a high chance of me falling asleep.  Worse, though, I wasn’t sure if that actually imparted any information that I or anyone else cared about.  I thought that it might not meet my goal of helping people really get to know each other.

That idea evolved into what became the meat of the program: 5-10 minute talks from as many people as possible, in which they talked about their user experience in some way.  I explicitly left this open for interpretation, and I really liked the breadth of talks that came out of it.  The very first of these talks was from one of the newest designers on my team, in which she discussed the differences between what she learned in design school (where you get to start with a problem and decide how to go about tackling it) and what design is like in the real world (where the problem is well-established, and you’re coming into the project in the middle of its cycle so all of the decisions about how to tackle it have long been made).  The last of these talks was from one of our most senior designers talking about a future direction for VMware and how he’s going about it.

To help ensure that we had time to actually talk amongst ourselves, I made one other decision that was at least slightly controversial: mealtimes were sacrosanct.  I received lots of requests to do something with the meals.  “Let’s show a movie!” “How about a design exercise?” “We should have a working lunch.”  I turned down each request.  They were great ideas, and I tried to incorporate them elsewhere.  But I didn’t change the (lack of) structure for the meals.  The meals were only for socializing.

Together, the technical program and the socializing time were scheduled with the intent of creating a space where relationships can be built.  The technical program gave us something to talk about.  Actually, it gave us several different somethings to talk about, since there were so many different short presentations.  You could talk to the presenter and get more information about their topic or their product, you could talk to the people around you about the presentations, you could commiserate with a presenter about how hard it actually is to stick to a very short time for your talk.  The socializing time was built in to make sure that we could actually have those conversations, as informally as possible.  I didn’t just want people to have to go back to their offices and email people — that’s too formal, and would result in fewer relationships actually getting built.

Another thing that we did to help build relationships was to give people something to create.  Every attendee received a 4″ Munny doll, which is a white vinyl doll that you can draw on or otherwise decorate to your heart’s content.  We set out a bunch of multi-colored Sharpies, and let the attendees do the rest.  Some folks did some truly awesome things with their Munnys.  At the end, we took a group shot of the well-decorated Munnys.  This was a great ice-breaker, and helped make more conversations happen.

Was vUE successful?  Based on the feedback so far, the answer appears to be a resounding “YES!”  I can’t tell you how relieved I am.  I was well aware that I was asking for a lot of people, to put aside their work for 2 days (or more, for those who travelled to be here).  Creating vUE was a gamble, and I wasn’t sure if all of the decisions that I had made would actually mean that I met my goal of getting people to build relationships across the company.  There’s definitely some things to do better in the future, of course.  Overall, though, I’m immensely happy with how everything worked out.

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.