Insights into “the sausage-making” of an event geared toward the best developers in the world.

It’s June and we’ve been deep in the planning and Creative Design for the Microsoft PDC09 conference to be held in Los Angeles this November. Working with an incredible team, as the “Creative Director” for the conference, I’m intimately engaged in helping guide the aesthetic and user-experience of the conference itself.

Since 1991, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) has been Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects. Attend the PDC to understand the future of the Microsoft platform and to exchange ideas with fellow professionals. You’ll learn about upcoming products, meet Microsoft’s leaders and top engineers, write some code, and be inspired! Unplug for a few days and think about the future.

I’ve worked for Microsoft for years, but also have deep experience on the Agency side, working for clients on projects similar to this … user-research, creative exploration, styleguide, website wireframes, visual comps, markup.  But now I find myself on the client-side, sometimes having to force myself to quell the desire to “just get in there and do it myself.” 

We’ve engaged the Creative Agency, WorkTank, to help with the creation of the styleguide, website architecture, and front-end build, as well as producing all the necessary marketing and collateral materials to help support the conference and the conference attendees.

In this and forthcoming series of Opinions, it’s my goal to give attendees and those interested in building experiences like this large conference, as well as an online experience which features live streaming video, archived video, social-networking, and mobile.  Throughout the lead-up and through the conference itself, I’ll try and provide insights into “the sausage-making” of an event like this, specifically geared toward the designers (but, of course, hopefully appealing to everybody.)

One of the things we’re going to be focusing on is the session-browsing experience.  We found that at PDC08 and MIX09 both, finding and viewing sessions was less-than-intuitive.  We’re spending particular attention to this aspect, and hope to greatly improve the experience.

Working on an event site like this is a particularly interesting series of problems, specifically centered around the fact we have two very specific demographics we’re trying to accommodate.  Firstly, we’re trying to attract the “elite developers of the world” to the event, to join the conversation, learn, and collaborate.  Before the conference we need to provide them with the information they need and *a reason to come.*  Sometimes this is particularly difficult as we need to keep some announcements behind the curtain until the event – the very announcements that would attract developers to an event like this.

Additionally, we need to provide this group an easy way to find sessions they’d like to attend, create a schedule of sessions they’re interested in, update them with new conference-related information.  Often this information is not actually available until sometimes fairly close to the event, presenting another challenge.

And with one team focused on the website, we also will be concurrently working on developing the actual conference experience, which includes everything from staging and signage to t-shirts, swag-bags, and everything that goes in them.  Sometimes working with the agency on these items is a refreshing break from the bits and pixels of working on the web-experience.  While working in print can be frustrating at times, it’s nice to change media from time-to-time.

The second “customer” we’re trying to reach is the developer that may not be able to actually attend the event, but still wants to experience the conference as if they had been there.  We still need to provide the “virtual attendee” an intuitive way to browse the sessions, but for these attendees, the online-experience becomes even more crucial.  We do our best to provide live-streaming of the keynotes, 24-hour turnaround for the on-demand sessions, and various ways for download and sharing of the sessions, including a “download all” option, so you can see everything.

So, as you can see from the above, there’s already a considerable amount of thought going into the event, and we’re just getting started.  We welcome your feedback and ideas on how we can make the PDC09 experience the best for everyone, both at the event and online.

Have you attended a PDC before?  What was your experience?  Let us know and be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest updates from MIX Online.