A lot has changed since I attended the inaugural UX London conference in 2009. My career has blossomed as companies have moved to capture the value UX design techniques can bring to their business. The UX field itself has continued to mature at an incredible pace, so that today we can look around and find stacks of amazing resources in print and on the web which inspire us in our work.

For me the biggest change from 2011 is that I now find myself located in London. In 2009 I was an out-of-towner stepping briefly into the ongoing conversation that is the London UX community. As of last week I’m a fledgling Londoner who will be diving in at the deep-end. For me UX London 2011 represents my first leap from the metaphorical springboard.

The 2009 conference was massively valuable. The workshops I attended changed the way I worked. Peter Merholz’s Product strategy and planning tools have been invaluable in keeping my projects focused, free of scope creep and, ultimately, successful. Richard Rutter and James Box’s Wireframing Web 2.0 for Design and Definition transformed the way I communicate design, releasing me from the straight-jacket that is Visio and letting my clients to experience interaction design in a way technical documentation could never allow.

It’s interesting for me to consider how this year my workshop choices will quite different to those I made in 2009. There will be less technique and more of a leaning towards managing UX, communicating insights, collaborating with business stakeholders and defining intangibles.

At this point I’ve got my eye on:

• Kim Goodwin’s Leading UX.
• Steve Baty’s Communicating Behavioural Insights.
• The Reiger’s It’s not the device people are after, it is all the things the device enables….
• Sunni Brown’s The Art of Graphic Facilitation.