It’s great to get a fresh perspective on user experience practice once in a while, and my recent trip to Berlin for UX Camp Europe allowed me this opportunity in an international context.

More than four hundred user experience (UX) practitioners and enthusiasts gathered in Berlin last weekend for the second pan-European ‘unconference’ UX Camp Europe 2011. The philosophy of barcamps and unconferences is that all attendees should also participate in one way or another, either by giving a talk or at least by engaging in discussions. Furthermore, these events encourage informal presentation formats as well as open sharing and discussions.

The two days were packed with great talks and workshops, with plenty of partying before and after the event.

Each day there were eight parallel streams, and so there was plenty of choice of sessions to attend. I started the first day by attending two sessions on Agile UX, gave my talk on communicating and selling UX design deliverables, then attended an inspiring afternoon session on change management and content strategy, a workshop on the KJ method (collaborative prioritisation method), and Eric Reiss’s keynote 10 war stories you won't see on Slideshare.

Day two, I chose Actionable Web Analytics, Responsive Designs, a session on researching and prioritising user tasks in design, and two sessions by Tobias Jordans - on Axure specifications and on small interaction design details that make a big impact on the user’s experience.

The number of attendees across the two days and the quality and variety of the presentations suggest that UX is thriving across the whole Europe.

Thanks to all the participants and organisers for making it such a wonderful event. We will hopefully see each other again next year.

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(Coverage of UX Camp Europe 2011 on Lanyrd.)

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox summarises the results of the Nielsen Norman Group's second study into the usability of iPad apps and websites accessed on an iPad.

For me the most interesting insight was that unless the primary user lives alone, their tablet is likely to be shared with their partner, children and visiting friends. NN/g concludes that "Tablets are shared devices" and that when designing apps for a tablet "you should assume that you're designing for a multi-user device."

Yet few tablet operating systems provide good support for shared use (driven by its need to control access to sensitive business data, the Blackberry Playbook is a rare exception). And this can lead to significant problems for users. Young children accidentally change settings, delete work emails and reset the game scores of older siblings. Teens move apps between folders, access age-inappropriate games and media, and use stored account and payment information to make unauthorised purchases. Partners must frequently log in and out of each other's Facebook, Twitter, Google and other accounts.

Working your way through these sharing problems is hard work for even the geekiest of us. And while some apps do provide simple ways to control access to multiple Facebook, Twitter and eMail accounts, users must learn the sharing features of each app and create a separate profile in each one.

This again demonstrates how important it is to investigate and understand people’s real behaviour and contexts of use when designing for new platforms.

So when we design tablet apps, we must consider carefully, whether and how to support shared use. Will users each want their own settings and data? Will adults need to protect some sensitive data from their children? If your app connects to a website or web service, will different users need to connect to different accounts? If you do need separate user profiles, how will you store and how will your users manage them?

NN/g's research and the multi-user support within many apps, suggest that better support for shared use should be a priority for tablet operating systems. The access experience could be very simple: tap your name and enter a password/code, or even just show your face to the camera. And while each app would still need to decide how it handles multiple users, standard APIs and common interface guidelines would make life easier for designers and developers. And most importantly, make the experience of sharing more simple and more consistent for users.