Thursday, October 13, 2005
UIE Showcase Seminar, 10 :30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Web Site Usability 2005: The Latest Research
Jared Spool and Joshua Porter, User Interface Engineering
Having just completely updated this popular seminar from last year’s conference, Jared M. Spool and Joshua Porter will bring you the newest thinking from UIE’s most recent studies. You’ll hear entertaining and insightful presentations on three critical issues facing design teams today.
Effective Dissemination: Best Techniques for Getting Teams Onboard
Usability testing, field studies, and other techniques produce massive amounts of information. The design team needs this information to make the right decisions. Disseminating the information teams collect is one of the biggest problems they face today.
Over the last few years, UIE has been interviewing teams about their techniques for ensuring that everyone on the design team has the information they need. Our studies show that reports are still the most common result from usability testing. While they can be useful for communicating an immediate list of recommendations or priorities from a specific study, they fail to help teams gain insights useful in future design efforts.
Do you create a large report or a small one? A written document or a PowerPoint presentation? How do back up your recommendations? What’s the best way to prioritize the findings? You’ll see how different teams approached each of these problems and learn what is most effective for your situation.
Personas are becoming a popular amongst many teams. Recent research shows there are a variety of approaches to creating and using persona information in the design process, from very formal to very informal. You’ll learn the pros and cons of each approach.
UIE’s research shows that many teams have tried style guides, templates, and design guidelines, but have rarely achieved their objective of creating uniform designs. We’ll discuss the common failure points of these techniques and explore a new technique that is gaining good traction: design pattern libraries. You’ll see the experience that organizations are having with design patterns and learn strategies for introducing them into your design process.
Web 2.0 – The Future Begins Here, Tomorrow: What Web Designers Need to Prepare
Web 1.0 was about creating a web site with designer-supplied content, navigation, and HTML functionality. Web 2.0 is a new way to think about the web, where content moves beyond sites, interaction is no longer just straight HTML, and users control how data is categorized and manipulated.
While some aspects of the new Web are still in the realm of science fiction, many pieces are quickly becoming a reality. The new technologies, such as Ajax, Folksonomies, and RSS are becoming commonplace tools.
Designers need to prepare for these new design techniques. In this session, we’ll show how these techniques are changing the way designers think about their sites. You’ll see examples of how sites such as Google, Flickr, and Backpack are using new interaction models like Ajax to create more powerful user experiences. You’ll learn how sites are using user-tagging techniques (often referred to as folksonomies) to make build their own personal information architectures. Plus, you’ll see the usability challenges introduced when RSS feeds move the presentation of your content off of your site.
The Essence of Scent: Designing Successful Web Site Navigation
If you want users to find the important content your site has to offer, you’ll need to ensure your navigation is doing exactly what it needs to. In this session, we’ll share the most recent research in UIE’s ongoing studies of the scent of information.
After observing hundreds of users scouring sites for information they need to find, we’ve identified the techniques that are most successful at helping users accomplish their goal. You’ll learn everything you need to know about three critically important page types: content pages, gallery pages, and department pages. You’ll see how these page types relate directly to the three stages of decision making.
The most basic page of navigation is the gallery page. It is here that the site presents a list of links, expecting the user will chose the right one. You’ll see how to design effective galleries, looking in detail at the best alternatives for layout, order, and presentation.
It’s on content pages are where users find their target information. You’ll learn about pogosticking and see effective techniques for avoiding it by providing lateral navigation.
Department pages provide links to galleries, allowing large sites to help users get to better content. Organizing the departments is critical and you’ll see the most current techniques for identifying, presenting, and organizing these important pages.
UIE’s Newest Research
The shelves at the bookstore are filled with advice on building usable sites, all based on the ten years of research we’ve conducted at User Interface Engineering. Now, you can hear the latest research, straight from the lab.
If you’re a web designer, information architect, developer, or web producer, you’ll love hearing Joshua Porter and Jared M. Spool deliver the newest findings. They’ve left plenty of time in the day to answer your questions and examine the challenges your team is facing.