This year’s IIA Congress was a very smooth affair. Though we had to trek out to Killiney, the journey to the posh south side was certainly worth it. The big challenge of these type of conferences is that they tend to be very passive things.

You mostly just sit and listen. There’s only so much of that you can digest, and it’s difficult for the speakers to talk about stuff of interest to everyone. As Fred from DoneDeal said, he goes mostly hoping for inspiration. And of course, the freebies and gifts. (I’m looking forward to my bottle of champagne, courtesy of RealEx.)

Here’s a photo of Morgan giving away a free weekend at the Brooklodge to Natalie O’Toole from Trocaire:

To get away from the sit-and-listen approach, the afternoon had a couple hours of break-out sessions, covering 8 different topics. I chaired a session on web analytics, which from my vantage seemed to do a decent job of engaging the audience in a bit of a discussion. It’d be interesting to hear how the attendees felt about those breakout session.

The theme of this year was “Buy, Sell & Do business online”, but I think an undercurrent of many of the talks was the importance of the user experience when you are trying to sell online.

Here are a few points I took away:

• Dermot Nolan from Bank of Ireland tried to encourage everyone to do more online banking, not just for personal accounts, but for business accounts. It saves you money and time (and it saves the banks money too). An interesting statistic he mentioned was that IT/Software businesses have jumped up to 3rd on the list of most popular startups in Ireland right now.
• Aileen from Amas talked about trends in internet usage in Ireland. She quoted Google’s Zeitgeist which showed that in March 2007 the top 3 search terms in Ireland were “Creative Ireland”, “Louth County Council”, and the “Health Service Executive”. Number 5 is “Slownik angielsko polski”. Huh? If you look more closely at Google’s site, it turns out that these are actually the top gaining queries, which Google defines as: “Gaining queries are those keywords whose popularity has increased the most in comparison with the previous month.” That makes more sense.

What about the user-experience theme?

John McElligott of eBay Ireland gave an overview of what they’re doing in Ireland. He put up a list of what people are looking for online (or maybe it was more like why they use ebay, I can’t remember). The number one reason, “by a long way”, was ease of completing the transaction.

Then Ronan Harris of Google spoke about the new Google Checkout service. One of the motivators for the creation of their tool was the poor quality of checkouts around they web. What’s holding back ecommerce? It takes too long to check out, there are too many accounts, and a fear of sharing personal info.

Boo.com doesn’t bother with user testing, or do they?

Then Ray Nolan talked about his new boo.com site. His motivator of setting up the new boo was based on the poor experience users had when previously looking for hotels. Start at Google, then to Expedia, back to Google, then to the hotel website, then to Trip Advisor, and then finally to wherever they decided to book. So he created the new Boo to try to put everything you need in one place, and with all the latest sophistication in UI design.

I asked Ray if they did any user testing, and he effectively laughed the question off. Of course not. They don’t do anything as formal as that (in so many words). But then later we were both up at the bar ordering drinks. And there he mentioned,

“Well, we didn’t do user testing, but we did go into hostels and offer free beer to anyone who would sit down and use our website while we watched them.”

In other words, they did user test their stuff, they just don’t call it that because it’s not done in a lab setting.

Any other thoughts on the day? Any good titbits people learned?