I had the unusual and welcome opportunity to attend two conferences within four weeks. The first conference I attended was An Event Apart August 27-28 in Chicago and FlashForward September 19-21 in Boston. An Event Apart was put on by the folks at A List Apart and happy cog. Lynda.com, my favorite online training site, put on FlashForward.
An Event Apart featured a one track two day event where FlashForward featured a four track three day event. I got something out of every session I attended at each conference although in my opinion one was superior.
I preferred the size, format and content (not to mention food) at An Event Apart. AEA had a total of 12 one hour sessions. At FlashForward there were 44 sessions, each lasting one hour and fifteen minutes. Obviously one person could not attend all of the sessions at FlashForward. I think this is a key annoyance of a “big” conference.
I believe that when you are at an event to get exposure to experts it is better to follow a learning track that builds on itself. At AEA Luke Wroblewski gave “Best Practices for Form Design” right before Derek Featherstone spoke about Accessibility.
I felt like everything I learned at AEA was interconnected and given in a purposeful order. The topics at FF didn’t seem to follow a typical structure even between scheduled tracks.
At FlashForward I attended 13 sessions which I organized into 5 categories; SEO (2), Usability (2), Creativity (1), Flash (6) and Other (2). I did learn something, especially from the two SEO sessions given by Giovanni Galluci, but I felt like a scatter brain bouncing from topic to topic. On top of that you never knew if you were missing a very good session at the expense of suffering through a mediocre software infomercial.
I am not making a stance that large conferences are bad necessarily. Large conferences serve a purpose. Personally I hope that my experience at AEA can be repeated. Perhaps Adaptive Path’s UX Week August 2008.