A guide to the Nielsen Norman Group UX Conference. How was it and is it worth the trip?

12 min readNov 7, 2021

This article is available in Russian here.

My name is Victoria, I am an interface designer (UX designer) from Odesa (Ukraine), and in July 2019 I attended the Nielsen Norman Group UX Conference. The main question I was asked upon my arrival was, “Is it worth it?” I will try to answer it in this article.

Content:
1. What is the Nielsen Norman Group UX Conference?
2. I want to go to the conference. What’s next?
3. My trip to the conference in Amsterdam — what it was like.
4. Is it worth going to the conference, and do I need a certificate?

What is the Nielsen Norman Group UX Conference?

These are 7-day conferences that Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) holds several times a year around the world. Its founders are Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman, the fathers of UX design.

The group itself constantly conducts advanced UX testing of sites and applications (using eye-tracking devices, for example), and then publishes its findings in the form of articles and paid research.

Conferences once gained popularity for reasons such as:
- Innovative knowledge for its time;
- Professionally designed trainings;
- An intensive training certificate that carries weight because of the names of the group’s founders;
- The exclusivity of the certificate in the post-Soviet space. People rarely had a certificate because of the very high price of the conference.

In Ukraine, the courses became popular largely due to the stories of pathfinders (such as Max Tkachuk), who spoke of the conference as a sobering event that opens your eyes to the true value of UX in design.

I want to go to a conference. What’s next?

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I went in 2019 instead of 2018 because while researching the website of the great popularizers of UX-science, I couldn’t figure out how to get to their famous conference :)

When you go to the site, select the menu item Training and Events, and then UX Conference, you will see a list of upcoming conferences.

Price. The price of the conference depends very much on the location. The “cheapest” are in Europe, the most expensive are in Asian countries. For example, right now the price for a conference day in London is $619, in Las Vegas — $878, and in Singapore — $931. Notice the incomplete numbers? You immediately realize that the enterprise is a commercial project, put on an assembly line.

The price of the entire conference consists of:

Prices for the trainings;
Prices for exams;
Tax (I’ll tell you below how not to pay tax. Everything is legal!);
(Optional) Hotel prices.

The conference is always held in the lobby of a major hotel, and if you have the finances, you can stay right there. The organizers give a discount.

Roughly speaking, the cost of travel to the conference provided you want to get a certificate, from 3 to 7 thousand dollars.

Lecture Selection. NN/g has a specific set of lectures that are repeated from year to year, with minor additions. And each city has a different set of lectures. So I advise you to study what is going on in what city and write out interesting points for yourself.

When you choose a city, note that there are 4 streams of lectures a day, you have to choose 1 of 4. The hardest part was choosing the streams.

There is another important criterion for selecting trainings — Specialization.

There are three types of specializations — Interaction, Management, and Research. If you go to a lecture once and do not plan to get a certificate, the specialization just hints at the direction of the training.

Certificate. You can go to one day of the conference, or all 7. But if you want to get a certificate, you need to attend at least 5 trainings and pass all 5 exams.

You specify this information when you register — choose training, and check the box “I want to take the exam”. If you pass the exams successfully, you get 5 points of certification and an automatic certificate. It looks like this:…

My certificate. It shows the trainings I took.

It can be added to your certificates on LinkedIn. It does not expire. Also, your name will appear in the list of certified on the NN/g website, and you will also receive this badge:

You can post on your resume and on LinkedIn. The company provides the necessary dimensions and embed links.

I will write below about whether or not a certificate is needed. But that’s not the end of it.

Certificate with Specialization. If you pass 5 exams in the same training specialization (Interaction, Management, Research), you will get a certificate with a specialization, that is, the name is added to, for example, Interaction Specialization. Why? I don’t know.

UX Master certificate. You can get it if you have passed 10 more trainings after the basic certificate.

Registration for the conference is relatively quick. The scariest part is the online payment. It’s not every day you send a few thousand dollars somewhere.

An important point about tax. I went to a conference in the Netherlands, so I will tell the European case. In the registration there will be a clause about the tax, which is turned off if you enter a non-EU country, and, accordingly, the conference fee does not include the tax. Soon you will receive a very confusing letter from the conference organizer. I publish at once the essence, without a relative from Europe I would not understand what is what:

We need a confirmation that you live in Ukraine, so that we do not have to charge you a deposit. The first option: you send me a proof that you work for a Ukrainian company (certificate of company registration in Ukraine). In this case we do not charge you tax, and the company address receives a zero check.

The second option — you pay the tax when you arrive at the conference, and when you leave the country, you take the money back from the Tax Free refund point at the airport.

So if you don’t want to pay a huge tax and then pick it up at the airport, a piece of paper from work comes in handy. The certificate of registration was enough, the confirmation that I work there was not useful. It is in the Ukrainian language, so I attached the same scan of the document, where I signed where the address and name of the company, as well as a translation of these data into English.

After registering, you get all the necessary emails — with confirmations, schedules, and everything else. All that’s left is to take your airline tickets and book your hotel — and off you go!

My trip to the conference in Amsterdam — what it was like.

I chose the conference in Amsterdam for three reasons:

1. The cheapest conference of the summer;
2. Visa-free regime — very convenient;
3. It was very helpful to have relatives who accommodated me.

I chose the following courses:
- The UX VP/Director;
- User Interface Principles Every Designer Must Know;
- Design Tradeoffs and UX Decision Frameworks;
- The Human Mind and Usability;
- Measuring UX and ROI;

You could have chosen Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini’s famous three-day training, but I was embarrassed by the program, which hasn’t changed in years, and the reviews like “I knew it all, but it was fun.

Upon arrival at the conference, you are given an envelope with the program, a nametag, to which are added company ribbons, if you are already certified, and a flash drive with the materials of the lecture. The organizers insist that the participants in any case do not miss the registration, which must be held every day, otherwise, you may not get access to the exam.

The nametag indicated lectures and days of attendance — for ease of communication. Foreigners were very confused by the barbaric transliteration of my name.

One training is one day.

The schedule for each day is as follows:
8 AM: Registration
9 AM: Classes begin
10:20 AM: Morning break
12:20 PM: Lunch
1:30 PM: Classes resume
3 PM: Afternoon break
5 PM: Classes end

Actually, it is:

8 AM: Everyone arrives early for breakfast — there is an abundance of food in a separate lobby — teas, coffee, pastries, yogurts and fruit. After eating, the Europeans talk to each other very intensely. No one is distracted by their phones, no one is standing quietly on the sidelines. If you saw a lone participant standing alone — most likely he was your countryman. By the way, I met a lot of Ukrainians from Lviv, and a couple of Russians. Concerning the gender membership — 50 to 50.

9 AM: Everyone runs to their rooms with a projector and desks. Each room is marked with a sign indicating the lecture. If the lecture involves teamwork, the desks are shifted. In my case, each lecture came with a biodegradable notebook and pen and Swiss chocolate.

10:20 AM Break. Again teas/coffee, goodies and 40 minutes of networking. I want to note that when I said “I am from Ukraine” I got a lot of “Oh wow!” and “And I am from boring *any other country*” in response.

11:00 AM: Second lecture.

12:20 PM: Lunch. It seems as if 80% of the price of the conference is to pay for the food. For example, we had a buffet and one of the items was, quite literally, a mountain of red fish, which they offered to ply themselves with a huge spatula.

1:30 PM: Third lecture.

3 PM: Another break, this time for an hour. It is usually accompanied by an unusual snack. One time there were mini kebabs, the other time spicy cheeses.

4 PM: The last lecture.

In the breaks it is offered to buy brand-name research NN/g

What follows are my subjective impressions.

Every lecture is perfect. The text is rehearsed hundreds of times, the program is so accurately scheduled that the lecturers have time to talk to the audience, and complete the module of information exactly a minute before the break.

Excellent presentations, though on each slide there is a red typeface request not to pass the material to third parties.

I made an outline of each lecture in Evernote. Some were purely theoretical and some involved activity.

The material is presented in a very light and uncomplicated manner. This was unusual, since in university you get used to large and complex pieces of information.

Here the information is presented in a wonderful way, especially for easy digestion and memorization.

But the activities were clearly simplified. Perhaps this is common in American education, but if the lecture included an activity, it gave the impression of being composed not for UX specialists, but for elementary school children.

For example, task was to perform several actions at once, like raising my arm and squatting on one leg to demonstrate limitations.

It was felt that the activities were done not to assimilate the material, but to create an impression of the lectures as an “exciting event.

Exams. Half an hour after the end of the last lecture, the link to the exam comes in the mail. It is an average of 30 questions, with variants of answers. The difficulty? If you listened to the lecture and took notes, the exam is very easy. If you for some reason listened to part of the lecture (which I think is highly unlikely, the lectures are too good), you can fail the exam.

Is it worth to attend the conference, and do I need a certificate?

So, the conference from NN/g is an expensive and high-quality event on UX topics. But is it worth the money and a trip abroad?

You should go to the conference if:

You are very interested in the topic of UX, but you are only familiar with superficial and simple materials, and you would like to talk about this topic with cutting-edge experts.
Guests included product designers from giants like Booking.com, Siemens, etc. And NN/g information is unique because they gather huge focus groups, use equipment and controlled experiments that you can’t replicate;
You want to see lectures of the highest level. Tired of “watering down” at questionable speaking engagements in your city? Or are you a design educator who wants to improve your speaking skills? This may seem like a strange reason to go to the conference, but my strongest impression of the conference is the quality of the lectures — “this is how you should present information!” Such an experience expands your ceiling of requirements for yourself and other lecturers;
The brain wants a shake-up and intensive UX training. Feeling like you’ve reached certain heights in your profession, but haven’t strained your head in a while? Troubled by an obsessive sense of degradation and your city can’t offer Middle+ or Senior courses? Take two weeks off. Spend 7 days on a conference and 7 on tourism and recreation. It’s the best vacation option and the best shake-up for a design professional;
Your resume lacks evidence of UX orientation. I’ve heard an opinion about a bad attitude towards people who take 5 trainings specifically for “paper”. I fundamentally disagree with this approach. A certificate is a confirmation of your goals, interests, desire to thoroughly immerse yourself in a particular topic.

The NN/g certificate is a demonstration of the designer’s specialization, the efforts he has made to become a specialist in this subject, proof of the considerable investment of time and mental resources in self-study.

And I think certificates are worth getting if the topic of the course is relevant and important to you.

Regarding the marketing move NN/g that makes you buy 5 lectures and not 3 — it’s not a “low-brow product”, and there is no situation where you are interested in 3 lectures, but because of the certificate you have to take 5. I really wanted all 7 days, but it was too expensive. And I wouldn’t have enjoyed the four days of the conference..

You should NOT go to the conference if:

You want very fresh knowledge. Unfortunately, if you work as a UX designer and are self-educated, you are unlikely to leave the conference with a pleasant dizziness from new and incredible facts. Your knowledge and experience will be structured, take shape, after the conference you will be inspired and full of energy to improve your approach to work! But the novelty is most likely not to be there;
You hope that the certificate will help you in your job search. I’ve heard a lot of opinions that when companies see a certificate, they will start fighting for you. In fact, you still need to “sell” your certificate — tell them about it, explain its value. Not everyone knows about NN/g, especially inexperienced recruiters. The trip will improve your resume and your value as a professional. But expecting you to invest 5k to get a good job will lead to disappointment;
The cost of the trip is very high for you, and you need to go into decent debt to pay for it. The game is not worth the candle.
You hope for a life-changing experience. There are a lot of rumors and exaggerated impressions around the conference. Five years ago it really was unbelievable and did not compare to the current level of knowledge of designers. But now the Internet is full of articles and experience of specialists from all over the world and Facebook is full of design conferences. If you’re not a junior, there’s not going to be an explosion.

At Nielsen Norman Group UX Conference I spent 5 days filled with quality content, unexpected results of UX research, inspiration from leadership lectures, delicious food and communication with foreign experts about design for government portals and “not so pleasant stakeholders”. Every morning I would run to breakfast at the Movenpick Hotel along the Amsterdam waterfront, and in the evening after the lectures I would greedily leaf through my notes, trying to memorize every sentence thoroughly.

Such experiences deserve proper attention.

P.S. European visitors to the conference told me they thought the price was quite “reasonable”