[IxDA Discuss] Design In The Open - A community for open source designers
a little plug for those who may be interested: www.designintheopen.org is an online community for designers working in/on open source projects. A place to share experiences, projects, experiments, ideas, mental health breakdowns and successes with people who know what it's like. if this sounds like your bag, pls come join us :) Leisa Reichelt Disambiguity.com Contextual Research, User Centred Design Social Design le...@disambiguity.com +44 778 071 2129 Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Seeking examples of creative video scenarios/user research/prototypes
Adam, We've been using video a lot to communicate concepts, prototypes and some testing with the Drupal community (and other interested participants) on the D7UX.org project. There are a bunch of videos here: www.YouTube.com/group/drupal7ux (that URL is from memory as I'm on my phone so hopefully correct!) Is that the kind of thing you're after? Sent from my iPhone On 12 Jun 2009, at 04:40, Adam Little alittle...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I am trying to collect examples of experimental and creative video scenarios or user research studies (or videos that mix both). Thanks so much! Examples I already have: Green House CPH - A video scenario that communicates an energy management concept in the form of a mock user research study (http://vimeo.com/3423797) Little Brinkland by Anab Jain- A documentary about a fictional town in the near future, design to communicate concepts about future workspaces (http://www.littlebrinkland.com/finalproposals.htm) MeetUp by Participle - A video mixing user research, experience prototyping and storytelling to communicate a new service for elderly Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Nice Research on Persona Effectiveness
Oh, and debate is for women. (Wait, no, I was thinking of something else. Nevermind,) Just on the off chance anyone thinks that continuing this meme would be funny It's not. (and I just got done explaining elsewhere why the first time it came up it didn't bother me so it's not that I don't have a sense of humour about these things) Leisa Reichelt Disambiguity.com Contextual Research, User Centred Design Social Design le...@disambiguity.com +44 778 071 2129 2009/5/29 Jared Spool jsp...@uie.com On May 28, 2009, at 5:55 PM, Robert Hoekman Jr wrote: Oh, man. This is hardly solid research. Now you're just begging for a debate. ;) Trust me. Compared to many of the hundreds of research papers I review each year, this one is pretty solid. And maybe, just maybe, I was begging for debate. Oh, and debate is for women. (Wait, no, I was thinking of something else. Nevermind,) 1. ... 2. ... 3. ... I actually think Frank did a nice job of defending his study, so I won't do that here. The only thing this study shows is that 2 out of the 3 teams created a more usable design as measured against heuristics (this assumes, of course (and it's a big assumption), that the evaluators did good evaluations), and that they happened to be the same groups that used personas in the project. At the absolute best, this is a loose correlation. It's absolutely not proof of genuine causation. I could have fared as well as any of them without personas and without a team. 4. Even if you throw out arguments #2 and #3 above, #1 still makes it all a moot point. No, no, no. You're looking at this wrong. Scientific research studies like this are little building blocks. You disassemble the problem into little problems, evaluate each problem, then reassemble them to build your case. While the bigger problem is, Do teams that employ personas produce effective designs for their audiences? that, as you've correctly pointed out, is hard to prove in a study. So, you break it down. What this study does (in a very sweet, nice way) tackle one small aspect of the problem: if you take a group of designers, break them up, give some personas and others not, do you see different results. The null hypothesis is, if personas don't make a differences, then the control group (the folks w/o personas) will not produce distinguishably different results from those that do. This study contradicts the null hypothesis, because the teams with personas produced different results based on the criteria (heuristic evaluation). Now, as you rightly point out, we can question the criteria (and should!). That would be a different study. What criteria would you like Frank or other researchers to measure against? That's the next building block. Also, we could perform the same study with different user research tools. What tools would you like to see studied? Of course, this study can't stand alone. Good research, like this, needs to be duplicated elsewhere before you can really stand behind it. Other researchers should try to replicate the experiment to see if they get similar results. Then, and only then, will we empirically know that the results were great. Frank did a good job of explaining to another team how to duplicate the experiment. You have to take this type of research for what it is and not expect a single study to prove everything. I found it fascinating because it duplicated what we've seen in our research in a controlled setting: teams that use personas have a different dynamic than teams that don't -- a dynamic that, in my opinion, leads to better design. All that said, I still love you Jared. :) Oh, Robert, you certainly know how to make a guy swoon. Hugs Kisses. Jared Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Designers, meet the Drupal community!
also not wanting to enter into the 'my tool is better than your tool' debate, but thought some people may be interested to know that Drupal is very aware of their current user experience issues and having conducted some recent usability testing that found some users completely at a loss when asked to complete a task to 'create content', the community on the whole is very aware of the fact that significant work needs to be done. to that end, I'm really happy to be currently working with Mark Boulton Design on a project sponsored by Acquia that is focused entirely on improving the user experience of Drupal 7 (the next version release of Drupal) for novice / intermediate users and as has been suggested, there is an awful lot that we hope to approve in this next release to make Drupal a much more viable option for non-developers. we're trying to run this project as 'open source' as we can - you can see some of the work to date here http://www.disambiguity.com/category/planet-drupal/ and we're in the process of getting a site that aggregates all of the activity from within the community and elsewhere on this project - just seeing the feedback here has already been insightful, so if you're interested in commenting on or participating in this process I would be really thrilled to have your input throughout the process. (that's a message for anyone, not only those currently jousting in this thread!) despite being drafted to work with Drupal on UX projects, I'm still a relatively happy Wordpress user. In fact, one of the success criteria we set for this project is that Drupal7 will be such a significiant improvement that it will be enough to tempt those of us working on the project from our other platforms (Wordpress and Expression Engine) and over to Drupal. I'm the first to admit that there is a long way to go, but the tide is really starting to turn within the Drupal community - there are now some really energetic UX and Design communities starting to emerge and the community overall has a much clearer sense of the impact that their current poor user experience is having on the perception of their product. I'm really excited to see what we can accomplish in the coming months and years and again, for those interested in helping us better integrate design into an opensource environment, please come and help out! It's a particularly great opportunity for anyone relatively new to the field and looking to gain some hands on experience - there's lots of work that needs doing - if you are interested, please ping me and I'm happy to help introduce you to the lay of the land (at least as much as I know it - I'm only fairly new to the community, but I can at least make it a whole lot less scary!) Leisa Reichelt Disambiguity.com Contextual Research, User Centred Design Social Design le...@disambiguity.com +44 778 071 2129 2009/3/21 Philipp Schroeder phil...@din15.org I actually didn't want to get involve in this discussion, because it is almost like Apple vs PC, but if I don't ask or discuss clarity will never be reached, and some people actually think that WordPress is just a blog and can't be a CMS. I hope this thread doesn't derail into a discussion about whether tool y is better than tool z. In my original post, I was trying to put forward that I see a huge opportunity for collaboration and cross-fertilization between the ixda community and the drupal community. I feel both communities can profit from each other's *expertise*. [...] Why is it then that the experts fear WordPress? Why do the experts choose systems that are known for their higher learning curves and shun the systems like WordPress that has excelled in user experience? Well, in an ideal world, software would be so adaptable to one's needs and personal experience level, that we wouldn't need distinct 'software for experts'. I feel that Alan Cooper's suggestion to optimize for the perpetual intermediates, rather than for the beginners, is good advice and something I feel Drupal is aiming for. Does empowering the user, scare the experts because they might no longer be needed or feel less of an expert among their peers? That is an interesting question. I am curious, where do you see evidence of such behaviour? Consider for example that Dries Buytaert - original creator and project lead of Drupal - has been evangelizing about empowering the user by eliminating the middlemen for years: http://buytaert.net/drupal-and-eliminating-middlemen [...] But if you are evangelists for a better user experience, shouldn't you be supporting the products which have a better user experience? Building software with great user experience for the masses is hard. That's why I point out that there is a great opportunity here ripe for the taking - for the ixda and drupal communities to actively collaborate on the ixda networking platform project. The ixda site building team will benefit
Re: [IxDA Discuss] IxDA selects Drupal
just wanted to confirm that UX/Usability are a priority for the next release of Drupal (Drupal7) - and that I'm working (with Mark Boulton) on a project to make it a lot more friendly to non-developers. I was very happy/excited to hear that the IxDA have chosen Drupal :) As others have mentioned, the Drupal community are amazing, including their very small and relatively newly formed but energetic usability crew. I hope that as a part of our work over the coming months we might also be able to make the very interesting world of opensource design and usability a little more accessible, increase the focus on UX and help push forward some thinking about design processes- stay tuned for more on that! :) Leisa Reichelt Disambiguity.com Contextual Research, User Centred Design Social Design le...@disambiguity.com +44 778 071 2129 2009/3/11 Jackson Fox jackson...@gmail.com I'm actually glad to hear you chose Drupal, as I just made the same decision for our local UPA chapter's new website. It's nice to see I wasn't crazy :) @Adrian - As a complete Drupal novice, I've found it to be powerful, poorly organized, and overly complicated. The power is what made me overlook the latter two issues, but I am very excited to hear Leisa Reichelt and Mark Boulton have been hired to work on the backend. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=39726 - Show quoted text - Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Does eye-tracking carry any real meaning?
just a little sidenote: it is fascinating to read the comments that people have left to the originally quoted article - lots and lots of incredibly positive and thankful comments with people talking of going back and redesigning their sites as a result of this information. it says a lot for the great demand out there for someone to make these grand pronouncements about what works and what doesn't (with or without context). People do love their rules don't they. I always find it a constant balancing act to try to give people this sense of perceived value through pronouncements and actually getting them to understand the context in which the design decisions are being made. Leisa Reichelt Disambiguity.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 778 071 2129 *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
