[A] $125 day-long technology conference scheduled June 12 in Burlington had already sold out Tuesday, nearly two weeks before the doors were set to open.
UX Burlington, named for the tech-industry abbreviation for “user experience,” which refers to the way a person encounters a Web page or site, is a first-time event with a title that appealed to Web developers, programmers, designers and user-interaction specialists who work online.
The organizers, Peter Brown and Maureen McElany, both 32, said they first released information about the event in February, and made “early-bird” tickets available in March. Until recently, the sales had just been steady, Brown said.
“It was kind of slow and steady, the entire time we sold tickets. It was really exciting to see it pick up momentum, and it just kind of snowballed from there,” Brown said. “We didn’t pay for any advertising – it was mostly word of mouth, we had some media partners, and we mostly just had the community getting behind it.”
The effort was the brainchild of Brown, who is a developer for Agilion, an app company in Burlington. For three years, Brown had been organizing a conference in Burlington around the programming language Ruby, and seeing outsiders attracted to the area and the niche tech conversations over the weekend-long event.
“It draws a big crowd from outside the state, even though there aren’t a ton of Ruby developers in Burlington, or even in the state. We wanted to do something that would draw a more local crowd, and we wanted to do something that was more broadly appealing,” Brown said.
User experience, as McElany explained, appealed to such a wider group, that it didn’t surprise her when the 150 tickets to the conference at Main Street Landing, on the Burlington Waterfront, were completely sold.
“UX, I would say that is a large part of why the conference was so popular. Because while our focus was to interest people who are involved in web and application development, (user experience is) something that can appeal to every industry,” she said.
“It stands from content strategy to writing to design to organizational development, it stands for not just engineering applications, but planning them, designing them and helping your users,” she said.
“Our original goal was to appeal to people who were developing, but it’s turned into so much more than that. We have people who have technical backgrounds, business backgrounds, people who are at the executive level of their company, and designers – we have everything,” said McElany, who does Quality Assurance testing for Dealer.com, a local software solutions company that works with automotive dealerships.
Less than a month after the early-bird ticket sales began, tickets for the eight-hour conference – which is set to feature nine speakers, including the closing keynote speaker Sha Hwang, who helped in the redesign of Healthcare.gov and has counted among his design clients CNN, MTV, Flickr and Adobe, had sold out completely.
Organizers say they don’t have any ambitions for future series or conferences – but they’re keeping an open mind — especially after scoring the support of local tech leaders like Dealer.com (a division of Dealertrack), Middlebury Interactive Languages and Burlington Telecom.
The conference may yet re-open sales for limited releases of additional tickets, organizers said, so those who didn’t make it can keep checking back or inquire via info@uxburlington.com.
Editor’s Note: VTDigger.org is one of the event’s sponsors.
