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I went to London on 15 of May to attend Usability Week 2009. I expected the speakers to share something new according to their own experience, or discuss more advanced topics, but instead I got basic information that can be found in a few usability books. Things you can find in the following books specifically:

• Don’t Make Me Think
• Information Architecture for The World Wide Web
• Letting Go of the Words
• Designing Web Navigation

Except these books offer much more than what you’d learn at the conference.

I’ve attended four courses: Usability In Practice, Fundemental Guidelines for Web Usability, Information Architecture 1 and Web Sites That Sell. All of them were disappointing except for the first one, which was rich of information based on the speakers’ experience. And I’ve met many people at the conference who shared the same opinion.

The problem with the conference seems that you won’t know the level of the courses until you get there (which is mostly “beginner” stuff). This made me think it was made for anyone BUT usability professionals, such as designers, managers, marketers…etc. People who need to learn a thing or two about usability in a short time.

If you can attend this conference on your company’s expense, have the patience to go through tons of full-of-text boring presentation slides, and don’t know much about Usability, then go for it. Otherwise, just save yourself some time and money, and read the books I’ve mentioned in the beginning of the post. Or do yourself a favor and research other more advanced conferences.

First of all, let me show you how I personally classify web developers (and I’m referring to “programmers” specifically):

1. Out-of-date college graduates: People that rely on what they’ve learned in courses they’ve taken whether in college or in more specialized diplomas. They either don’t realize that web development is a constantly evolving field, or are just too lazy to learn anything after they get their degree. Most of the time they do web development for the check at the end of the month, not because they actually enjoy what they’re doing.
2. Amateurs: The i-don’t-care-as-long-as-it-works crowd. Amateurs are those self-taught developers who rely heavily on modifying others’ applications to suit their needs, or just copy/paste code, and tweak it randomly until it works. Not only they produce terrible code, but they tend to think they’re the greatest thing ever, too.
3. Professionals: These are the ones who are passionate about what they’re doing (regardless whether they’re college graduates or self-taught), and constantly learn more, keep themselves up to date, and look for ways to improve the quality of their work, regardless of their current skill level.

I personally still have a lot left to learn in web development, but I do consider myself a “professional” based on the description above.

Most developers though, unfortunately, fall under the first two categories. Here are the reasons I think why:

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Almost everyone who knew about my plans to launch a new personal site were like “What? ANOTHER one?”, because I already had mashhoor.ws, which turned later into webinmind.net.

But no, this one is completley different. This site, unlike the older ones, won’t revolve around the blog. Sure, the blog is still important to me, but it’s not what I made this site for. I wanted to have a personal site that basically acts as a hub for all of my activities online.  There will be a portfolio section (which I’m still working on) for all of my previous work, too.

If you’re a fellow Arab and wondering why I’m still not writing in Arabic, then let’s say I don’t really like the idea of blocking a big percentage of the site’s potential visitors  by using my native language. I need my work to be visible for everyone globally.

That’s it for now. Gotta go back to work on my projects!