from: jmspool 2 months ago

This is a short presentation to help attendees of the UIE Virtual Seminar, Testing Your Critiquing Skills, prepare their critiques. For more information, see http://uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/critiques

Tags: critique usability design

from: jmspool 4 months ago

From the IXDA Boston night of Short Talks (http://tinyurl.com/4uoqhn) I had 10 minutes to give this 32-transition presentation: What\'s the Best Way to Compare Multiple Design Alternatives? Good design practice suggests you create multiple sketches, which eventually evolve into full-out design alternatives. However, once you have those alternatives, what\'s the best way to decide which one wins? I will review one approach and talk about the pitfalls and advantages to evaluating multiple designs at once. (What's even more amazing is that I was really busy that week and didn't start working on the presentation until I'd sat down in the audience to hear the other speakers. The entire presentation came together in under 90 minutes.)

Tags: usabilitytesting uie usability design

from: jmspool 7 months ago

Keynote: Journey to the Center of Design Jared Spool Saturday April 12 2008, 8:30 - 10:00AM User-centered design was born in the 1980s, amidst a world filled with frustration with blinking VCR clocks and computer command lines. Up until this time, developers focused on making the devices work, giving little heed to how they'd be used. Terms like "user friendly" and "easy to use," buzzwords for the UCD movement, soon became as common as "new and improved" on laundry soap. Fast forward 25 years and it now seems the foundations of user- centered design are now disintegrating. Notable community members are suggesting UCD practice is burdensome and returns little value. There's a growing sentiment that spending limited resources on user research takes away from essential design activities. Previously fundamental techniques, such as usability testing and persona development, are now regularly under attack. And let's not forget that today's shining stars, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the iPod, came to their success without UCD practices. Is it time for user-centered design to evolve into something else? Or is there something else happening in our world of experience design that makes UCD obsolete? Should something else occupy the center of design? These are just the questions that this year's keynote presenter, Jared Spool, likes to answer. Especially after a few drinks. And while a Saturday morning keynote may seem early for the kind of heavy drinking these particular questions demand, Jared will have just arrived from Italy, a nation with a long tradition of philosophical intoxication. This will set the perfect stage for an entertaining and insightful presentation to open our conference. We guarantee a journey that shouldn't be missed.

Tags: paradigms design iasummit ucd usability

from: jmspool 7 months ago

[Stay tuned for the audio.] © 2008 User Interface Engineering From the UIE Web App Summit: http://webappsummit.com Who has the best practices for web app design and what do they do to make world-class applications? Jared will share the latest research in the techniques and methodologies that can make a huge difference. Thousands of sites have the same web app: the e-commerce checkout process. They all do essentially the same thing: exchange the site's products for the customer's money, simultaneously arranging for delivery and payment. Yet, every single one is different and despite their prevalence, frequently hard to use and frustrating. Why is this? Creating easy-to-use and delightful applications, such as checkout, while meeting the needs of the organization is one of the most difficult challenges designers face. While many sites struggle, some design teams have learned how to do this especially well. To open the UIE Web App Summit, Jared will share UIE's latest research on designing successful web-based applications. He'll describe the techniques and methodologies used by the best designers and the common traps they've learned to avoid.

Tags: uie webapps business design

from: jmspool 2 years ago

You can sign up for more information just like this at http://www.uie.com/uietips. Thanks to Andy Budd and the folks at the dConstruct Conference for providing the audio for this presentation. [Note: The slides are slightly different than I presented at dConstruct. Because of time constraints, I couldn't talk about slides 34-36.] The advertisement for this presentation: Experience design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few organizations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management. It’s become commonplace for organizations that build products and web sites. Experience Design is a centerpiece of boardroom discussions and quickly becoming a key performance indicator for many businesses. However, you can’t just hire a couple of “experience designers” and tell them, "Go do that voodoo that you do so well." Today’s business environment forces us to build multi-disciplinary teams, compiling a diverse group of skills and experiences to handle the many facets of the technical, business, and user requirements. In his usual entertaining and insightful manner, Jared will talk about what it takes to build a design team that meets today’s needs. He'll demonstrate how successful Experience Design: + Must integrate the needs of the users with the requirements of the business + Is learned, but not available through introspection + Must be invisible to succeed + Is cultural + Is multi-discplinary + Thrives best in an "educate and administrate" environment You'll see examples of designs from Apple's iPod, Netflix, the Mayo Clinic, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few. © 2007, User Interface Engineering

Tags: designskills userexperience netflix usability ipod