Clare Davidson from SimpleUsability will be joined by Barry Hill, who has been using Jaws for the past 15 years. This session will give you the opportunity to see how Barry navigates his way through websites using Jaws assistive technology. We will then discuss how accessible these websites are and what changes should be made to improve the user experience.

Clare Davidson is a User Experience Consultant, working at SimpleUsability. Previous roles have included working at Lloyds Banking Group and Aviva.

The event will be held courtesy of SimpleUsability and will be held in the Round Foundry Media Centre.

To order a free ticket please go to; http://accessibilityinaction.eventbrite.com/

To find us on twitter use #nuxuk or you can find us on facebook by searching ‘Northern User Experience’

Part 1 – Prototyping with Axure RP – A brief introduction to Axure by Ali Zaman

Download Ali’s sample Axure RP file

Twitter: @web233

Part 2 – Prototyping with Axure RP – PROTOTYPING WORKSHOPS: for requirements, user insight & interaction design by Chris Bush

Twitter: @suthen

Part 3 – Prototyping with Axure RP – Using Axure for Usability Testing by Barry Briggs

Download Barry’s sample Axure RP files

Twitter: @quiffboy

Axure RP Licence Winner

Congratulations to James Darracott who is the lucky winner of a full Axure RP licence worth $589 which was kindly donated to us by Axure. A big thanks to Axure for being so generous with the prize.

If you are interested in trying out axure you can download a free 30 day trial.

Photos from the session

“Usability & User Experience 101″

• When: Thursday, February 10, 2011 from 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM (GMT)
• Where: Michael E. Porter Lecture Theatre, MMU Business School, Aytoun Street, M1 3GH Manchester
• Who with: Paul Rouke, Head of Usability at PRWD
• Twitter Hashtag: #UX101
• Register for FREE: http://saschoolux101.eventbrite.com/

Event Overview

In this event, Paul will introduce you to usability and user experience, and provide you with a range of insights, tips and best practice that can be used when working on web projects.

The talk will cover key site areas such as homepages, landing pages and enquiry pages, and will include time for questions both during and after the talk.

You’re encouraged to tweet about the talk before, during and after, using the hashtag #UX101.

About Paul Rouke

Paul is Head of Usability and founder of PRWD, a Manchester based usability consultancy who help businesses generate more leads and more sales from their websites.

Paul is a usability consultant, trainer and speaker who absolutely loves sharing tips, advice and customer insights to SME’s through to blue chip companies on how they can improve their usability and on-site conversion rates.

Paul works with a range of well known and respected brands including Speedo International, Lakeland, JD Williams, Econsultancy, Smart Insights (run by Dr Dave Chaffey), The Royal Mail and The Scout Association who all recognise the increased sales and profit they can gain by investing in improved on-site usability to improve their conversion rates.

Paul is one of Econsultancy’s well respected training team, and he delivers two courses, Usability and User Experience and E-commerce Usability and Best Practice. Paul also writes articles for Econsultancy’s award winning blog, sharing tips, advice and recommendations.

In addition to working with Econsultancy, Smart Insights co-founder Dr Dave Chaffey brought Paul in to be the expert commentator on usability and conversion optimisation for Smart Insights, a digital portal and consultancy who provide advice and software to help businesses succeed online.

Paul’s business PRWD also has a usability blog sharing tips and advice and company news. You can follow Paul on Twitter for his latest insights, links and commentary on all things usability and conversion optimisation, or if you prefer you connect through Linked In.

1. Remote Usability Testing
2. Brainstorming of ideas for upcoming NUX sessions
3. Interaction Architecture for Startups and Digital Agencies

Tickets: Free tickets are available from eventbrite

Venue: Simple Usability, Round Foundry Media Centre, Foundry Street, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS11 5QP

Time: 7pm to 9pm

Tickets: free from nux.eventbite.com

Twitter hashtag: #nuxuk

Sponsor: thanks to Simple Usability for providing the venue and refreshments

Session Details

Remote Usability Testing

This session will be presented by Lee Duddell from whatusersdo.com

Lee will talk about when to use remote testing and what you can expect to get from it. He’ll also provide some examples of innovative uses of remote testing that you may not have thought of!

About Lee

Founder of whatusersdo.com an innovative online User Experience research service.

Brainstorming of ideas for upcoming NUX sessions

This session will be presented by Dina Salah from the University of York.

A modified form of Open Space, to reach interesting session ideas. Since the meeting is supposed to be self-organising, the facilitators put their energy not in running the meeting but creating a setting that gets everyone’s creative energy flowing. A full description of the original (non modified) form of open space http://www.agileopen.net/on-open-space

About Dina

Dina Salah is a 3rd year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York working under the supervision of Professors Richard Paige. Her research focus is on how to bridge the gap between user centred design and agile software development processes.

Before starting her PhD she worked for 12 years in Egypt both in academia as a teaching assistant and an assistant lecturer in a number of Egyptian Universities, and in industry as an Oracle trainer, consultant and developer. She is an Oracle Certified Professional DBA10G, DBA9i, Developer 9i, Developer 6i, and Managing Oracle on Linux Certified Expert.

Interaction Architecture for Startups and Digital Agencies

This session will be presented by Peter Bagnall from Surface Effect

About Peter

Pete Bagnall is an independent Interaction and Software Architect, at his company SurfaceEffect Ltd. He has had a varied career in the software industry from network research at BT’s research labs at Martlesham Heath (now Adastral Park) to working as an Interaction Designer in Silicon Valley. He’s taught courses for Lancaster University and presented workshops in design methodologies at the BCS annual HCI conference.

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.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

I’d like to start a thread on here about how we could approach the usability issues of VR displays like this, and really about how as we move forward what sort of challenges people see coming, and how they might be solved.

For a start, the reason I’m so keen on this idea, is that having had back pain due to sitting in a chair for prolonged periods, I can see a need for an “Active Interface” where I can spend my day moving about to interact with my computer.

I think that one of the interesting problems that the VR displays will pose, apart from the ability to link a point on the screen/in the space in front of you, with your finger/wiimote is that Information Architecture will become even more massively important. However, I think that by Benchmarking some real world solutions – like supermarkets, some of those problems will already have been solved.