Activities of the Usability and User Experience Community
2001 Conference - Chicago, Illinois

Usability Progression

Tuesday, 8:30 - 10:00
Karen Bachmann, Moderator

This progression covers usability techniques, perspectives on applying usability and usability fundamentals. Discover new ways to anticipate and meet user expectations and bring value to your company

Table Topics:

Working with users: How ethnography and anthropology can help us help users
Ginny Redish, Redish & Associates
Of course, you write for your users. But how do you know your users? How can you find out more about them? What do you need to find out about them? And where can we, as technical communicators, turn for advice on how to get the information that we need about users and their ways of working? Come talk with Ginny Redish about how we can draw on research and techniques in ethnography and anthropology to do user analysis for technical communication, web design, and interface design.

How Usability Supports Quality
David Dick, SWIFT
Companies across industries have initiated total quality management (TQM) procedures. Usability professionals can support those procedures and incorporate TQM principles in creating user-centered products.

Merging User Assistance and the User Interface
Whitney Quesenbery, Cognetics
The goals of both user assistance and user interface design are the same: to create an efficient, effective and satisfying user experience. In other words, usability. What happens when the UA designer has an idea which will change the UI? Are there ideas which are mutually exclusive? Particularly compatible? Are some usability problems better handled as part of user assistance? What is the difference between UI and UA in a user-centered design? This session will provide some answers, some practical suggestions and some provocative approaches to these and other questions.

Usability Testing in New Product Development
Roberta Shroyer, Tec-Ed
Through a case study, learn why your company should do usability testing as early as possible in the development of a new product, become aware of basic steps in testing a limited prototype of a Web site, and find out what you can learn from an early usability test. This practical session focuses on how early testing benefits technical communicators as well as developers. Topics discussed include how to find places in the interface where instructions can help and places where changes must be made, as well as how to differentiate tasks that need to be explained briefly in help from tasks that require more detailed explanations in documentation.

Designing a User Survey
Karen Bachmann, eTrango
Although technology companies are starting to understand the value of gaining user feedback and interaction to support the development process, sometimes gaining support to interact directly with users is a challenge. Conducting a survey is one way to gain remotely user insight. Learn how to design,  develop, and distribute effective user surveys.

Usability Across Training Modes
Robert Grice and Steve Weintraub
As you plan the development of your new training program, you may wish to incorporate usability activities to ensure quality in the final deliverable. But because modes of professional training vary, you may not be sure what type of usability activities to include in your project lifecycle. This talk provides a high level overview of current trends in professional training development and the various usability activities which may apply to each.

Developing Guidelines for "Age-Friendly" Websites
Tharon Howard
One dirty little secret of the Internet is its under-served populations, which is a real problem if you are a politician who is concerned about the "digital divide." However if your company's developing an e-commerce web site, and if you're looking for market penetration in unsaturated populations, then these underserved groups represent new growth opportunities. This session described a pilot study at Clemson's Usablity Testing Facility where we have begun designing guidelines for ensuring that websites are "age friendly." Despite the fact that we gave computer literate participants broadband access to a "well designed" site, not one, single person in our study was able to complete all of the simple tasks within one hour. Our observations from ths study are helping us begin to identify age-friendly guidelines for future study.

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