Bookstore Education Conferences
End-to-end design of two national, multi-day professional development conferences each year
Role: Director of Education
Organization: American Booksellers Association
Years: 2022–2025
Focus Areas: Learning Design · Experience Design · Service Design
Tools: Google Workspace, Calendly, Zoom, Drupal, Monday.com, Swoogo, SurveyMonkey
Team: Led a three-person Education team; collaborated with Event Logistics, Marketing, Membership, and the Executive suite.
As Director of Education, I led the end-to-end design of two national, multi-day professional development conferences each year. I was tasked to oversee the central education programming directive, from identifying member needs and shaping the program structure, to securing speakers and authors, coordinating on-site logistics, and ensuring the content lived on well beyond the event itself.
I approached these gatherings as design challenges, blending UX, learning experience design, and service design to create intuitive, empowering, and inclusive learning environments for a community with diverse roles, business models, and experience levels. The result: industry-leading programs with improved attendee experience, increased peer connection, and a flexible, accessible library of educational content that extended the benefits of the conferences long after the events.
Discover
Understanding the Problem
When I stepped into the role, I inherited two national events with long histories, loyal followings, and high expectations: Winter Institute and Children’s Institute. These were already beloved by attendees, the kind of gatherings that felt like homecomings for the independent bookselling community. But as the industry evolved, it was clear that more was needed to ensure the continued impact and success of the conferences, particularly as these events serve as some of the only professional development platforms for independent booksellers—a profession without traditional academic pathways or credentialing, but rich with passionate people eager to learn and grow their businesses.
The challenge wasn’t to “fix” something broken. It was to reimagine something treasured so that it could serve a more diverse, more time-pressed, and more varied group of booksellers than ever before.
Attendees arrived from every region and store model. A pop-up shop in a dense urban neighborhood had vastly different needs than a legacy brick-and-mortar store in a rural town. Many attendees wore multiple hats—owner, buyer, HR lead, event planner—sometimes all before lunch. Skill levels ranged from “just opened my bookstore” to “I’ve been doing this for 30 years.” Some sought strategic vision; others needed ready-to-use tools for the moment they returned home.
The learning challenge was to:
Serve an increasingly diverse and evolving bookselling community.
Deliver relevant, actionable programming across a wide range of roles and experience levels.
Create a cohesive, human‑centered attendee journey.
The conferences themselves were complex ecosystems:
Multi-day programs packed with keynote talks, education sessions, author receptions, and networking events.
Dozens of sessions to design, panel, and develop.
A constant balancing act between formal learning, peer exchange, and the serendipity of meeting the right person at the right time.
The question that guided my work from the beginning was:
How can we design a national learning environment that feels as intuitive and human-centered as the best independent bookstores—true third places where people connect, build relationships, and belong?
Context: The Two Conferences
Winter Institute
ABA’s premier four-day annual conference, bringing together over 900 booksellers along with hundreds of authors, publishers, and industry partners.
A four-day event dedicated to children’s bookselling, with additional general sessions for stores of all types, drawing 500+ attendees.
Children’s Institute
Planning for each event was a year-round effort. Because timelines overlapped, our team was effectively running two large-scale events in parallel every year.
Research and Needs Mapping
To ground the conferences in real bookseller needs, I gathered insights through multiple channels:
Advisory councils as SMEs and sounding boards: We regularly engaged with internal advisory groups to review early session descriptions, solicit feedback on topic selection, and conduct immediate post-event debriefs on everything from programming to logistics.
Surveys and interviews: Pre- and post-event surveys surfaced learning priorities and unmet needs; one-on-one conversations unpacked the “why” behind patterns.
Persona development: I mapped role-based personas (owners, frontline staff, managers, event leads) across career stages and store sizes to guide programming and flow decisions.
Journey Mapping: We identified common pain points, from registration to session engagement.
Audit of Past Conferences: I analyzed session content and evaluation data to ensure we delivered foundational learning for new attendees while avoiding excessive repetition year over year.
Behavioral data tracking: I introduced session-level attendance tracking to better understand real-time attendee behavior, so we could see not just what people said they wanted, but what they actually chose.
Competitive Audit
I studied both peer and adjacent-industry events to spot opportunities:
Regional bookseller association conferences: Valuable content, but reliant on bookseller panelists to build sessions without instructional design support—challenging for busy store leaders and uneven for learners.
Industry parallels (RISE, ALA, AWP): Demonstrated the value of diversified formats, intentional schedule flows, and clear event framing; helped surface emerging topics affecting booksellers.
A Personal Connection
My commitment was rooted in my own experience. As a younger bookseller, I followed ABA’s conferences avidly, hearing colleagues speak about it with near-reverence—an event that could convince someone to make bookselling their life’s work. Because attendance was capped at three booksellers per store to keep the experience intimate and equitable, it took ten years before I could attend. When I finally walked through the doors, it exceeded every expectation. I built close relationships with innovative peers, formed friendships that continue to this day, and brought home insights that helped my stores not just survive, but thrive. I knew how transformative the experience could be and I was determined to design programs that delivered that impact for others, whether it was their first conference or their fifteenth.
Define
Framing the Problem
From the start, the challenge was not to produce a schedule of sessions, but to shape an experience that would be both deeply valuable and broadly accessible. ABA’s conferences have a reputation as the pinnacle professional gatherings for independent booksellers, but reputation is fickle; misalignment among programming, logistics, and community expectations could erode what made these events so meaningful.
Core Problem
How might we design a national bookselling conference that delivers transformative, career-shaping learning for attendees while balancing the diverse needs of booksellers, ABA leadership, and publisher sponsors—and extend its value to members unable to attend?
Constraints Shaping the Problem
Design decisions are rarely made in a vacuum:
Diverse attendee needs: Booksellers arrived at the conferences with vastly different goals and needs, so the programming needed to feel tailored yet cohesive—operational best practices, creative inspiration, and network-building.
Panelist and content development limitations: Most panelists were working booksellers with deep expertise but limited time and little formal instructional design training. Left alone, they risked delivering insightful but not actionable sessions.
Venue and budget constraints: Rotating host cities meant new floor plans and capacities each time—often in hotel spaces that strained crowd flow. Sponsorships were vital but carried expectations for author visibility that needed careful alignment with the educational mission.
Data gaps: Prior reliance on surveys and anecdotes—without session-level attendance data—meant risk of designing to stated preferences rather than real behavior.
These constraints became creative catalysts, pushing us to design solutions within tight boundaries while keeping the attendee experience at the center.
Design Goals
These goals became the foundation for program development and logistical planning.
Prioritize actionable education: Concrete, store-ready takeaways in every session.
Balance inspiration and practicality: Pair industry-wide conversations with operational how-tos.
Reduce cognitive load: Clear navigation, pacing, and session framing.
Balance high-energy and quiet zones: Support multiple learning styles and energy needs.
Raise the quality bar: Ensure speakers deliver inclusive, practical, actionable content.
Ensure access beyond the event: Use formats that fit frontline realities.
Maintain community connection: Embed peer-to-peer moments throughout.
Develop
Designing the Solution
Throughout the development of the conferences, constraints became creative catalysts. If panelists couldn’t devote extensive prep time, we provided scaffolding. If attendees wanted networking but skipped discussion formats, we redesigned the schedule to foster organic interaction. If venues were tight, we staggered program flow to reduce bottlenecks. Above all, I anchored decisions in the belief that a conference should not just transfer knowledge but also spark lasting relationships and ignite the ambition to build a career in independent bookselling.
Experience Architecture
The conference was shaped as a living story rather than a loose set of sessions. Influenced by Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering, the program guided attendees from curiosity to connection, through learning, and into action.
Purpose & Emotional Arc: Breakfast keynotes set an energizing tone each morning, breakout sessions built momentum through the day, and evening author events and networking gatherings closed with celebration and connection.
Facilitation & Flow: Session formats balanced energy and reflection—education panels, inspirational keynotes, and dynamic networking bursts—while adapting to the room’s mood to maintain engagement.
Before, During, and After: Anticipation was built through pre-event communications, programming evolved in real time to meet attendee needs, and post-event connection was sustained through a robust audio series and shared resources.
Metrics of Meaning: Success was measured not only in numbers, but in post-session linger, follow-up conversations, and the action tools attendees carried back to their stores.
Multi-Layered Input Channels
Development was intentionally collaborative and iterative, grounded in my own experience as an attendee and validated through real-world feedback loops. I used ABA’s advisory councils as rotating lenses through which every programming idea was examined:
Booksellers Advisory Council: Representing a nationwide cross-section of independent booksellers.
Board of Directors: Ensuring alignment with the ABA’s mission and strategic direction.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee: Safeguarding representation, accessibility, and equity.
Children’s Group Advisory Council: Advocating for children’s bookselling needs.
I ran early lists of session descriptions through these groups, sought targeted feedback on sensitive or complex topics, and met immediately after each conference to capture unfiltered impressions before memory softened the edges.
Persona-Driven Programming Pathways
I mapped attendee personas based on role, interests, and experience level. Each breakout block was then reviewed against these personas to ensure that:
Every attendee had at least one high-value choice per time slot.
Content addressed role-specific needs, from owners seeking financial strategy to frontline booksellers seeking foundational learning.
The full schedule offered a balanced mix of formats and topic depths.
To check my assumptions, I conducted schedule “walk-throughs” with bookstore owners and managers from across the country, asking how they would navigate the program and, crucially, what they would advise their teams to attend. This surfaced gaps—especially where roles overlap differently by store format—which we corrected before finalizing.
Bridging Stated Needs and Actual Behavior
Past programs relied heavily on post-event surveys. I suspected a gap between what attendees said they wanted and what they did, so I implemented session-level attendance tracking. The data confirmed the mismatch: although surveys suggested high demand for formal Idea Exchanges, attendees often skipped them for panels or lectures. Follow-up interviews surfaced a perceived “ROI gap”: prepared sessions felt like a surer bet for limited time.
Rather than abandon peer learning, we restructured it. We stopped running Idea Exchanges opposite high-interest panels and instead designed informal exchange time into the passing periods themselves. By lengthening passing periods to 30 minutes—long enough for meaningful hallway conversations but short enough to keep people on-site and engaged, we created organic networking windows without forcing competition with prepared sessions. My philosophy was simple: prepared sessions provided the spark; hallway conversations fanned it into flame.
Programmatic Accessibility Considerations
The increased passing periods supported not only logistical flow but also the well-being of neurodivergent attendees. Longer breaks created essential opportunities to decompress, process information, and recharge before the next session. Room layouts were also intentionally adapted for accessibility. In several cases, theater seating was replaced with classroom-style setups, offering tables for note-taking, sketching, or other focus aids. This change better served Read/Write learners and neurodivergent participants who process information more effectively while doodling or engaging in kinesthetic note-making. These design choices ensured that accessibility was not an afterthought but an integrated part of the attendee experience.
Raising the Quality Bar
Analysis of our attendee feedback and the competitive audit revealed a recurring issue across bookselling conferences: uneven panel quality, especially on technical topics (finance, HR, inventory). Panelists were often high-performing booksellers with deep subject matter expertise but limited time or instructional design skills.
Based on this understanding, we shifted to a more hands-on approach to session development. I hired team members with instructional design expertise to partner with panelists on learning objectives, structure, and facilitation. The result: clearer takeaways, better engagement, and more consistent sessions—even when panelists had limited prep time.
Curating and Supporting Speakers
Beyond schedule design, I was responsible for securing and preparing speakers:
Pitched publishers for authors when their books aligned with event and session themes.
Selected from nominated speakers to balance expertise, perspective, and audience resonance.
Served as primary liaison with publicists; anticipated logistical and technical needs.
Rehearsed with speakers to refine timing and clarify key takeaways.
Provided on-site support as their point person.
This process ensured that speakers arrived prepared, comfortable, and fully aligned with the goals of the conference, resulting in sessions that felt intentional, cohesive, and worth the travel investment for attendees.
Deliver
Final Design & Outcomes
With the structure in place, delivery focused on crafting a high-quality live experience and extending impact far beyond the event.
A Balanced, Navigable Schedule
Persona-based planning paid off. Across roles and experience levels, attendees found sessions that felt directly relevant. Hallway and coffee-line conversations reflected the intended balance: operational depth, creative ideas, and genuine community connection.
Partnering panelists with staff trained in instructional design produced better-organized presentations and clearer takeaways. Presenters reported feeling more confident; rooms stayed engaged; discussions spilled into the hallways.
Stronger, More Consistent Session Delivery
Smooth Flow and Better Networking
Thirty-minute passing periods changed the energy. Instead of rushing between rooms, people lingered to continue conversations sparked in sessions. This unstructured networking became a frequently cited highlight in casual conversations and survey comments.
Data-Driven Learning for Future Events
Session-level attendance tracking ran successfully, giving the organization its first detailed look at actual attendee behavior. The data informed subsequent program refinements and supported smart real-time adjustments.
Extending Accessibility Beyond the Event
Conference travel is expensive, and many stores can’t send staff. Historically, select session videos lived behind a member login on the organization’s website, but the website’s IA made content difficult to find and long-form video formats weren’t ideal for frontline workers with little uninterrupted, private computer time.
To make conference content accessible to booksellers on the go—whether receiving shipments, traveling to offsite events, or listening in personal time—I created BookED, ABA’s Bookstore Education Podcast. In this role, I:
Coordinated with videographers, event staff, and panelists to capture clean audio from every session.
Edited and mastered recordings in Audacity, recorded introductions, and packaged episodes with clear metadata.
Managed syndication through Libsyn, scheduling regular releases and supplementing with archival content to provide continuous, year-round learning opportunities.
This shifted post-event content from a hard-to-access archive to a flexible, portable library of learning—extending the reach of the conferences to every member bookstore, regardless of budget or travel ability. The podcast gained steady listenership and became a go-to resource for booksellers seeking professional development on their own schedule, with one bookseller gushing: “We have been listening to the ABA podcast almost religiously…and it has been INSANELY inspiring and helpful.” - Bookseller from Florida
Through these delivery efforts, the conferences became not only a transformational in-person experience, but also a living educational resource for year-round education supporting the independent bookselling community.
Reflection
Designing ABA’s conferences was an absolute highlight of my career. The work required balancing strategic goals with human experience, navigating constraints without compromising quality, and making hundreds of interconnected decisions that shaped how people moved, learned, and connected. I drew on service design and instructional strategy to craft experiences that honored the operational and emotional realities of independent booksellers and helped move the industry forward, one learner at a time.
Key Takeaways for UX Practice:
Design for real people, not fictional characters: Ensure every role and perspective has a clear path through the experience.
Prototype in context: Conversations, walk-throughs, or schedule drafts can surface critical insights.
Treat constraints as creative fuel: Limitations often spark the most elegant solutions.
Build for connection as well as content: Relationships forged in shared spaces amplify lasting impact.
When we design with empathy, intention, and attention to flow, we don’t just host an event or launch a product—we create experiences that leave a lasting mark on people’s lives.