Tag Archives: UX

Happy World Usability Day!

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What is World Usability Day?

It’s about making our world work better.
It’s about “Making Life Easy” and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first…

World Usability Day was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals’ Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 200 events are organized in over 43 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.

For more information go to http://www.worldusabilityday.org

October – Customer Data Analysis Month

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It’s been a while since I have written a new blog entry. Being emerged in the Scrum process has definitely kept me busy. I have also been working on some personal development. I’ve started a new eating lifestyle that will hopefully result in losing some weight. And I’ve started writing down a lot of recipes that I may turn into a healthy cookbook one day. I also went to Orlando for two days last week to see my best friend who was visiting from Hawaii.  I haven’t been recording this information because my Blog is generally focused on UX related topics, but it explains the lapse since my latest update.

I stated previously that when I started the Scrum process for my latest project, that I felt more like I was in the role of a business analyst and interaction designer than a Human Factors Engineer.  I spent the last week updating our new Employee Orientation to reflect the new Scrum project management methodology, and I have a new project on the horizon. This is very exciting for me because the last project I worked on was for UI enhancements to an existing application, whereas this project will be building a new application from the bottom up. Therefore I hope to be able to do more real Human Factors work such as building personas, and creating mental models. And basically contributing more towards the to the requirements, and functionality, and more original design than what I had the opportunity to do previously. This is exciting because it means I will be in uncharted territory and doing some things for the first time. I expect this will be a huge learning opportunity for me as well.

Today I cracked open my Mental Models workbook from training that I attended by instructor Indy Young. I brushed-up on customer data analysis techniques before going through data collected through customer visits. This consists of summarizing content by using a verb + noun = atomic task. This will be used in an affinity or mental model diagram that I will create. I am recording the users behaviors, philosophies and feelings and leaving out the tools/medium, statements of fact, explanations, circumstance and complaints. In a nutshell I’m getting back to doing Human Factors related work and I’m loving it!  Yippie!

Mockup Madness

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I haven’t really had much time to write in my blog lately because I’ve been so busy creating mockups for the Sprints at work. I’ve been using Twitter much more actively than before, but I don’t really discuss Usability Topics on there. So far I think the integration of the Scrum process has been going very well. It’s encouraged communication, collaboration and exposes design issues much earlier in the process than waterfall.

There is one thing that has been in the back of my mind lately. It seems like the process tends to allow for the constant bandaging and improving of software that already exists. Some of the design issues that exist seem like they are ready for a complete redesign. Every time I see a project rushed out the door it makes me think of Alan Coopers quote: “There’s no group of consumers waiting for you to ship your bad product to market.” Not that I think we ship bad products, I think I work on a fantastic product that is extremely powerful and flexible. I would just like to see the UI updated. Being first to market seems to take a priority to the UX.

Looking for a better way…

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Over the past year, I have been trained in User Centered Design techniques by some of the leading names in this country. It seems the whole Contextual Design process is very time consuming. I have a hard time making users visits because I do not access to a solid repertoire of customers from my work site. The application I do UX for requires lots of hardware and setup. I have received great UI feedback from trainers, but even some of their requests are hard for me to test in my current environment.

Because of the previously stated issues, and the fact that I’ve been reading up on the IXDA website, I am getting interested in Action Centered, or Behavior Centered design. This takes the User–the most inconsistent and unreliable element out of the equation. I am looking for good resources on ACD, and how I can integrate the ACD workflow and methodology into the scrum process that we are initiating at my location. I am even interested in doing maybe a hybrid of methods, because I believe it is important to know the users, and listen to their needs, it just seems like it may not be practical 100% of the time.

Getting Familiar with User Centered Design

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I have to reiterate my previous statement about not having time to keep up with everything.

I signed up to Facebook the week before last, and I’m just starting to get my friends list built up. You can view pics of my trip to Utah on my Facebook page here.

I spent the past 4 days in South Jordan Utah for a Contextual Design course. The class was taught by Hugh Beyer the author of the book Contextual Design and one of the key players at InContext.

When I was first hired at Avocent I was given a copy of Contextual Design to read. I found the content to be rather dry. In case you are not familiar with Contextual Design, it’s the process of using customer centered data to drive design decisions.

The class I participated in was fairly engaging, however, I would like to think of some ways to spruce up the content for when I present it to my peers at work. I found the process to be slightly different than the Mental Models class I took in California a few weeks ago. I will probably end up adopting a hybrid of techniques. Apparently InContext suggests there to be at least 2 people to work on each project, and seeing how I am a UX Team of 1, I will have to streamline the process to make it easiest for 1 person. Of course I would include my coworkers for pieces where I need assistance.

I will be sorting through and organizing the content from what I learned on Contextual Design over the next few days, and perhaps put some highlights up on this page.