User Research and Design, Usability engineering, usability testing, User Centered Design, HCI, User Interface, UI, Human Computer Interaction, Usability in India
One of the world’s leading experts on choice, Sheena Iyengar talks about fundamental differences in how the idea of choice differs across different countries and cultures. Citing various interesting examples from her research spanning a more than 15 years, she explains the assumptions which inform the American view of choice and how too much choice can impose constraints instead of opportunities.
About Sheena Iyengar
Sheena Iyengar is one of the world’s leading experts on choice. Iyengar’s research has been informing business and consumer-goods marketing since the 1990s. Her experiments have provided experiments have provided rich material for Malcolm Gladwell and other pop chroniclers of business and the human psyche.
Sheena teaches courses at the Columbia Business School to MBAs, Executive MBAs, and Executives, including courses at the World Economics Forum in Geneva, Switzerland. Her work is regularly cited in top news outlets such as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on National Public Radio.
John Underkoffler starts of by talking about how, around twenty five years ago, the Macintosh fundamentally changed the way people thought about computation, computers and how they used them, and that it was such a radical change that the early Macintosh development team had to write an entirely new OS from ground up for it. Referring to the advancement in fundamental supporting technologies, he talks about how one can buy more graphic power in less than a 100 dollars, and that same power would cost a million bucks from SGI a decade ago.
He goes on to demo a few projects of his and the ‘g-speak spatial operating environment’, as he call it and ends by saying that in five years time from now, when you buy a computer, this will very much be part of what you will get with it.
About John Underkoffler
John Underkoffler owns Oblong Industries, a company he founded to move the g-speak spatial operating system into the real world. Oblong is building apps for aerospace, bioinformatics, video editing and more.
Before founding Oblong, Underkoffler spent 15 years at MIT’s Media Laboratory, working in holography, animation and visualization techniques, and building the I/O Bulb and Luminous Room Systems.
Rob Tanen begins to talk about how user researchers have historically lacked appropriate technology for studying how people use technology and the emergence of a variety of tools that can be applied to data gathering, analysis and sharing. He talks about the need for awareness and guidance in the selection and use of such research technologies.
Tanen goes on to talk about the basic characteristics of effective user research tools: documentation, measurement, efficiency and enhancement, data on current usage of various technologies for data gathering, analysis and presentation, demonstrations and tips on the latest technological tools for conducting user research, including high-speed digital video and pen computing and concept designs of future user research tools.
About Rob Tanen
Rob Tanen is Director of Research at Bresslergroup, a product design and development firm. Rob has over 15 years experience applying product/interface usability in the medical, industrial, commercial and consumer fields.
Rob is creator and editor of DesigningforHumans, the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) blog focusing on events, methods and technology related to user research. Rob has a BA in Cognitive Science from Vassar College, and MA and PhD degrees in Human Factors/Experimental Psychology from the University of Cincinnati.
David Kelley, chairman of IDEO, says product design has become more about the user experience than about hardware. He shows a video of this new, broader approach, including footage from the Prada store in New York.
About David Kelly
David Kelly is the founder of IDEO. He helped design the first mouse, the Treo and the Leap chair. Kelley has also been teaching design at Stanford for more than 25 years and now leads the university’s design school there.
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Rohan talks about Adam, a tablet PC in the making by his Hyderabad-based company, Notion Ink, which was founded by six IITans and an MBA graduate with an average age of just 24. Adam generated considerable buzz after they decided to demonstrate their prototype at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show), the world’s largest consumer tech trade show in January this year.
And with good reason too. The Adam tablet boasts of twice the battery life and performance of the iPad, thanks to the integration of two breakthrough power saving components - nVidia’s Tegra 2 chip and a PixelQi screen. It has the ability to play full high definition videos and of course, Flash, on the web browser. As Shravan puts it, the Adam offers the performance of a computer with the power consumption of a cellphone. The Adam tablet also features a 10.1 inch PixelQI dual mode screen allows users to read it easily in bright sunlight like an e-reader.
Did you know that there are more Farmville players than there are twitter accounts? In addition to a few quick facts, Jesse Schell talks about the new thinking that is being brought to game development by studying the success of some extremely popular online games. He talks about why Club Penguin, Mafia Wars, Web Kinz, Farmville and even the Wii are successful beyond expectation today.
He talks about the psychological aspect of why these games are so popular today, how these games manage to make so much money and about their retail models, which are different from the regular retail model.
He also talks about how games are being used by regular products are using games to their advantage. And finally he goes on to describing his vision of how games will be ubiquitous in the future.
About Jesse Schell
Jesse Schell runs a games studio called Schell Games. He also teaches at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. In the past, he worked as creative director at the Disney Virtual Reality Studio. He is also author of the book, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.
A usability test is used to measure the usability of a part or whole of a product. It basically involves giving tasks that are commonly performed or intended to be performed on a part or whole of that product, to participants that are representative of the product’s users.
This is how I would define a usability test in brief to a layman.
Adobe and Condé Nast (publisher of various magazines including Vogue, GQ and Wired) unveiled a new digital magazine experience based on WIRED magazine at the TED conference in Long Beach, California. Built on Adobe AIR and developed with Condé Nast, the tablet prototype illustrated the possibilities for magazine publishers to reach readers in new ways. The concept enables immersive content experience in digital form and allows new interactive features to stimulate reader engagement, including
content designed specifically for the touch screen experience
easy navigation methods, including an innovative zoomed-out ‘browse mode’
the ability to browse image slideshows
embedded 360 degree object viewers
support for video and audio content
the ability to rotate content using device accelerometer functionality
About the small usability issues across your application that you think you can ignore, think of them in this way- one small crease on an ironed shirt is okay. But creases all over and you have an un-ironed shirt.
