Over The Air 09: first impressions
I attended the first day of the Over The Air conference yesterday, which proved very interesting for two reasons. First, I heard about some of the new and upcoming developments in mobile tech (widget, widget, widget, it seems…). Second, this was a Developers conference, and very much so. So this doubled as a field trip in developer land, ethnographic style.
If there was any doubt about the audience being developers, just counting the number of ladies would remove it. I estimate the ratio to be close to 1 woman for 15 guys, a very far cry from the approximate gender parity of UX crowds.
The session were mainly technical, full of info about APIs, (in-)compatibilities, standards etc. Some UX session were also present, but I have to say I was a bit disappointed by them. It’s not that they were not good, far from it actually, special props to Bryan Rieger with his incredibly clean, beautiful, and effective slides. It’s just that given my background in UX and the MSc I just finished, none of this was really news to me: I was simply not the intended audience.
Like any good event, #ota09 got me thinking on a couple of points, that will be the basis of a few blog post.
First up: Hackathons, developer’s conceptions, and how it negatively affect good UX
“If there was any doubt about the audience being developers, just counting the number of ladies would remove it. I estimate the ratio to be close to 1 woman for 15 guys, a very far cry from the approximate gender parity of UX crowds.”
Are there proportionally more or less women at UX events?
As one of the few females at OTA ’09, I thought the ratio was an improvement on similar events I’ve been to (I was the only female at a frameworks talk a couple of years ago). But I think that maybe half were representing one of the sponsors. The rest I met were developers, like me.
Anyway, despite attending a couple of flakey talks, I did learn some stuff, enjoyed the event and am brimming over with inspiration and enthusiasm today!