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UIE Virtual Seminar Presentation

Testing Your Critiquing Skills: Site Navigation

Opinions are cheap but insights are priceless. When looking over someone else's design, how do you ensure you're delivering valuable insights that bring new perspectives to the table?

The best critiques not only deliver value to the original designer, but to everyone involved, because it raises the discourse to the underlying fundamentals and goals, not just the specifics of color and font size. Learning to critique well is like many other skills: the more you practice, the better you get.

You'll know you've delivered a great critique when:

• The designer is receptive and engaged in the discussion, instead of being defensive and argumentative
• The designer becomes introspective and talks about how they want to revisit some of the underlying precepts of the design
• Other team members use the critique to look at other on-going work

We're going to focus this session on Site Navigation. We'll look at some interesting solutions and talk about what the designers have done well and where we might expect their users to run into issues. We'll see how these designs tackle some of the big challenges that many designers face when building large, complex web sites. We'll even look at other sites that have possibly solved the problems in other ways.

In this UIE Virtual Seminar, you'll get a chance to test out your critique skills. We've solicited four web sites from members of our audience, and have asked those teams a series of questions about their designs. To help you prepare, we've created the following preview of the event.

In the preview, I share the four sites we'll look at in the seminar. Watch the seminar and pick the sites you want to critique. (You'll want to plan to spend between 15 to 30 minutes exploring each site, then another 15 minutes writing up your thoughts on them. So, if you only have 45 minutes, just pick one site. If you can spare more time, choose accordingly.)

The four sites we'll look at are:

• NASA
• Management Sciences for Health
• The Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania
• Home Shopping Network

 

In the preview, I explain what we'll be critiquing on each site. Doing your own critique is optional, but it's the best way to get the most out of the seminar. If you're watching the seminar with your colleagues, there are two approaches: you could each critique a different site, so that you get coverage. Or you can each critique the same site and compare amongst yourselves.

Join us for this fun, interactive session where you and your colleagues will get a chance to test your skills and learn new techniques for providing insightful, constructive feedback.

Instructor Biography

Jared M. Spool founded User Interface Engineering in 1988, and has built the company into a leading research, training, and consulting firm specializing in usability and experience design. He has been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers.

Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.

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