I took a trip up to Iowa the week of Memorial Day to reconnect and brainstorm with the rest of my design team and soak up a little Summer in the corn fields. It was a great trip and I left with new ideas and some good laughs.

While I was there I took the opportunity to speak to the group at CRineta, a Cedar Rapids user group focusing on .net. I’ve visited the group a few times in the past to see talks that I was interested in, mainly those focusing on JQuery and JavaScript, but I had never given a presentation to them.

Due to my non experience, when I was initially asked to speak I hesitated. Then I remembered that atop my goal list for 2012 in big bold letters is the line, “Speak publicly to gain some more street cred in the community.” So I quickly, without thinking, accepted. And then the butterflies began.

Amidst planning for my trip, packing, and traveling, I managed to quickly put together what I thought to be a nice two hour presentation entitled “Listen & Be Led: Better Usability Through User Data.” The talk focused on listening to your users, through face to face and virtual methods, using that information to dictate design decisions, and then testing what you’ve created. While it’s more “designery” than most of the talks that are given at this particular group, I think it fit simply because usability transcends all interfaces.

I was surprised by how well it went. I was slightly timid, and as someone who suffers from terrible anxiety I was nervous of how my body would react to the pressure, but I held up both physically and mentally. The group was interested and engaged, asking questions and adding their experiences as the discussion moved along.

Overall it went really well. I was given feedback, some things to work on, but everyone seemed quite pleased and excited. I’ll work on my speaking skills, tweak the presentation, and I’m thinking I’ll start submitting to present it to larger groups. The competition is intense, but who knows? Maybe it’ll trip someones trigger.