After 3 weeks with many many events, I am finally gathering my thoughts and writing about my great experience at UXperts (uxperts.mobi) conference in Belgium, a user experience focused event.
First and foremost I would like to thank Patrick Bosteels for inviting me to speak at this event. Thank you, Patrick!
Evolving from the previous Droidcon, UXperts broadened the horizons from Android, to also include Windows Phone enthusiasts; the main focus was both on the importance of User Experience in today’s technology world, but also on bringing together experts from different fields to talk mobile.
The agenda was very heterogeneous, Patrick’s idea of bringing together people from very diverse yet strongly connected work-areas is a very inspired one. There was a mix of developers, marketers, designers and business people. It was a chance to meet new people and understand and look at your own work and opinions from a different perspective.
Day 1
After two rather short flights I arrived at Brussels. I was surprised to attend a spontaneous live concert in the hotel’s lobby: a group of guests started playing instruments out of the blue. The hotel was very close to the city center, so I managed to visit a little bit. In the evening, Patrick and Karin took me, Yana and Pavel out to a local pub. We drank traditional Belgian beer, especially sweet cherry beer for the girls.
Day 2
Early in the morning we took off to the conference in nearby Leuven with Kim and her “chocolatebrown” Mini.
The schedule was very busy with short coffee and lunch breaks. The networking was encouraged by not giving anybody any badges which proved to be very efficient.
After the keynote by Patrick, Nathalie Goethals from iDrops presented their project concepts from Social Innovation Lab which were very creative and I hope they will all turn into reality as soon as possible. Another eye-opening presentation was Joris de Sutter’s who gave very interesting insights about the Belgian smartphone markets.
The agenda also included presentations about the new Windows 8 and the Metro design from Microsoft, and a presentation from Google about getting mobile. Next there were a few more technical presentations about connectivity, Windows 8 Win RT, and also solutions for cloud-powered apps.
In the second part of the day, it was the apps’ turn. Pavel spoke about Spooky Labs’ very successful games, next came our 1tap2send story, myShopi, Windows Phone great app examples, the music industry getting mobile and again the power of the cloud.
As a final touch, 4 Nokia Lumia phones were given to the fastest people in the audience to send an sms to Patrick.
In the evening we all enjoyed a delicious meal at a local restaurant, together with Tanguy de Lestre.
Day 3
I left for the airport very early, together with Yana and Pavel and had breakfast in an American diner.
The first flight to Zurich got a little delayed, and there was barely enough time to catch the connection back to Bucharest.
