UX Track Sessions
Business methods and technologies continue to evolve
rapidly. Design and development lifecycles become shorter, with more
expected, more quickly, and on tighter budgets. In this session, user
experience experts Ann Marie McCarthy and Cay Lodine offer insight into
what it takes to be agile---and when to go guerilla. Ann Marie will
offer a brief comparison of how usability and UX design professionals
operate in waterfall v. agile environments. The talk will focus on the
importance (and challenges) of gathering and incorporating user input
in short, iterative cycles--within a process involving parallel tracks
for development and design. Several research methods and tools will be
recommended that lend themselves well to an agile environment. In many
ways, the conditions of a hurried and under-resourced project are quite
similar to working in an agile environment. In the second half of this
presentation, Cay will discuss a pair of recent usability studies,
conducted on the same product within weeks of each other-- with an
extremely short timeframe and tight budget . The presentation will
highlight the difference in usability test findings, and discuss the
pros and cons of conducting multiple usability tests. Presented as a
case study, the session will include a detailed discussion of the two
techniques used--one being an independent off-site study and one being
a more formal usability test--and why the usability testing methods
were chosen. Special focus will be placed on the test
results--including common issues and unique findings. The potential
causes for these variations will be examined and the significance
discussed. The session will close with a joint Q&A session, drawing
out similarities and differences, pros and cons, of both agile and
guerilla, so that you can thrive in whatever environment you find
yourself!
Speakers:
Cay Lodine,
Ann Marie McCarthy
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Session II: Prototyping—Cheap and Easy Tricks for Better Software
Prototyping
is widely regarded as invaluable to projects of any scale. Why? Because
it leads to gathering user feedback and identifying potential usability
issues early in the design and development processes—before too much
time and money is spent writing code. This session focuses on two
straightforward prototyping methods that might lead you to set aside
your favorite high-end UI modeling tool in favor of a simpler, more
cost-effective approach to speedy iteration—and will debunk the myth:
“If it's too easy; it can't work." In the first half of this session,
Carolyn Snyder will cover paper prototyping (as per her book: Paper
Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User
Interfaces). Kyle Soucy will clue us in to the oft overlooked, and
surprisingly underutilized, value of creating prototypes in PDF. Both
paper and PDF prototypes offer a surprising degree of flexibility.
Paper prototyping—which arises from simple screen shots and/or
hand-sketched drafts of windows, menus, dialog boxes, pages, popup
messages, etc—elicits maximum user feedback with minimal effort. PDF
prototypes, with only a little more effort, allows for inclusion of
dynamic elements such as rollovers, embedded video, and calculations.
The second half of the talk explores how prototypes can be usability
tested with users, either in person or remotely—and offers a useful
framework for deciding what prototyping methods best meet the needs of
your particular project.
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Speakers:
Kyle Pero Soucy,
Carolyn Snyder
Session III: Experience Design—Lessons Learned from Games Design
While most of us involved with experience design focus on software
applications, graphical user interfaces and web sites, there is a whole
other world creating highly engaging interactive experiences: the world
of games. Delivered by avid gamers and user experience designers Sarah
Bloomer and Marise Philips, this presentation explores the way games
are designed to deliver engaging experiences, looking primarily at user
interface details, such as: How are errors presented and dealt with?
(certainly not pop-up dialog boxes) How do users interact with games?
(not always through a cursor floating across the screen) How is
navigation and orientation handled? (there are no global nav bars).
We'll delve into the process of games design, and look at the evolution
of interactive design to better understand where we are today. Popular
games, both multi- and single- player games, will be used as examples.
Some of the underlying principles of Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of Flow
will be drawn upon as a way to focus the discussion.
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Speakers:
Sarah Bloomer,
Marise Phillips
