As you may know, we invited Fluxible attendees to complete a feedback form to help us understand what you all thought of your Fluxible experience. As revealed last week, we received a great deal of feedback, some of which we shared at that time. It’s time to share more about what we learned.

We ended up with a phenomenal 50% response rate, and we thank all of you who took the time to share your thoughts with us. We deliberately kept some of the questions open-ended to encourage you to write whatever you wanted. The comments were terrific. We will be considering all of them in our planning for the next Fluxible.

“Will you attend Fluxible again next year?” & “Will you attend Fluxible again next year?”

These two were pretty straightforward. The responses were overwhelmingly positive. Many thanks!

“Tell us what you enjoyed about Fluxible”

This is where it starts to get more interesting. Surprisingly, for an open ended question, there were some strong patterns that were easy to quantify.

For example, 77% of the responses specifically mentioned the speakers, while 51% commented on the socializing/networking/community. Clearly the focus of the conference was a big hit, while the opportunity to meet and talk to people was also widely appreciated. 38% of you mentioned the music on Saturday — the Festival of Interstitial Music – with some of doing so in glowing terms. I’m pretty sure we’ll want to do that again!

Other things that you clearly enjoyed include the coffee selection, the learning opportunity, and the range of topics. Somewhat smaller numbers of you mentioned the venues, the posters, and the scale of the event.

“Tell us what we should do differently next time”

This was, we had hoped, potentially the richest area for feedback, and that’s what it turned out to be. The feedback here was much more diverse and doesn’t break down quite as easily, but was insightful and illuminating. There were a few themes that emerged, though.

16% of you commented on the technical issues on Saturday morning, though many were very forgiving. We’ve since learned more about what happened with the sound, and would like to share that now. Apparently a new sound board had been installed at the Conrad Centre some weeks prior to Fluxible, and had been working perfectly up to and including a big event on the night before Fluxible. On Saturday morning, the sound board failed. It took the venue’s technical crew some time to address, which they finally did by removing the new board and re-installing the old one. Similarly, delays in cleaning up from the night before led to delays in setting up our event. Once resolved, everything was fine, but we understand the concerns that some of you expressed.

There were several comments on the length of the day on Saturday, and how it felt too long. Relating to that, the break for dinner meant that some of you decided to miss the social event at city hall on Saturday evening. We’re definitely looking at ways to address this for next year.

A smaller number of you said that you would like the workshops to more hands-on. Obviously not everyone was able to attend every workshop, but we do understand that some were less hands-on than expected, and we could have communicated that more effectively.

Interestingly, we had requests that talks be both longer and shorter, and that the breaks be both longer and shorter.

There were many more specific details that we will absolutely be considering as we make our preparations for the next Fluxible.

“If you could be the Chief UX Officer on a spaceship, which one would it be?”

Finally, here are the totals for the selections that were made in response to the spaceship question. Not every submission included an answer to this, which was quite a reasonable response to such a silly question.

  • Millenium Falcon: 16

  • Serenity: 10

  • Enterprise (but not NCC-1701-E): 9

  • What's a spaceship?: 8

  • Galactica: 7

  • Heart of Gold: 6

  • Discovery: 2

  • Nostromo: 2

  • Thunderbird 3: 1