World Usability Day: UXcamp Vienna 2011

Hi,

on the 10th of November is the World Usability Day. The Interactiondesign Stammtisch in Vienna is organizing a Barcamp two days later on the 12th of November 2011.

I think most of you know that for a Barcamp it's important that everybody is participating. Of course the participation is free of charge.

Where and When?
Samstag, 12. November 2011 von 9 Uhr bis 18 Uhr
A1 Telekom Austria, Lassallestraße 9 (nähe Praterstern), 1020 Wien

More information:
http://www.barcamp.at/UXcamp_2011

A few of the sessions will be held in english - see more info about that in the "geplante Sessions" section.

Would be happy to see you there.

Br, Claudia

100 things every designer needs to know about people & Neuro Web Design - What makes them click?

Hi,

in the last month I read two great books by Susan Weinschenk:

• Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? (2009)
• 100 Things every designer needs to know about people (2011)

She has a Ph.D. in Psychology and is working in the field of user experience for 30 years.

Both books draw their attention to the things that are going on in people unconsciously - how do they perceive information? How are they focusing their attention and what motivates them? How are they deciding?

But the books are not only high-level and theoretical, they also bring concrete examples for designers - like the perception of different font types or sizes.

Both books are worth reading, but if you want to have the one with more content, more pictures and more colors try the "100 things" book.

Br, Claudia

EVENT: Usability-to-Go für Entwickler: 1x1 Kompaktwissen

Hi,

together with my colleague Stefan I will run a one-day workshop in Vienna and Zurich called "Usability-to-Go für Entwickler: 1x1 Kompaktwissen"
(It's planned to be in german, but we can handle english speaking participants too :-) ).

So the workshop is for developers and will be a hands-on workshop.

The content will be:

• What is user-centered design?
• Personas (representatives for the end-user)
• Wireframes and Sketching to communicate and discuss requirements
• Usability Testing
• What methods are usefull depending on the project environment?

The dates are the 25th of October in Vienna (Austria) and the 3rd of November in Zurich (Switzerland).

More information about the workshop can be found on the TechTalk website.

Br, Claudia

Links - "Best of": 90% don't know CTRL+F, ROI of UX & Google+ Reponsive UI

Hi,

after my Blogging-Summer-Break I want to share again some interesting links of the last weeks.

Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F
theatlantic.com, Alexis Madrigal - August 18th, 2011
Alexis Madrigal talked with Dan Russel, a search anthropologist at Google, and was surprised that 90% of people don't know how to use CTRL/Comman + F to find a word in a document or web page!

ROI of UX
i-Thought.org, Marie-Claire Jenkins - May 29th, 2011 (already a little bit older)
I'm always interested on how to communicate the ROI of UX to customers and stakeholders. Most of the times these are high-level and boring articles but this article is a short summary and you should have a look at this video created by Susan Weinschenk.

Neues Google+ Feature zeigt Best Practice für responsive UIs und Scrollen
uxzentrisch.de, Tobias Jordans - August 19th, 2011
One of my new favorite blogs is "UXzentrisch" ... but it's only available in German. In this article they talk about the new google+ Feature (You-Tube Video in Englisch) and the best practice of a responsive UI in the browser.

Have a nice day,
Br, Claudia

UXcamp - Day2: Dealing with the failure of the user & Design Studio

Dealing with the failure of the user
In this short discussion we talked about the "failures of the user".

Good failure vs. Bad failure: Failure can be good to give space for innovation.

Trying to make new failures and not always doing the same one. It's hard to document failures to learn from it in the future.

Broken gets fixed, but crappy lasts forever.

The user sometimes comes with the wrong mindset to our interfaces so he will do something wrong - so the user is wrong, but we need to take care of. Or maybe we should punish the user?
- Have the balls to say "no!"

The system should support my activity itself and not always ask if I'm really sure... So instead of asking "are you really sure" an undo method for deleting.

Design Studio (rapid collaborative sketching)
In this workshop Anders Ramsay explained the two kinds of Design Studio.

Ideation Clearinghouse
Get ideas of all stakeholders out, what are they thinking, how are they envision the product.
Tip: Put a large stackof paper on the table - Psychological effect (no limits for ideas)

Rules:

• Create a private atmosphere (it's not common for them)
• Everybody is participating (also the moderator) to let all participants feel comfortable

5 minutes sketching, Presentation in the group, Dot voting about the best idea
Add notes and ask questions to understand their ideas.
An additional iteraton can be done if the group has some new ideas.

Internal design studios
Add more constraints and goals and push them. Do more iterations to refine ideas.

Little big details

In this great session Tobias Jordans presented 18 "Little Big Details"... you can find the links to the great examples in the blog ux-zentrisch

UXcamp - Day2: Digital Trends - Challenges for Traditional UX

In this session Clive K. Lavery (@cklaery) talked about the Digital Trends they analyzed based on the financial industry. They have a report with a lot of good examples, hopefully they will publish this as a white paper.

10 Digital Trends:
1 - Asymmetric Engagement - Strategies are not only happening on a website, there is more interaction (Crowd Sourcing, Serious Gamification, Social ...)
2 - Empowerment: Customers don't want to be thought
Life Assistence: www.mint.com (Personal Finance Management), Personal Heath Managements (MSN)
Civic Engagement: www.guardian.co.uk - Political Watch /
3 - Self-Sovereignty: Kout (www.kout.com) - Influence Monitoring - You want to be in a community but want to be recognized
4 - Context Awareness: The context is important, but the context is not "mobile" but the goal the user wants to reach (Geo-Fencing, Smart Targeting)
5 - Lifeline - Digitazation: You show you life online
6 - Convergence - Smart Homes, smart cars (Channel Alignment, Augmented Reality, Unified Communications)
7 - Distributed Experience: Content is distribute into various channels (Micro Blog, etc. ) (Portability, Extensibility, Modularity)
8 - Ubiquity: Web is everywhere and we take what we want - not going online anymore (Mobile Computing, Capability Cloud, Object Hyperlinking)
9 - Human centricity: Natural User Interaction, Cognitive Design, Affective Computing (Users are more dynamic, can we plan how the users are using it)
10 - Sensemaking: A process to make sense out of big load of data; Data Aggregation, Advanced Analytics, Data Visualization

The problem: It's not possible to test innovation unless you created it.

UXcamp - Day2: UX of conferences (Sven Guckes)

A discussion session about "UX of conferences" hosted by Sven Guckes... Here are my notes.

Brainstorming Session

• After conference follow ups: Newsletter with summary
• Facilitating the in-between talks - enough breaks / more open spaces (facilitate 1:1 talks than 1:N talks) - "expand family"
• "lightning talks" - Talks to share a lot of ideas in 1-5 minutes
• Tagging - Wall for Tags with Faces (you can see the people in what they are interested in)...
• Speakers should know what the audience the need to prepare for (the organizer needs to take care of - show demographics)
• Share infos in various ways ... Facebook event/group, upcoming.org,
• Content of the website: Travel, Accomodation, pickup-places, party
• Barcamp: Couchsurfing (good example fosdem.org), Adopt-a-geek
• Community advice (evangelists of conferences)
• Twitter - News : always at the right time and updating

 What you should focus in the conference on:
- Goals for the community
- Business plan
- Goals for the committee

 

3 most important infos on a website: speakers, costs, hard facts (how to get there)
Most time organizing an event needs to be spent on money + sponsors.

Call for help if you need it: Show tasks on the website - The problem is tracking the people.
(makesense.org -Website: Website to find people, it's about skills)