Northern User Experience

It looks like we have (just) enough people to proceed, so following an unplanned summer break NUX is back, back, back.

We will be meeting 6.30  at the Waterhouse pub, just near St. Peter’s Square metrolink (walkable from piccadily station).

http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/pubs/pub-details.php?PubNumber=2103

Judith will be talking about personas and how she uses them in her work.  There’s been a lot of interest from the group on this, so for those that can’t attend, we can put the presentation and any other content here on the blog.

Since the group is currently homeless again,  we can also discuss possible venues (MDDA and so on) and decide whether we prefer meeting a) somewhere with a projector or b) somewhere that serves beer.

See you there.

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’ve been made aware of a Firefox extension for diagraming/GUI prototyping called Pencil. I’m going to take a look at it, to see how it compares to old stagers like Visio, and newer whizz-bang options like Axure, but I was wondering if anyone else has any experience or opinions on this tool?

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

Following my 1st meet-up on the 6th August, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the group and its current exposure in the north-west.

From what I understand, what the Northern User Experience group is currently

• a monthly get together attended by a very small group of people passionate about usability, user centered design and accessibility
• attended by the likes of a usability guru from Sage, and ex usability consultant at HSBC (now at Ability Net) and one of the original founders of Wordpress
• an offshoot a chapter of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA), the worldwide association for usability professionals and advocates
• an opportunity for attendees to discuss topical areas of the usability market, gaining insights from client-side specialists, agency side consultants, freelance consultants and developers

From my initial exposure to NUX, where apparent weaknesses are

(Please note this isn’t intended to come across as being critical of anyone involved in the group to date, and I know it is run purely in peoples spare time and simply out of passion!).

• a current lack of exposure as being the primary usability community in the north
• due to the lack of exposure, very low attendance to the monthly get togethers
• a lack of engaging reasons as to why someone should attend the monthly get togethers
• very limited content on this blog, meaning new visitors may not feel the group has the kind of credibility which it does actually have by the people involved (Mike I know that a profiles page is being planned which will certainly help this)

Potential ways to increase exposure and help build credibility

Below I have listed out some ways in which I would be very keen in helping to implement in order to increase the exposure of the NUX and therefore strengthen its credibility. I am sure this will provide benefits across the group, both in the effectiveness of this blog and in the scale of the monthly meetings.

• promoting the group and the monthly events through Manchester Digital
• promoting the group and the monthly events through the Geek-up Google group
• promote the monthly get together to the larger agencies in the north west, who have a vested interest in user experience
• providing links into external blog posts tagged with, for instance, NUX, therefore providing more regular content being available through this blog (for instance I have recently published an article on our User Centered Design process, which may well spark some commentary from people within the NUX group)
• promoting NUX on our own usability blogs, therefore increasing exposure to people interested in and reading about user experience and user centered design
• creating a podcast of each monthly event and promoting it on the blog, increasing the amount of engagement on this site and hopefully helping to encourage new visitors to come along and participate
• for when attendee numbers increase (or maybe not) videoing the monthly events and posting these up on the blog
• harnessing the increasing flexibility and power of Wordpress to provide an improved user experience of this blog, perhaps even using the blog to push some of the boundaries of what Wordpress can do - this could provide interesting online news and provide increased exposure of the group

I know these initial ideas would take varying levels of time to implement, but although I am new to the group, I am extremely keen in seeing the Northern User Experience grow in exposure and credibility over the long term, like I’m sure others are.

As a side note, if London can end up with having a large event focussing on the BBC user experience with a BBC UX representative, then why not have ambitions of this kind of coup for the North West!

What does everyone else think?

Thanks to everyone who came along to Sage yesterday, and nice to meet some new people too. Apologies for the misleading 8pm start time posted in a couple of places….

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.

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…

Following some research with my colleague who found our site, he suggested EventBrite as another place we could list our events. It’s free to list free events, so looks like it might be another opportunity for us to be found.

http://www.eventbrite.com/home

We talked a little in Wednesday’s (July 2nd) meeting about the lack of recognised qualifications to audit or certify a web site as “accessible”. I recalled a customer of my company had asked about the use of a “trusted friend”. Alas, my recollection was faulty and the phrase they had used was “critical friend”.

It is desirable that the system meets the W3C level 2 accessibility standards or conforms to another equivalent standard…
Please supply detail of how you audit your systems compliance to achieve accessibility standards. Do you make use of a ‘critical friend’ in this process if so, please state…

– extract from a request for tender document

I researched at the time the meaning of this phrase, which was new to me, and found the following reference in Wikipedia:

A critical friend can be defined as a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critiques of a person’s work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work.

– Wikipedia article ‘Critical Friend’

The concept is very interesting and seems to have been coined in the context of UK local government.

To paraphrase, I might describe a critical friend as someone who is knowledgeable and honest enough to tell you the truth about the bad stuff, but who will, equally, give praise about the good stuff. A ‘consultant’ who is likely to dress up your short comings in fancy praise-sounding words in a fat document for a fat fee will not do.

It needs to be someone who is knowledgeable about the system under review or at least the domain involved. Someone who perhaps has a moral interest in seeing that the system succeeds: both for your organisation as supplier and the end user as consumer, but who can still be paid a reasonable fee for their time.

In the case of an accessibility review it needs to be someone who can look at the whole picture; beyond just the validity of the mark-up and ticking the boxes from the WCAG check-lists. Someone who can empathise with at least some of the challenges faced by people with a range of disabilities. Someone who can understand the use cases and evaluate your system from a functional, goal oriented viewpoint.

It naturally follows that this someone must understand ‘usability’ and the very close relationship between the two disciplines — An accessible site is likely to be more usable and a more usable site goes a long way to address some of the cognitive accessibility issues.

Great to meet Chris, Mike and Rachel, and of course Jackie (but we know each other already, from Lancaster). I certainly found the conversation got my grey matter working, which I always enjoy.

Couple of sites to look at…

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/  - written by Joel Spolsky, which I really like. Great writing style (well, it would be he wrote an essay on that too) and some very interesting ideas.

http://www.ted.com/   - If you’ve not seen the TED talks, there are some great design related ones. Jackie, if you can tear yourself away from the cooking and homely arts this will be a great distraction - assuming you’ve not devoured them all already.

If you look at http://www.ted.com/index.php/profiles/view/id/60092 you’ll see my profile there with some of my favourite talks - no desperately design related, but what the heck.

Yes, I remember, I somehow accidentally volunteered to talk about designing for older people. I can also talk about personas (till the cows come home). I’m giving a one day tutorial on personas at HCI 2008 in Liverpool again this year (did it last year) so do tell everyone and I’ll be your friend forever. I’m also putting together a half day session for executives called “Design Matters”. I’d love to run this by a test audience, so before you get sick of the sound of my voice I’d love to try this out on you and get your views. Very much focussed on helping execs understand why design is important.

Looking forward to next month, see you then.

–Pete

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