On November 10th I attended the St. Louis User Experience Conference and was thrilled to listen to local Usability Guru’s whom spoke on topics including, but not limited to:
I am writing this review, or synopsis shall we say, albeit without divulging names or top secret info! If you attended the conference then I would love for any of your feedback. If you were unable to attend the conference then I’d appreciate your thoughts on the following topics.
A Complete Site Redesign
For this breakout session two presenters discussed the redesign of their Website and how design and usability worked together.
Before designing the site they wanted to get the Big Picture, so one step was to determined 5 Mantras:
By knowing these mantras and understanding their business (which included field tests) they were able to design for a better user experience.
When it came to the Usability portion of the presentation they started off speaking about the Usability testing phases which included:
After Usability testing has been completed they have to condense hours of video footage down to 15-20 minutes for their highlights presentation.
The team wrapped up their presentation with some key findings:
The leads went up partially because the contact form was in a much more visible and usable location. The print-friendly feature is also a nice since some users may want to printout the information and bring into a dealer for discussion. When it comes to metrics, being able to measure the print-friendly function is very nice.
This presentation provided valuable information and was a nice look in the redesign of their site. Coincidentally they redesigned their site in 2000, 2001, 2002 and most recently in 2005. Kind of makes you want to consider a redesign, eh?
Intuition Not Required: The Merit of Learnable Designs & Interfaces
For this breakout session a local agency had a presenter on hand that gave a very unique and interactive presentation.
The presenter started off with some slides that spoke to Usable vs. Intuitive design. Then he had an interesting bottle the he wanted the attendees to checkout. It looked similar to a soda bottle but yet it was different.
Our presenter asked if someone would volunteer in an experiment: Open the bottle and poor the drink into a glass. Sounds simple enough doesn’t it! Well not so fast…
A volunteer emerged and off we were. After a couple of minutes some of the attendees started mentioning possible ways to open the bottle. One attendee decided to assist the volunteer, thus we now have two volunteers.
In short the bottle was opened and so was the discussion.
The rest of the breakout mainly consisted of dialogue around perceived notion, user gaining knowledge and then applying that knowledge when in contact with the item. Of course we did revisit a few more slides.
I feel that this presentation was fun and provided a unique way to discuss the topic. Are you curious about that bottle? Checkout Ramune Soda and make sure to read the description below the image.
Contextual Inquiry
This breakout session consisted of a last minute presenter due to someone being unable to present. And boy she did a great job!
She had some slides that spoke about contextual inquiries and some that addressed what business people typically think:
A unique contextual inquiry video presentation followed her slides. It was a taping of a play/skit that had taken place two months prior to this conference which addressed the users of a web application. The video was not only informative but very funny too!
I feel yet another fun and unique presentation was held at the St. Louis Usability Conference…and on short notice to boot!
Where Usability Meets Design
Two-for-one special! That’s right folks, we had two very energetic presentations for this breakout session!
The first presenter informed the attendees that she had been a designer for many years and then shifted over to the usability realm. Some of her presentation touched upon the following:
She went on to say that if you look at our history we have very similar backgrounds. Graphic designers typically have art backgrounds while Usability Specialists tend to have psychology backgrounds but both delve into and work with technology.
One suggestion on a way to meet in the middle is to have visual communication and objective language.
Elements of design, such as Texture, was also presented. When texture was presented she spoke about the Principles of Visual Design.
The second presenter had the attendees to their feet almost immediately! Well not in applause just yet but rather to interact with her presentation. Stretching was on the agenda and I forgot my workout clothes!
“Raise your arms and stretchhhhh to the right if you think the Google website is more on the usability side vs. the design side….” said our presenter. The attendees got a kick, ahh how about a stretch out of it.
After our workout activity the attendees were presented with how the presenters’ designers and usability specialist work together. Typically a designer will be paired up with a usability specialist from the beginning of a project. Throughout the project the management may shift between the two as the project moves forward.
A project lifecycle case study was also presented to help better understand the deliverables and iterations on a typical project at her company.
The “Where Usability Meets Design” breakout session was yet another fun and informative presentation during the course of the day.
UCD in Agile or Iterative Development
I’m writing this synopsis in an Agile format but you shouldn’t notice anything different in my style of writing. For this breakout session the presenter started off with some dialogue with the attendees.
“Right people outweigh methodology” said one attendee when asked what are some pitfalls of Agile.
Our presenter went on to discuss that we need satisfaction - we need to see something and that’s where agile comes in. We see something when working in an Agile programming method even if its a little fuzzy.
Should we make Agile more flexible and get rid of some requirements? An “Agile Manifesto” was presented:
Agile directly implies iterations. One concept on how to do Agile is to “Shrink-to-Fit”.
UI documentation in HTML and CSS is very important.
Our presenter went on to demonstrate Agile in an Out of the box way.
On one side of the stage was a stool with a stuffed animal on it. On the other side of the stage was our presenter with a Nerf toy gun. He got into position and aimed at the stuffed animal then turned around 180 degrees.
A volunteer was requested to move the stool with the stuffed animal either left or right on the stage and to let the presenter know when he has finished. The volunteer did so and said “Ready”.
Immediately our presenter turned around 180 degrees and fired… just missing the stuffed animal by about 2 feet! Either his aim is bad or this demonstrates Agile not taking place.
You have to be able and willing to change. The stuffed animal here is the project and the aiming of the toy gun before it was moved was our blueprint of where we were going. In an Agile world we do not “Aim, Fire, Ready”.
Wrapping up his presentation he mentioned that we should embrace uncertainty because in any project we do not know enough at the beginning.
Improving the User Search Experience
For this breakout session we did not have a Usability Specialist but rather a gentleman that is heavily involved with receiving feedback on and tuning the search engine tool used for a large global corporation Intranet site.
The Intranet has around 31,000 users with 38,000 pages on the site which receives around 8 million page views per month. Needless to say I’m sure he receives plenty of feedback on the tool. Then again as he keeps tuning the tool I would imagine less feedback may come in as results are provided more and more accurately.
They implemented the tool iPhrase back in 2004. It has a customizable interface and in moving forward they would like to integrate feedback links on every search result page. (Note: IBM agreed to acquire privately held software maker iPhrase Technologies in 2005)
The feedback links would have simply three questions and a comments box for a user to share what they were looking for.
The “Google Effect” is one reason to implement such a feature. This effect is due that a high percentage of users search Google and almost always receive results. In an Intranet everything must be tuned more precisely however they are able to provide synonyms.
This well done presentation was insightful because it shows that was able to show that users can become frustrated when searching one tool and it does not provide what the user was looking for vs. say a Google search.
The Future of Digital Product Design (keynote speaker)
Our Keynote presenter flew in from California to discuss Design and Usability with the St. Louis Usability professionals.
Energetic and knowledgeable. Our presenter whom would be concluding the day was definitely both of these and he was also pretty darn cool too as he decided to incorporate the St. Louis Cardinals logo on his second slide; you knew this was coming since they are the 2006 World Series Champions!
Our presenter started off by stating that design touches upon us physically, intellectually and emotionally. And that we should attempt to focus on all 5 senses:
Trends:
Future Trends:
Wow! Our keynote speaker had some great thoughts on design and usability which can be applied in just about all applications from a physical product to a software application. The world around us is changing and change is a good thing for sure.
Conclusion
Though I did not get a chance to attend all of the breakout sessions I have to say that the 2006 St. Louis User Experience Conference was a hit! Some of the other sessions included:
I’m sure a lot of great content was presented in those breakout sessions too but alas only 8 hours in the day and I haven’t a clue where my clone ran off too…
Cheerio,
Greg
November 13, 2006 at 12:24 pm
Great report! It was a really informative conference and I had a great time.
November 19, 2006 at 12:14 pm
PDF presentations from the presenters are now available at http://stlux.org/presentations.htm