Knewton User Experience

WRAP-UP: UPA NYC WITH Jared Spool

Monday night’s UPA NYC event featured Jared Spool whose talk ‘Mobile & UX: In the Eye of the Perfect Storm’ focused on mobile user experience.

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Approaching Data with a Beginner’s Mind- By Hunter Whitney

Excerpt

“

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.
     - Shunryu Suzuki

Recently, I was asked for my opinion on a project in which a UX team was trying to represent complex relationships using a specific type of data visualization. I asked whether that type of visualization was the best way to represent the relationships, and why that particular approach had been chosen. The answer: a designer “liked it.” Perhaps not enough foundational thinking had gone into what they were trying to accomplish. I believe UX practitioners, and the growing variety of users working with these kinds of visualizations, need to consider and ask fundamental questions about the full process that determines what data gets collected, stored, processed, and ultimately displayed. Otherwise, they become part of the problem of misinterpreting data rather helping to make it clearer and more meaningful. Sometimes the simplest questions are the most important to ask, especially when designing visualizations for complex data sets.”

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Wrap-up: 1st Annual User Experience Awards

The first-annual User Experience Awards was held Monday night, coordinated by NYC-CHI as part of NYC Internet Week in partnership with NYC UPA, NYC IxDa and NYC Information Architecture Meetup.

A few highlights…

Razorfish’s project for Terra mobile won Best i-pad experience with a tablet optimized version of their site. It feels like an app and it’s built in HTML5.


 
I tried Terra on our office i-pad and it’s very intuitive and easy to use. Panelist Nicole Rubin from Creative Good mentioned that ‘an intuitive site is one that is easy to use and learnable even when in a different language.’

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WRAP-UP: UPA NYC with Dmitry Zak

At last night’s UPA NYC event, Dmitry Zak from the NBC Universal IxD team talked about ways to improve their video syndication process at CNBC. The goal was to build a system that would make video producers day-to-day job simpler and less painful.  He says he like to be guided by Einsteins quote…

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Dmitry’s approach was user centered design. He conducted user interviews and research and observed the folks that use the system day-to-day. The highlight for me was when he talked about building a system that knows and anticipates the user’s actions and tasks they will perform. This adaptive approach makes the process easy for the user and also minimizes input errors.

• Highlight input fields that users use most often
• System reacts/gives options based on the user’s actions and what they can/cannot do (ex. selecting two events makes ‘merge’ button active)
• Digital fingerprint (name/photo) of the user (history of workflow across shared files)
• Make error messaging more meaningful for humans

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Ten Guidelines for Quantitative Measurement of UX - By Richard Dalton

Excerpt:

“Most UX designers use qualitative research—typically in the form of usability tests—to guide their decision-making. However, using quantitative data to measure user experience can be a very different proposition. Over the last two years our UX team at Vanguard has developed some tools and techniques to help us use quantitative data effectively. We’ve had some successes, we’ve had some failures, we’ve laughed, we’ve cried, and we’ve developed ten key guidelines that you might find useful.”

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