It's late on the second night of the UI13 conference in Cambridge, Mass. Unlike other training and conferences I've been to, this experience has been nuts – in a good way. I've met fantastic people who have similar interests and work in the practical application of usability and design and learned from some of the best in the field.
On Monday, I spent the day at Luke Wroblewski's session, Visual Design for the Web: Communicating with Customers. Luke did a great job giving an overview of visual communication and organization principles. While some of this reminded me of being at SCAD, it was a re-learning I needed, a sort of reminder to remember the basics as I'm working on a design project.
Something never explicitly explained to me before was the idea that a website has a personality that communicates with customers. Near the end of the day, each table completed an exercise in developing a visual personality for a website. We flipped though magazines pulling out textures, colors, fonts, and imagery that communicated the feel and intent we wanted to portray. Our team tacked pictures with a fantasy rugby website theme on a big sheet of paper and ended up with a sporty, slightly aggressive concept with a focus on fantasy sports stats tracking. This was a fun exercise that inspires me to find a way to help my company's business team better communicate with visual examples of their ideas.
Tuesday was packed with seminars. My early morning session was Dana Chisnell's The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild. Dana presented on her experience with a California ballot project where she had no access to what she would test until test day. She also was dealing with a random group of participants and no one to assist her with facilitation. What's fantastic is that she made this work. Most sessions I do are quick and dirty. I may have a test plan and a lightly created script, but usually my planning, facilitating, analyzing, and reporting happens within a week or two. Not much time, so perfection is not the key – qualitative information is what's important. Hearing Dana explain her quick and dirty method left me confident in my own methods.
At Jared Spool's keynote session, what really stood out to me was the human graph we created. Forty audience members were pre-selected to answer a few questions to rate their opinion of four major brands. Based on those ratings, people stood at certain points along the wall and with that, became a living graph. Starbucks surprised me with a bell curve shape, and given this is a design conference, Apple was, of course, highly rated overall while Microsoft did not.
At Kim Goodwin's talk, Where Usability Meets Desirability: Visual Design with Personas and Goals, one of the biggest things I want to go back to communicate with marketing is that focus group preferences don't indicate buying behavior.
Scott Berkun did a fabulous job of explaining how failures are learning experiences. Someone or something will benefit from just about any failure. My favorite example from his talk was the Apple Newton. Apple failed miserably but Palm learned from this failure and became dominant in the market with their own product, which focused on a different technology.
There is a whole lot to say but I don't want to write 2000 words tonight. I'd rather hear from the readers. What were the key points you've taken away from the first two days of UI13? What was your favorite session?
Did you enjoy the ice cream? :)
Related posts:
UI13
0 comments:
Post a Comment