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Usability | Web Directions

Podcasts, slides and other presentation materials

Lisa Herrod - User testing for the rest of us

• In: Resources
• By: maxine
• March 10th, 2008

Catch this presentation live at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.

Everyone knows they should be doing it, but like software testing, it’s one of those things we often don’t get round to. In this presentation, Lisa Herrod looks at some sure fire user testing techniques that produce proven results, don’t cost the earth, and are easy to implement. After this session you won’t have any more excuses for not doing solid user testing of any site or application you develop ever again.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• testing
• usability
• user experience

Jackie Moyes - Converting research findings into business speak

• In: Resources
• By: maxine
• March 10th, 2008

Catch this presentation live at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.

Getting your company to adopt a user-centred design approach can be an uphill struggle. The first stage typically is to get them to agree to incorporate usability testing in to the development process, at a stage early enough to actually implement any design recommendations. The second stage is to convince them to do more ethnographic style research to understand the larger context of the task that the site is trying to support. The biggest challenge comes last – how to help the business owners make the mental leap between the in-depth findings from the research and the implications and opportunities it presents to your core business strategy and product roadmap.

This is the challenge that the User Experience team at News Digital Media have been addressing. In this presentation, Jackie will discuss this issue in more depth and present examples of ‘design tools’ the team have been experimenting with to try and bridge this gap and help the business develop more user-centric strategies.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• ethnography
• strategy
• testing
• usability
• user experience
• user research

Andy Budd - Designing the experience curve

• In: Resources
• By: maxine
• March 10th, 2008

Catch this presentation live at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.

These days people expect more from a website than a handy set of tools and a pretty interface — they want an experience. From the moment somebody enters your site they’ll be judging you on everything from the way the site looks to the tone of your error messages. And they won’t just be judging you against other sites. They will be judging you on every customer experience they have ever had, from the rude man at the train station to the lovely hotel clerk that checked them in on holiday. So in order to compete, we need to up our game and look at experiences both on and off-line.

In this session Andy Budd will look at the 9 key factors that go into designing the perfect customer experience. By taking examples from the world around us, Andy will discuss how we can turn utilitarian experiences into something wonderful.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• design
• interaction design
• usability
• user experience
• web apps

Steve Baty - Analysing user research data

• In: Resources
• By: maxine
• March 5th, 2008

Catch this presentation live at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.

In our efforts to better understand the end users of the sites & applications we design, we generate a great deal of data. That data is useless to us until it has been analyzing and interpreted. This presentation looks at some of the methods & techniques we can use to make sense of user research data in a meaningful & rigorous way. The presentation will look at some of the common types of quantitative data collected during user research, and the statistical analysis methods we can employ to make the most of our data-gathering efforts. The session covers practical examples such as task completion rates, time-to-completion, page view comparison, as well as some basic concepts in statistics.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• testing
• usability
• user research

Stephen Cox - Building ethnography into the design process

• In: Resources
• By: maxine
• September 29th, 2007

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.

Working in usability and user experience can give you some great insights into the product design process. Yet few organisations know how to take advantage of this information silo. As a user experience expert do you sometimes wish you could have more input into product ideas handed down from above? Ever wanted to have the ear of business strategists? Even be best friends with marketers and sales people? Stephen Cox explores some of the exciting things that can happen when the disciplines of usability and user experience are allowed to seep out into the realms of strategic and tactical design innovation. He approaches the field of ethnographic design research in practical terms illustrating how News Digital Media has come to embrace the idea of extensive customer research, and the benefits that this has brought to different levels of the organisation.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• design
• ethnography
• innovation
• strategy
• usability
• user experience
• wds07

Lisa Herrod - Usability: more than skin deep

• In: Resources
• By: maxine
• September 29th, 2007

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.

Web Usability is far more complex than User Testing and Interaction Design alone. And while interface design is an important consideration, there’s more to a usable site than what’s on the surface. We all know the importance of accessibility and web standards, so let’s take that knowledge one step further and into the realm of usability. In this session Lisa Herrod will redefine the common definition of usability by introducing a greater focus on accessibility and web standards. By taking a more holistic approach you will soon see why usability is more than skin deep.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

• Tags
• accessibility
• design
• interaction design
• interface design
• usability
• wds07
• web standards