Coming to a November meeting near you: User experience evaluation and design - qualitative and quantitative aspects of the total user experience

Increasingly, tech writers and information architects are being asked to perform usability evaluations of  their own designs or the designs created by others. What do you need to know to fulfill this business  request?

This presentation is geared to the practitioner, and will address:

• the concepts and terms of the usability profession
• the activities that are typically involved in evaluating a product for usability
• what's meant by the new and confusing catch-phrase "user experience" - how the usability activities map to the product development lifecycle

These specific topics and related techniques will be covered:

• User-centered design versus system-centered design
• Usability and user experience principles
• Qualitative versus quantitative approaches to usability evaluation - Heuristics for evaluating a product's usability and usefulness
• Crafting business and usability goals (including human performance goals
•  Ways to sample user tasks to create user scenarios and personas
• Conducting various types of usability evaluations, including evaluation for accessibility
• Activity-based focus groups and their value for design evaluation

Suzanne Currie is a usability and user interface design consultant. She has 10+ years experience in designing interfaces that meet business and user goals. Types of software applications have included: Call Center, CRM, Learning Management, Performance Management, Entertainment, Pre-Press, Banking, Insurance, Billing, etc. Suzanne's clients have included: TXU, Foxtel, Scape, Amcor, HP, Fosters,  Cybercrop, Australian Wheat Board, Victoria Education, and others.

Suzanne offers a wide range of professional services to her clients. These include:

• Evaluation of user interfaces, products, and business processes, including experiment design, expert and heuristic evaluations, formal/informal and qualitative/quantitative inspections, and design recommendations based on analysis of findings
• Design of user interfaces and the broader user experience, including conceptual design, collaborative/participatory design, customer touch-point design, business process design, low and high fidelity prototypes, formal design of the user interface including information, interaction, and presentation design, UI specifications, style guides
• Analysis of business objectives and user needs, including fieldwork investigations, contextual inquiry, persona and scenario development, task analysis, experience modeling, future-focused visioning activities, activity-based focus groups
• Techno-anthropology services, including ethnographic observation, interviewing, and fieldwork
• Expression of the above recommendations in business documents for business decision-makers, technical documents for programmers and creative documents for presentation designers