Northern User Experience

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…

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

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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Once again we’re meeting at the laterooms offices. Chris Collingridge will be talking to us about agile development and the usability challenges that it presents.

Directions and an agenda to follow.

Hi Everyone,

Thanks very much for the excellent turnout – and a big apology to Ed who attempted to come but had navigational difficulties. We will fix the directions for next month. Please comment if I’ve missed anything.

NEW SITE
Mike kicked off the meeting by demonstrating our new online home,which you can find at www.northern-user-experience.org . We agreed thefollowing actions:

• Rachel to write some introductory text (who we are etc).
• Once we are equipped with logins, everyone to complete the short biography section (there is a box for this in the user account setup).
• By next month, think of some categories / themes for the group blog.

We agreed that it probably wasn’t practical for everyone to have individual blogs attached to the site, but the option is there if you have the time to maintain one. If you are already a blogg, we can integrate your existing blog.

EYE TRACKING
Judith gave a fascinating presentation on eyetracking, which prompted lots of questions and discussion. In fact it was such a successful presentation that we didn’t get time for the problem solving session!
For those that missed it we can post the powerpoint on the new site.

AOB
Next month’s meeting will be in the same venue (thanks Hugo). Tero is investigating venues in Leeds for future meetings since we have a few members on the other side of the pennines. If there is demand, we can also look at hosting a meeting closer to liverpool since we have a few people travelling from that direction as well, but it depends on finding a suitable venue.

We now have enough volunteer speakers to set up the next 3 meetings in advance, I’ll send a mailout about that separately.

See you next month