Presentations about user research
Podcasts, slides, videos and more
Dan Hill — Closing keynote: 15 years in
It is time for the practice of web development and design to broaden its horizons. How can the skills and experience we’ve acquired over the last 15 years of working on the internet be applied more broadly to, say, the design of cities, buildings, organisations, government and so on?
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Donna Spencer — Information seeking behaviours
Each information seeking behaviour needs very different approaches to information architecture, information design and page layout. During this presentation, Donna will talk about each information behaviour, its key attributes, key design needs, and show good and bad examples of each.
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Suze Ingram — Would you like service design with that?
Service design is well established in Europe and North America and there’s already a handful of Australian businesses offering service design. What is it? Does experience in designing for screen interaction translate to designing services too? Will service design be the next big thing? Suze offers insight by drawing on her years of experience as a UX designer and researcher. She shows how service design might fit into your business in the future, who you might pitch it to, and what sort of skills you might need to deliver service design.
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Jeremy Yuille — The social life of visualization
When visualization is coupled with collective intelligence it becomes a very powerful tool for making sense of the data that is now an increasing part of our personal and organizational experience. But how do you design social web applications so they can use visualization effectively?
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Daniel Burka — Changing successfully: Adapting your interface over time
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 1.40pm.
User interface design is an iterative process — the design of Digg and Pownce have been a study in evolution and adaptation. This talk will inspect the why and how of these iterations by looking at specific case studies from the two projects as well as previous client work Daniel has tackled.
The case studies will examine specific user interface challenges that have arisen and will chop them up into their various bits. How do I identify a challenge? What is the best approach for getting started? How do I solve the problem conceptually and technically? How will I know if I solved the challenge successfully? Case studies have been selected that are especially pertinent outside of their specific contexts to help you in your everyday UI design.
The presentation will focus on design inspiration, decision-making processes, technical solutions, and learning from missteps as part of a designer’s iterative process.
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Hurol Inan — Informing experience architecture with quantitative insights
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 1.40pm.
Quantitative insights gathered through online analytics can contribute greatly to the design and optimisation of online experience architectures.
The success of an Experience Architect depends on the business impact of their architecture. Quantitative techniques can be used in benchmarking before and after performances of a website demonstrating the impact of the new architecture.
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Jackie Moyes — Converting research findings into business speak
A presentation given at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.
Getting your company to adopt a user-centred design approach can be an uphill struggle. The first stage typically is to get them to agree to incorporate usability testing in to the development process, at a stage early enough to actually implement any design recommendations. The second stage is to convince them to do more ethnographic style research to understand the larger context of the task that the site is trying to support. The biggest challenge comes last – how to help the business owners make the mental leap between the in-depth findings from the research and the implications and opportunities it presents to your core business strategy and product roadmap.
This is the challenge that the User Experience team at News Digital Media have been addressing. In this presentation, Jackie will discuss this issue in more depth and present examples of ‘design tools’ the team have been experimenting with to try and bridge this gap and help the business develop more user-centric strategies.
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Steve Baty — Analysing user research data
A presentation given at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Australia, May 16 2008.
In our efforts to better understand the end users of the sites & applications we design, we generate a great deal of data. That data is useless to us until it has been analyzing and interpreted. This presentation looks at some of the methods & techniques we can use to make sense of user research data in a meaningful & rigorous way. The presentation will look at some of the common types of quantitative data collected during user research, and the statistical analysis methods we can employ to make the most of our data-gathering efforts. The session covers practical examples such as task completion rates, time-to-completion, page view comparison, as well as some basic concepts in statistics.
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Indi Young — Innovation With Mental Models
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.
In his recent book, The Myths of Innovation, Scott Berkun argues that innovation does not happen in a flash of inspiration. Instead, it takes years of research to deeply understand a problem space. A designer who methodically examines, adopts, or discards various hypothesis about the topic is the one who comes up with the best solutions.
In this talk, Indi Young will present a methodical (but rapid!) approach to invention. Using a mental model diagram depicting the behavior of a customer segment, she will show how to recognize when your current offerings could do better at matching needs and how to synthesize new ideas.
With the ideas in this presentation, you will be able to think up new product ideas and improve upon old product features in a guided, strategic manner.