Presentations from wdux08
Podcasts, slides, videos and more
Robert Hoekman Jr — The essential elements of great web applications
A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008, and Web Direction Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.
Most great web applications have a few key things in common. But can you name them? Better yet — can you achieve them consistently in your own projects?
In this closing keynote, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious (New Riders) describes the seven qualities of great web-based software and how to achieve each and every one of them by learning to communicate through design. See why it’s important to build only what’s absolutely essential, apply instructive design, create error-proof interactions, surface commonly-used features, and more in this informative session that will change the way you work and enable your users to walk away from your software feeling productive, respected, and smart.
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Oliver Weidlich — The mobile web user experience — we’re starting to get it right!
A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.
Historically the mobile web has been a terrible experience, but things are starting to change. Really! We are now at the point that the mobile web is becoming easier to access, both on-deck & off-deck, there’s useful & tailored services out there, and killing some time on the train home doesn’t cost more than your weekly train ticket. We’ll check out the latest and greatest in the world of mobile web and what makes them different from the others. We will also cover the important things to keep in mind for making a better mobile web customer experience.
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Mathew Patterson — Delivering user experience to the inbox: designing for email
A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.
So you’ve designed a fantastic website for your client, tested in all the major browsers and everything looks great. Now they want to send an email newsletter to all their customers, using the new design.
No problem right? Just need to test in Outlook 07, and 06. Yahoo and Hotmail too, of course. Oh, and Gmail, Lotus Notes, AOL…Of course, the design may not work that well for an email anyway, and isn’t there some kind of anti-spam laws?
Like it or not, HTML email is here to stay and the responsibility for doing it right belongs to web designers. Learn how to plan, design and build an email newsletter that will provide a great user experience to the recipients, and great value to your clients.
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Lisa Herrod — User testing for the rest of us
A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.
Everyone knows they should be doing it, but like software testing, it’s one of those things we often don’t get round to. In this presentation, Lisa Herrod looks at some sure fire user testing techniques that produce proven results, don’t cost the earth, and are easy to implement. After this session you won’t have any more excuses for not doing solid user testing of any site or application you develop ever again.
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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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Donna Spencer — Getting content right
A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.
We all know that great content is a core part of the website user experience. So why is it so hard to find content that isn’t dull, lifeless and uninteresting — blah, blah, blah?
Web content can be vibrant, interesting and fun. It can draw you in, fill your head and make you learn without having to think. And it’s not really hard to write. Three simple tricks can turn poor content into a great experience — remember that readers care more about themselves than you; write in real words with authentic voice; play show and tell.
This presentation will discuss these principles, with plenty of funny and not-so-funny examples. You’ll go away with practical steps to make your writing kick-ass. And you won’t even have to think.
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Andy Budd — Designing the experience curve
A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.
These days people expect more from a website than a handy set of tools and a pretty interface — they want an experience. From the moment somebody enters your site they’ll be judging you on everything from the way the site looks to the tone of your error messages. And they won’t just be judging you against other sites. They will be judging you on every customer experience they have ever had, from the rude man at the train station to the lovely hotel clerk that checked them in on holiday. So in order to compete, we need to up our game and look at experiences both on and off-line.
In this session Andy Budd will look at the 9 key factors that go into designing the perfect customer experience. By taking examples from the world around us, Andy will discuss how we can turn utilitarian experiences into something wonderful.
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Andrew Kesper — ABC’s election site: making the most of dry data
A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008, and Web Directions Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.
While elections can be exciting times, the underlying data — swings, booth counts, and the like is probably only riveting to psephological tragics. Yet the ABC’s election web site managed to take this raw data and make it attractive, compelling and interactive.
In this session, the ABC’s Andrew Kesper takes us through the election site, looking at the design decisions, and uses of technology like Ajax, Flash, and interactive maps — tools which have wide applicability for government sites looking to present data in more user-friendly and attractive ways.
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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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Jeremy Yuille — Web visualisation: do you see what I see?
A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.
In this session Jeremy Yuille from ACID looks at information visualisation from a user experience perspective, overviewing new and old examples and how they can help (or hinder) the experience of using the web. You’ll see what kinds of amazing things you can do within the browser platform these days. More importantly you’ll learn why (and when) you’d want to use visualisation at all.