Knewton User Experience

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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Wrap-up: UPA NYC with Andrew DeVigal

At last night’s UPA NYC event, Andrew DeVigal, Multimedia Editor at The New York Times, spoke about multimedia storytelling. He defined multimedia storytelling as ‘how you tell a story to engage users and to deliver content to what the user is looking for.’
 
Process, engagement and learning from users
Working quickly (by nature of the news) allows for more opportunities to experiment, learn, and grow because people are using and reacting to your projects more often. Some projects will grow unexpectedly and ‘out of proportion, but you learn and move on.’ Sometimes using a quick ‘hallway test’ within the office will help get a feature out in just a few days(‘Sounds of Radiolab’ project). 

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UPA NYC Event: World Usability Day 2010

Last fall, I attended the UPA NYC World Usability 2010 event. Guests speakers included John Hockenberry (from syndicated media and journalism) and Sylvia Harris (NYC’s ‘public designer’ from visual design and citizen advocacy).

I liked the overall sense of urgency of solving usability problems in both presentations. Taking existing and future problems and solving them now. Both presentations were really engaging and fun. I liked that Hockenberry led an interactive discussion ‘Are you a citizen Usability Expert?’ We looked at the recent election ballot…If you have two minutes with election commissioner, what woud you say? People shared their ideas of what would make it better/easier to use.

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