Today I had the great pleasure of talking with Steve Baty from Meld Consulting and Donna Spencer at Maadmob about their extraordinary efforts in putting together UX Australia.

Donna and Steve describe how they wanted to create a conference that modeled the essence of User Centered Design in every detail.

Calls for presentations weren’t required to have a focus towards a specific discipline; diversity of experiences lead to innovation. One only needs to look to the speakers presenting at UX Australia to see how this approach to creating a conference will inspire others long after the event has wrapped up.

Even the smallest details for the conference were given to the global community to ensure a great experience . A contest was held to create the badges attendees and speakers would wear during the conference.

The competition winner is Matt Balara. He triggered the discussion about requirements (on Flickr and on Twitter) and iterated the design based on the feedback. Matt will get a one-year subscription to Saasu (one of our fantastic sponsors)…We decided to use Tom Voirol’s design, which was based on Matt’s, with an upside-down schedule at the bottom. Tom will get a subscription to an Optimal Workshop product (who are also a fantastic sponsor).

Most of the conferences in Australia such as Web Directions and Edge of the Web are web focused. This is the first conference being held in Australia that is focused exclusively on user experience.

Both Steve and Donna hope that people will start to expand the notion of user experience beyond the creation of great web services. The opportunity to learn and inspire will come not only from the great diversity of presentations but also from attendees flying in from every corner of the world.

In addition to UX Australia, Donna recently published her book Card Sorting – Designing Usable Categories, through Rosenfeld Media, and was the lead consultant in building the Optimal Workshop’s online card sorting tool Optimal Sort

Steve is a member of the board with the Interaction Design Association, initiated the UX Book Club, and is one of the “Kahunas” at Johnny Holland, the peer written webzine that will be recording and publishing presentations after the event.

With a conference designed down to the last detail according to the ideas and wishes of those attending, this will undoubtedly be a remarkable experience for one and all!