UsabilityNJ World Usability Day - Idea Market Guidelines

Below are the Idea Market guidelines for the UsabilityNJ World Usability Day Celebration on November 14, 2006.

Procedure

As an idea market facilitator, you'll post a Big Question (and perhaps a couple of related smaller ones) on your easel. Participants in the meeting will move between easels, discussing the Big Questions where they have an interest and perhaps some background to share. As you gather comments, further questions, and points of discussion, you'll fill up your tear sheets with ideas that you can use to build an informational article.

Following the event, you can work up the material you gathered into a brief article for the UsabilityNJ website – and for whatever other use you have for it, such as further research, publication, or maybe even a presentation at a future UsabilityNJ meeting.

You can see some samples of idea market afterthoughts from the 2006 UPA Conference.

Making a Proposal

If you would like to propose an idea market for the New Jersey World Usability Day event, send a brief email with your Big Question to apreston [at] usabilitynj [dot] org by October 15, 2006. We will get back to you with confirmation and instructions about when you need to be at the Sarnoff Corporation Auditorium for the event, and where to send your sponsorship check ($15). We will provide easels, tear sheets, and markers, but if you have a favorite brand, you may want to just bring them with you. Student proposals will be sponsored by the chapter, and all Idea Market sponsors will be listed in the program booklet.

History of Idea Markets

Ulf Andersson, the originator of idea markets (and member of UPA), created the session format after attending a conference during which he realized that some of the most interesting and useful discussions happened between sessions. Ulf, a co-founder of INTECOM (the International Society of Technical Communication Societies), developed Idea Markets for INTECOM's first international conference.

Ulf wanted "a way to arrange a conference consisting of an entire, long break," a format in which attendees could easily find the people they were most interested in talking with about the topics they were most interested in discussing. Ulf's solution, idea markets, creates a temporary environment in which people from different backgrounds not only learn from the experience of others but also generate new ideas.