What I’ve learned from setting up and running WhatUsersDo

Lee Duddell is co-founder whatusersdo.com an innovative online User Experience research service.

How Usable Are Personas

It seems like a mantra that we create personas for user-centred design, usability testing and just about everything. But how usable are they? When are they best used, what alternatives are there, and when do they work best? Keith will be leading a fun exercise to explore different ways of creating personas, and then facilitating a discussion on how persaonas can work in practice, and at which times there might be better alternatives.

Keith Doyle is founder and user experience architect at Extreme Usability based in York. Exterme Usability offers user experience and website optimisations services across the UK.

Let Us Know You’re Coming

It helps if we have an idea of numbers, so if you want, you can let us know you’re coming at the Upcoming website. It is fine to just turn up on the night if you want.

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If you want to tweet about the event or Northern User Experience, our twitter hashtag is #nuxuk

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Time

The event will be from 7pm to 9pm

Venue is The Brewery Tap

The Brewery Tap is right by the train station and there’s an NCP car park across the road (LS1 5DE). We’ll be meeting between 7 and 9. They do sell food if you need something to eat. The address is 18 New Station Street, Leeds, LS1 5DL.

www.brewerytapleeds.co.uk.

Sponsor

The venue sponsor is Extreme Usability.

Introductions

We started by introducing ourselves and what we do. We had people attending from Leeds, Harrogate, York and Lancaster. The steering group talked a bit about what Northern User Experience is and how it works.

Discount Usability Testing

Tonight’s session was facilitated by Keith Doyle. We listened to a Boagworld Podcast of an interview bewteen Paul Boag and Steve Krug about Krug’s new book called ‘Rocket Surgery Made Easy‘. This was followed by a discussion of Krug’s methodology and of how we carry out usability tests in general. Lee Duddell from What Users Do has met Steve Krug, and he explained the unmoderated usability tests which they offer – a service which Krug recommends in his book and which is discussed in the Podcast.

Instant Usability Testing

We had a quick go at Krug’s methods to identify the top few things which would improve the Northern User Experience website in the next month. One issue raised was to split the text out to make it easier to read, so in this post, I have added more headings – so hopefully this site is becoming more usable already!

What are your thoughts on discount usability testing?

You can add a comment here using the link below, tweet using the #nuxuk hashtag, or email the mailing / discussion – you can join using the form on the right. Let us know if you have written a on the subject in your blog, and we can create a link to your post.

Sponsor

Tonight’s venue was sponsored by www.extremeusability.co.uk

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.

interaction between usability professionals and software developers

Sorry for the delay (Rob did send them promptly)

Rob will be giving a talk at Tuesday 20th Jan’s meeting, on the subject of the interaction between usability professionals and software developers in delivering projects.

The talk will cover the common pitfalls that both sides can make in failing to understand the perspective of the other and how this can be addressed. It will also cover the interaction between common User-Centered Design processes and modern software development processes such as the various types of Agile development.

Rob is hoping to keep it fairly short (15 minutes or so) and cover a few practical points that should be useful to everyone. Hopefully it will be a topic which can stimulate some interesting debate too!

See some of you next Tuesday!

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:

• Title: Usability: What’s The Use?
• Date: 28th January 2009
• Time: 6.00pm – 9.00pm
• Venue: CUBE (Centre for the Urban Built Environment), 113-115 Portland Street, Manchester M1 6DW
• Cost: FREE!
• Official Event Page: http://usabilitywhatstheuse.eventbrite.com/

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.

It reads

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A loading error occured [sic]. This might negatively influence the use of the application. Please reload the application if this occurs.

Beside the spelling mistake, the euphemism for ‘the application might break’, it’s also not clear after which ‘this’ occurring one should reload the application. And will I lose my work so far?

I had to convert it to PDF to get it uploaded into WordPress. If anyone would prefer it in the original PowerPoint format, just let me know.

http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/

I really enjoyed the discussion on measuring user behaviours and metrics for usability: it was great to have some input from people (particuarly Steve & Mike) who’ve done some of this with web analytics, and get some extremely valid context and caution from Judith. The stuff about measuring usability improvements (KPIs, A-B testing, and cash!) was good too, as was the discussion on surveys.

Our next meeting is due to be on 3 September. I won’t be able to be there, unfortunately, but Judith offered to kick off a discussion on personas, and Manchester Digital Development Agency was suggested as a possible venue that definitely sounded worth investigating.