Archive for the ‘User Research’ Category
Saturday, September 20th, 2008
Speaker: Maria Giudice, Hot Studio, Inc.
Date: September 20, 2008
Waterfall approach
Predictable and structured approach
Human-centered: solutions are based on upfront research and strategy
Team roles are clearly defined (designers design, engineers build)
Rigid, heavy, and slow
Documentation and specifications
"Waterfall method is best when you can't afford to learn from your mistakes. You don't design ...
Posted in Design Process, Events and Conferences, User Research | No Comments »
Saturday, September 20th, 2008
Speaker: Indi Young, Independent Consultant
Date: September 20, 2008
Advices: Step out of your problem solving role
Empathy
Vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
Feelings, thoughts, attitudes, emotions, beliefs, behaviors, reactions, philosophies, motivations
Example - Mental model courtesy of Google Analytics Team, 2007
Understand My visitors (use first-person verbs). Make ...
Posted in Design Process, Events and Conferences, User Research | No Comments »
Saturday, September 20th, 2008
Speaker: Colleen Murray, Jump Associates
Date: September 20, 2008
The origins of scenario planning
Developing and communicating scenario worlds
Frameworks
Make sense of what you see
Build mental models, maps and metaphors
Use needs to highlight opportunities
Imperatives
Suggest directions and principles for development
Offer guidelines for prioritizing and making decisions
Observations
See the world with fresh eyes
Listen and Learn
Find ...
Posted in Design Patterns, Design Process, Events and Conferences, Lectures, User Research | No Comments »
Friday, September 19th, 2008
Speaker: Miguel Gomez Winebrenner, Cheskin Added Value
Date: September 19, 2008
Focus on Latin America multi-cultural segment
Assimilation vs. Acculturation
Assimilation - the abandonment of one's original culture in favor of a second or host culture. In the US, some immigrants gradually lose their original culture in favor of the second, thus assimilating.
Acculturation ...
Posted in Events and Conferences, User Research | No Comments »
Monday, August 25th, 2008
Designing Your Reputation Systemview presentationtags: patterns karma levels points
Bryce Glass, Sr. Interaction Designer at Yahoo!, shared his presentation on building reputation system at the 2008 IA Summit. Highlights from the slide presentation:
Yahoo! Design Pattern Library: Reputation Patterns
Define your business goals
Drive user engagement
Promote a specific feature
Acknowledge top contributors
Increase content ...
Posted in Design Patterns, Events and Conferences, Interaction Design, User Research | No Comments »
Monday, July 28th, 2008
Paul Thelen ( Founder of Big Fish Games) presented casual game study industry findings performed by Big Fish Games in partnership with NPD Group. The study focused in US market with emphasis on the casual portion of the gaming industry.
During the keynote, Paul presented the14 distinct gamer groups. Of the ...
Posted in User Research | 1 Comment »
Sunday, July 27th, 2008
At last week’s Casual Connect Seattle (23-25 July, 2008), Paul Thelen, The Founder, Chairman and CSO of Big Fish Games, spoke about the key findings on diversity and complexity of casual game industry in the US market.
Finding 1: Segmenting gamers into two buckets is misleading
Finding 2: Combining Casual ...
Posted in User Research | No Comments »
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
Suzanne Boyd and Emma Rose from Anthro-Tech talked about their usability research methodologies when they were commissioned by the Washington Department of Licensing for its Website redesign project in 2005.
Step 1- Discovering users’ mental models
Users’ mental models dictate how they look for information.
When the information architecture reflects users ...
Posted in Case Studies, Prototyping, Usability Testing, User Research | No Comments »
Friday, February 8th, 2008
Carolyn Wei, User Experience Researcher at Google, shared the 5 UX challenges Google facing to make useful, desirable, and delightful products.
Challenge 1. Understanding our users
These different sources of information provide different part of the story at different stages.
User experience research
Logs
Customer support
Quantitative market research
Live online experiments (A/B tests)
Challenge 2. Consistency
Consistency ...
Posted in Lectures, User Research | No Comments »
Friday, January 11th, 2008
Tim Briggs, Senior User Experience Researcher at Microsoft Office Design Group did a seminar in the “Current Issues in Technical Communication” lecture. He talked about the process of software instrumentation through case study on Office 2007 development.
What is Documenting instrumentation?
The ability to track people’s clicks. Which is essentially ...
Posted in Case Studies, Lectures, Usability Testing, User Research | No Comments »
Hello, my name is Janet. I am a UX designer at Big Fish Games. 
by Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone
