New Ideas : Web Directions South

User Experience design & UCD in government projects

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:39:42 PDT

Undertaking UX and UCD in Australian federal government departments offers unique benefits and challenges for the UX practitioner. Many departments are embedding UCD roles in project teams and others are interested but aren't sure what it is and how to implement it. Present case studies and real examples, along with fundamental UX/UCD technique takeaways for the unitiated.

It would be good to explore / present this for audience members who work for government departments and UX practitioners who would like to know more about this. This could be a presentation or a panel discussion with questions submitted by audience members.

Comments (0)Presentation Ideas (37) user experience ux design federal government

Online user behaviour and implications for interaction design

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:19:32 PDT

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Having conducted hundreds of usability tests over the years for a wide range of clients and websites, we have noted consistency in online user behaviour and have learnt how to make designs more effective and usable whilst helping organisations achieve their business goals.

Using examples and video footage from test sessions with real users, I would like to present some common usability issues, supporting theories and interaction design recommendations in regards to things such as:
- visual hierarchy and controlling user focus
- visual groupings and Gestalt theory – how colour, positioning, size etc can rightly or wrongly imply association
- typical navigation and search behaviour - how do users look for information when they come to your website and how to accommodate different behaviours
- banner and header blindness – why users may not see or use your large and supposedly prominent main menu
- balancing marketing/advertising/business needs with user needs – is that big banner important or does it just get in the way of users completing their tasks. Where should it go?

I would endeavour to make this session as interactive as possible and include lots of examples, case studies and video footage.
Posted by Tania Lang, Peak Usability

Comments (0)Presentation Ideas (37) user experience, usability, user behaviour, interaction design

Using AJAX to enhance your online user experience

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:54:44 PDT

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Over the last couple of years, our firm has undertaken usability testing of several websites that use AJAX. We notice that AJAX is changing the way that users interact with websites and changing user expectations. AJAX has the potential to provide richer and more interactive online user experiences but also introduces its own set of usability problems.

I would like to present views I have obtained about AJAX from discussions with leading usability experts from around the world as well as demonstrate key usability issues and common user behaviours we have unveiled through our own usability testing and research with users in Australia using AJAX sites. I would also like to present some interaction design guidelines and heuristics for developing user friendly AJAX designs.

Comments (0)Presentation Ideas (37) usability, ajax, user experience

Personas & Presentation Formats

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:41:13 PDT

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Hi,

I had the opportunity to speak at last years conference on Usability and Agile. Whilst my presentation was high level, I did have a number of people ask me more about usability testing and personas.

I can certainly pull together a presentation on the use of personas for design, development and usability testing. We have found them to be very useful tools to rapidly embed user focus into our projects and perform qualitative user testing.

Other thoughts on presentation formats:
I throughly agree on the post about "Death by Powerpoint". So how about a challenge to the presenters to liven things up maybe? One of the main themes I have seen and something I have experienced myself is trying to choose between similar presentations. In some cases, the write up on the presentation was fantastic, but the presentation itself did not deliver or vice versa. So how about including a Pecha-kucha (www.pecha-kucha.org) session at the beginning of each day at Web Directions? All presenters have 6 mins 40secs to describe the main points of their presentation with 20 slides, each shown in a timed format for 20 secs. The challenge to the presenter is that they have to cover a summary of their presentation in sync with the slides. The audience can then make an informed decision about which presentation would offer them the most benefit. The Pecha-kucha format can be altered slightly to fit in with conference proceedings, but it might be a fantastic way for conference attendees to get a taste of all the presentations offered at Web Directions. I would be more than happy to participate in a Pecha-kucha format if asked to speak. :)

Cheers,
T

Comments (0)Presentation Ideas (37) usability, agile, personas

1001 Photoshop tricks in 3000 seconds

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:23:01 PDT

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Every designer using photoshop has these. The collection of custom shortcuts, tricks, recipes for getting the sexy new look. The things that other designers stop and go, how did you do that.

Now don't sit there and say, yeah but everyone does it like me. I know that they don't; most designers use photoshop differently, sometimes based on their experience with the product. There is so much in this product that people never use that it would be good to just see a collection of advanced tips and tricks. This could be a panel. workshop or just a short 50 minute session.

I'm not talking an Adobe show and tell, I'm talking real designers, people that live and breath photoshop.

Okay it's designer focused, but come on, it's not always about the devs. Sometimes us designers want a little time in the light too!

Comments (0)Presentation Ideas (37) photoshop, design, tricks

Dealing With Legacy

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:13:51 PDT

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The web in a commercial fashion has been around for a while now, after all these years you would expect that all the sites and and intranets would have been ungraded from the old Legacy sites.

However all to often it just isn't the case. Old Perl and Table sites are all over the place.

Time after time, I have seen that web teams just don't have the time to review and rework the dinosaur they are working on into a shiny sexy new web site. They are just too busy patching patch on patch and tacking on that next new feature. And as you know that just makes it worse.

I would love to hear from these web teams, the ones that have converted the dinosaur into something sexy. Do they do it via special ninja stealth skills or is it something darker. Or maybe just a complete clearing of the decks. What works what doesn't. What can I apply to take away and use tomorrow. That's what I want to hear.

Comments (0)Presentation Ideas (37) legacy, tablelayout, anti-css

Designing for different information behaviours

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:29:00 PDT

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When people use websites and intranets they are doing more than just 'finding' information. They may be looking for something they know about or exploring something brand new; filtering through large volumes then comparing results; getting an overview of a topic or diving deep. They may even think they want to find one thing, but actually need something entirely different.

Each of these information behaviours needs very different approaches to information arhitecture, information design and page layout.

As a presentation, I'd like to talk about each information behaviour, what it's key attributes are, what the key design needs are, and show good and bad examples of how it is done already on the web.

Notes: I need to think about the title a bit more to make it obvious what this is about...

To be presented by Donna Spencer

Comments (0)Presentation Ideas (37) information architecture, information design,

1 Minute Project Pitches

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:02:10 PDT

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I've got a bunch of projects that would be good to do but don't have collaborators for. I'm sure other people do as well.

Get a room full of developers and have everyone pitch their projects including - reason for projects existence, basic outline of projects design, skills/level required for collaborator, type of licence if released.

After the pitch the audience tells you why it's a bad idea or that there's a project that does it already.

Comments (8)Networking Ideas (6)

Testing automation for freelancers or small teams

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:08:01 PDT

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Automating testing can be very useful. However, freelance developers and smaller teams may not have access to QA / Testing teams like bigger outfits do.

This would be a session on tools like selenium, iMacros and some demos on how to set up and maintain test scripts to automate testing of our web projects. Maybe even how the tests could dump logs or email when tests fail etc.

Another side topic but related is Unit Testing front end code like XHTML / CSS, whether refactoring of the styles broke the site in different browsers.. There is some work going on at http://github.com/garethr/css-test/tree/master but it might be possible to do other ways?

Comments (1)Presentation Ideas (37) freelance, testing, automation

Sessions on web production processes

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:28:47 PDT

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I believe many agencies struggle with finding a good workable production process that prevents nasty surprises and ensures the client gets what they need.

I'm sure we could get together a number of speakers sharing experiences and approaches that we all could learn from. Maybe even a panel?

Comments (3)Presentation Ideas (37)