WebVisions is a Portland-based web conference that I’ve attended twice before. Sadly, due to a crisis at the office, I was only able to attend the first day of sessions this year, which means I missed Andy Baio’s presentation on internet memes and Jeffrey Veen’s keynote.
What I did see was good, but not great. In a nutshell, I think that WebVisions is a B-grade conference that’s trying desperately to become an A-grade one. It has moments of greatness, and manages to attract some excellent speakers every year — but it’s rough around the edges, and the quality of the non-superstar sessions is sometimes startlingly bad.
Last year, I really came down heavily on Jina Bolton, a talented designer from Apple, who was giving her first major presentation. While the content was pretty solid, she had a slew of technical problems which combined with her first-time jitters to make her presentation very rough. When I wrote about it, I commented that her apparent lack of preparation made her come off as unprofessional, and I said she should have rehearsed. Jina commented on that post, and said that she had rehearsed. Whoops.
I didn’t mean to sound like a jerk, but I stood by my comments because in the end, the impression that I (and my coworkers) got was that she was unprepared. However, I regret picking on Jina so much when I was really trying to make a larger point about the conference.
I would also like to clarify that I don’t mean to belittle the presenters themselves. Public speaking is incredibly difficult to do well, and most people in our industry simply don’t have the experience or training to do so. I’m not saying that I would be a better speaker than anyone else, but if I have to pay to see someone speak, then I think it’s fair to expect a certain level of quality. Everyone wants to get their money’s worth.
This year, I found the mix to be much the same. I went to a great session by Mark Wyner called Best Practices for Permission-Based Email Communication which confirmed a lot of independent research I’d just done for a presentation at work. I also went to a nice little presentation called Design is in the Details by Bryan Veloso and Dan Rubin that I learned a few neat little tricks from.
On the other hand, a session that I had high hopes for, Designing for Video Game Marketing by Andi Rusu, was a complete disappointment. Andi’s company has done the website for several big-name video games, including Jade Empire, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Viva Piñata. What’s notable about this is that typically they get contracted early in the development process, and the only resources they receive are a few sentences describing the game. When they did Jade Empire, for instance, the description they received was “it’s a martial arts game set in ancient China, but not the real China.”
That could have been the setup to a truly fascinating presentation about how to overcome the difficulties of a client that doesn’t give you anything to work with. Instead, we got a one-hour tour of the company’s portfolio, with brief commentary on each site. I won’t make the claim again that he didn’t rehearse, but it certainly felt like he was unprepared, because the presentation was very unorganized, and it didn’t have any clear goal other than to walk us through their portfolio.
Ultimately, the difference between a real top-notch conference like An Event Apart and WebVisions is quality control. Zeldman and company only get the highest-quality speakers for their show, and all of the presentations are very refined. You can tell that the speakers have repeatedly rehearsed and really put a lot of time and effort into their sessions — and you don’t get that same feeling from most of the speakers at WebVisions.
I think this problem partly stems from the conference model that WebVisions has chosen. An Event Apart uses a single-track model where there’s only a single speaker at a time. As a result, time is at a premium, so they can only feature the cream of the crop. WebVisions, on the other hand, uses a multi-track model where there are several speakers to choose from at any given time. Because of this, even though the conference is only two days long, they really need to book something like eight days worth of speakers. Naturally, not all of them are going to be rockstars.
Leaving aside the separate issue of WebVision’s distinction between “sessions” that are included in the cost of admission, and “workshops” that cost extra, I think the decision to use a multi-track format is hurting the overall quality of the conference. I want to see WebVisions become a fantastic conference that draws crowds from around the country, but that’ll never happen with the mixed bag of speakers that it offers right now.