Neuro-usability Workshop

Some time ago I was wondering how to make the world of IT and NLP work together. And there it was, a small conference called Neuro-usability Workshop, organized by YUUX and Neuralia in one of the Warsaw's hotels. The topic was the effective ways of measuring web applications' usability using neuroscience.
We arrived at the conference just a few minutes before it started. There were not that many people, which was kind of surprising for me. I thought this was a very hot topic.
First disappointment was that one of the key presentations was cancelled due to health issues of the presenter. Thankfuly, the orgranisers were thoughful enough to collect email addresses from people, record the presentation at a later time and send it to everyone. I forgot to leave my email so if you know how to get the presentation please let me know :-)
Then there was a short walk-thru on the methods used to measure our subconscious reactions, including MEG, fMRI, ETR and so on. Strenghts and weaknesses of each method was covered. This was pretty basic stuff, but still very interesting. People familiar with the subject probably were bored with it, but newcomers sure found this introduction very helpful.
And that's when I should have left the conference. If I have left then I would say it was a fairly good conference.
The last part was close to be a disaster. It was supposed to be a simple case study showing how neuroscience can help with usability. First of all, there was no clear thesis. I felt like they had no idea what they are trying to prove. The research went like that: first they checked which values did the respondents associate with each store. Then they gave each respondent some basic tasks to do in both stores. And finally they checked how did the association change after the respondents completed their tasks. To be honest, that proved nothing. The respondents were exposed to each store for just about 5 to 10 minutes and the definition of success and failure was not clear. All we could see there was some poorly designed tests and misinterpreted data. Instead of showing how neuroscience can help to improve web sites, they tried to use it to compare how brand perception changes over very short exposure to a website. Furthermore one of the stores was internet-only and the other had a lot of physical stores also and a much stronger brand among young people. The test group was not the best one either. It's true that they had little funds to do a real research, but still they could have done a much better job with the resources they already had.
That's all I wanted to say. I don't regret going to the conference, but only because there still aren't that many meetings on that subject, so better this than nothing. And there was free lunch...