by pete bagnall
10/07/2009 in News
Professor Alistair Sutcliffe from Manchester University has kindly offered to give a talk this coming Tuesday 14th July on the topic of technology and the impact on our social lives. It promises to be very interesting…
by pete bagnall
26/02/2009 in News
Talking to Rachel after tonight’s meeting (more about that later) I had a thought for next month. Rather than talking about it – why don’t we do it. How about we design something as a group. We have more than enough people to make a spectacularly over-staffed design team (or two more sensibly staffed teams). It would really interesting to see what we could come up with. Either it will be fantastic or it’ll start a huge fight and we’ll all spend the rest of the evening is Casualty…
by Mike Little
09/02/2009 in Accessibility, Information Architecture, News, Usability
There is an interesting eye tracking story over on the Google Blog, covering their results from some usability studies they carried out.
Specifically: eye tracking to test the use of thumbnails in search results. Though the blog report is fairly brief, they did come to specific conclusion.
Our studies showed that the thumbnails did not strongly affect the order of scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants to find the result they wanted.
There is a real time eye tracking video and some heat map images in the article too.
Go read the original and let us know what you think in the comments.
– Story from Official Google Blog.
by Paul Rouke
Some people may be interested to know of a free usability event being run by Manchester Digital on the 28th January 2009. I will be speaking at the event along with Judith Garmen and Pete Bagnall.
It’s focused on helping business owners understand the importance of usability for both their internal and external facing websites and systems, with the aim of improving companies bottom line through the likes of improving staff efficiency and the conversion rates from marketing budgets.
A few details below:
Further details and a brief overview are below:
For the digital sector, usability and user experience are more than new fads.
These topics, and their perceived value to businesses, have been talked and written about many times, but lets get it straight: just exactly what is the use of usability to a company looking at improving their performance, ROI and staff efficiency?
In this FREE event Paul Rouke, User Experience Director at PRWD, and 2 guest speakers Judith Garman of AbilityNet and Pete Bagnall of SurfaceEffect, will be providing a range of real-life examples and industry insights which will help reveal some of the tangible benefits businesses can gain by embracing usability and user experience.
Through the course of the evening you will see why usability can play a significant role in the likes of e-commerce websites, B2B websites, lead generation sites, intranets, internal software systems and the development of bespoke web and software applications.
The event will be followed by drinks, some food and networking.
18/12/2008 in News
All,
Good to see some new people at the last meeting.
Following our discussion here is a link to some AbilityNet videos of assistive technology users
http://uk.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=3CD45E862B50C925
Some of these are also available on Easy Youtube which was developed by Chris Heilmann
http://scriptingenabed.pbwiki.com/AbilityNet-Videos
Judith
by pete bagnall
29/10/2008 in News
For our next meeting I’ll be talking about a pet topic of mine. I’ll be looking at the car user’s experience and seeing why it’s so difficult to get people to switch to public transport. Then I’ll be looking at how we might design a public transport system in such a way as to make the experience as good as (or better) than using the car.
I’ll also look at other modes of transport, and see where they fit in a transport policy based heavily on user needs.
Some of the solutions I’ll mention already exist in early form, some are much more futuristic, but most are achievable with current technologies. This isn’t sci-fi, but full implementation would be expensive. So I’ll talk a little bit about how we might afford these systems, and the other social benefits which might arise from moving beyond the car.
Right – now I’m going to drive over to York! See you all next time.
04/10/2008 in News
We are going to be able to use Manchester Digital/MDDA offices on Portland Street for our next meetings. – Thanks for sorting venues Paul.
I’ve set up a poll on Doodle to see what dates are the best for everyone, we are still looking at meeting every month. http://www.doodle.ch/participation.html?pollId=b4ss63xhtx24m8iw
We’ve also had offers to talk on a range of interesting topics so we can set up an agenda for the next six months or so.
Thanks
Judith
by Rachel
14/09/2008 in News
When we met on thursday, we agreed it would be nice to do something a bit special for world usability day, but it’s not far away so we will need to move quickly. The plan so far is:
- Try to get an outside speaker.
- Try to get a small sponsorship / donation to fund a speaker / food / drinks – either from a commercial organisation or possibly from a local government / quango source.
If you can help us achieve either of these, please get in touch.
If you have any other ideas for how the event could take shape (bearing in mind the short timescale and our very limited resources), please share. The theme of this year’s day is “Transportation” which is possibly a little bit outside of the box for most of us, but let’s see what we can do with it.
All suggestions gratefully received…
02/09/2008 in News
Wasn’t clear if we had a venue sorted for tomorrow, could someone confirm if we have. Otherwise Wetherspoons on Princess street might be a good option they have a few side rooms that are often empty. http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/pubs/pub-details.php?PubNumber=2103
Judith
by Rachel
09/07/2008 in News
I’m currently studying an OU course in UI Design and Evaluation. Over on the course message board we’ve been having an interesting discussion about the terminology / jargon that the course materials use – in particular the concepts of task scenario, concrete use case, use scenario and essential use case:
a task scenario is related to a specific case, ie it is ‘concrete’
a concrete use case is not related to a specific case, ie it is abstract
a use scenario is a predicted task scenario for an as-yet unwritten system
an essential use case is less specific and higher level than a concrete use case
The students with a development background find this terminology particularly problematic because terms like use-case already exist with a definite and slightly different meaning in OO programming. It’s less of a big deal for me – I’m not a programmer so in my head, they mean what the textbook says they mean. Even so, as a writer I can see that the concepts and their definitions are a bit on the messy side. This is an area of the course that everyone seems to be struggling to learn and retain.
I’d be interested to know how much use these terms get from people doing usability in the real world. If you’re communicating with people from different disciplines, the last thing you need is terminology that means something different in their discipline. I can also see how, as a field that often has to fight to be taken seriously in industry, the language of programming may have been appropriated to add gravitas.
Your thoughts please…
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