Today I’m encouraging all readers of this newsletter / blog: send in an idea for Quant UX Con. I’m the chair of Quant UX Con and I’d like to demystify the Call for Presentations!
First, if you’re wondering whether you can do it … you can! Quant UX Con is intended to be useful, and does not require that presentations are academic “contributions”, or theoretical, or advanced methods, or anything like that. As long as a presentation is something of interest to UX Researchers who use quant methods, it fits.
Second, the Quant UX Con audience is friendly and welcoming, and new presenters are especially welcomed! And uou can present from anywhere worldwide, around the clock in any timezone. Or join live at a watch party location.
Third, if you’re thinking, “my company doesn’t care about publishing, it won’t help me” … I can say this: presenting will help you! Maybe it won’t help in your current job, but it will help your confidence, learning, meeting people, and will quite possibly your next job. (My own publishing was quite important when I made two job changes in my career, to Google and to Amazon!)
“I don’t have anything to present!”
Ask yourself this question: what is something I learned in the past two years, that I wish I had known before? If you can answer that, then you probably have a presentation that will interest others!
Your talk might walk through a method, or give a literature review, or a case study, or a career reflection, or put together a panel discussion, or a code walkthrough … all of those are welcomed! You can find past talks here: https://www.quantuxcon.org/quant-ux-con/past-conferences
Want more specific ideas? Here are some ideas I would personally like to see, off the top of my head:
A walkthrough of a favorite but little-known R (or Python) package
How to set up a local SQL server and IDE, so you can learn SQL on your own
Scanning old PDFs to get data from them
How we tackled [difficult problem X] and the lessons we learned
Getting started with GitHub: how and why to set up your own code repo
Integrated reporting with Quarto: creating reports with reproducible code
Why Bayes?
Connecting Excel to R — using the power of R directly from Excel
Kill the chart clutter — how to make cleaner, better, more useful charts
Round table on hiring: 4 hiring managers [or 4 candidates] discuss the UXR job market today
Keeping up with the bots, addressing survey panel issues today
An alternative to Powerpoint: making slides in Beamer / R markdown / Quarto …
Put it in a notebook! Boost your collaboration with Jupyter (or Colab, or Quarto, etc.)
... and of course, traditional research methods discussions, innovations, think pieces, or specific research findings.
Do It Now … “But wait, I don’t have time!”
Yes, the CFP is due on Tuesday July 1 … but that is doable! Proposals require only an abstract with these pieces:
Summary: 2-5 paragraph abstract that describes the presentation
Audience: who will be interested?
Goal / takeaways: what will the audience get from the talk?
Once you have a concept, I’d estimate the CFP itself might take 30-45 minutes. Perhaps 60 or 120 if you really want to polish it. (FWIW, I timed myself and wrote up my own very complete proposal, directly in the CFP form, in 20 minutes.)
And you’ll hear it here first: we might extend the CFP by a few days. That has not been decided, so don’t count on it — and go ahead and start. But if it takes you slightly longer, you may be OK! Or go ahead and submit now, and then update it after you polish it.
Or worst case, write it up now and save it for next year :) But better, send it in!
How?
Find the CFP form at: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/78930/submitter
Thanks for considering it — we really do hope you’ll share ideas, and of course, please join us in November!
