Usability Life Cycle: From Requirements Gathering to Advocacy

1. INF385P – Intro to Usability Week 3 – Usability Life Cycle

2. Course web site . . . • http://courses.ischool.utexas.edu/Bias_Randolph/2010/Fall/INF385P/index.html • Thanks, Justin.

3. Class wiki (template) . . . • http://courses.ischool.utexas.edu/rbias/wiki/ • Username: seven • Password: plusorminustwo • Thanks, Sam.

4. Homework – Now remember, WHY are we looking at these? For the yucks? • Daniel Acevedo http://www.mikematas.comhttp://havenworks.com/ • Ana Carmona http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines_redesign.htmlhttps://www.aa.com/homePage.do • Amy Davis http://www.aldaily.com/http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ • Mandy Deen http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/http://www.yahoo.com • Marynia Goertz http://allrecipes.com Blackboard (www.courses.utexas.edu) • Catherine Grady http://www.cnn.com/http://www.nytimes.com/ • Lara Hanneman http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/http://www.burlwoodbox.com/ • Susie Herbstritt www.endless.comwww.piperlime.com • Daniel M. Hill http://smarthistory.org/http://www.lingscars.com/ • Natalie Hill http://www.thewildernessdowntown.comhttp://www.godaddy.com • Nusrat Khan http://www.grameenamerica.com/http://www.gdrc.org/icm/grameen-info.html Karen Kremer http://www.faylib.org/http://turbotax.intuit.com/ • Steve Kuperman http://www.mla.org/http://www.bk.com • Brent Sipes http://www.boingboing.nethttp://www.netlibrary.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/ListContent.aspx • Jamie Swim http://thebikesmiths.com/j/ Blackboard's discussion board function: www.courses.utexas.edu • Bhavna Verma http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/http://www.borders.com/online/store/Home • Tres Wilcox http://www.craigslist.orghttp://lesailes.hermes.com/us/en • Sandra E. Yates http://www.hulu.com/http://www.amysicecreams.com/ Unafraid to take on Austin's Food Mafia

5. General, kinda, process flow • Someone has an idea for a product/site. • Maybe there was a problem that needs to be fixed, or an identified efficiency • Gotta figure out WHAT to build – Gather user requirements • Build something – Scientific underpinnings, Design support • Don’t be satisified with the first design – employ iterative design approach -- Evaluation • Don’t just thrown your findings “over the transom” -- Advocacy

6. User Profiles • Or “personas.” • From www.uxmatters.com: “In the UX world, we know the value of personas. Personas do all of this for us: • They lend a personal face to our user population. • They provide guidance for design. • They help us understand who it is we are designing for. • They fill in for users when you can’t—or it isn’t practical to—talk to them.

7. Some resources • http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/09/whats-my-persona-developing-a-deep-and-dimensioned-character.php • Building A Data-backed Persona by Andrea Wiggins, boxesandarrows.com • http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/building-a-data • Getting Started with Building Personas by Howard Kaplan, FutureNow Inc. • http://www.futurenowinc.com/resources/FutureNow_Getting_Started_with_Building_Personas.pdf

8. Not just demographics • BUT ALSO • Knowledge • Interests • Goals • Activities • Expectations • Influencers • Frustrations • Pain points

9. Checklist for creating personas From “Personas: Focusing on getting the design right – Part 1” by: Fiona Meighan http://www.apogeehk.com/articles/Personas_Focusing_on_getting_the_design_right_Part1.html • Find out about user goals through interviews and observing real end users • Ensure personas are created based on primary data you've collected • Ensure personas are specific • Include the key user goals only • Ensure each persona has a name, age, family and occupation. • The persona data should provide enough information for decisions to be made and feature creep to be avoided. • Design for a primary persona and possibly a secondary persona. The goal is to narrow down who your team is designing for

10. Key words: Requirements Gathering • User profile • Persona • Task analysis • Contextual inquiry • User/task matrix

11. Key words: Sci Underpin • HCI • Human information processing • Perception • Cognition • Mental models

12. Key words: Design support • Style guides • Patterns • Components • Bridge method

13. Key words: Evaluation • Lab testing • Field testing • Prototype testing • Paper-and-pencil testing • Remote usability testing • Crowd-sourced usability evaluation (!)

14. Key words: Advocacy • Organizational placement • Cost-justification • Skill sets • Storytelling • Job titles – Usability, IA, UX, etc.

15. General resources • http://courses.ischool.utexas.edu/Bias_Randolph/2010/Fall/INF385P/index.html • www.useit.com • http://www.usability.gov/ • http://www.upassoc.org/ and http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/index.html • http://www.stcsig.org/usability/ • http://www.hfes.org/web/Default.aspx • http://www.sigchi.org/ • http://hcibib.org/ • You’ll find others!

16. So, my vision . . . • Over the next 3 or 4 or 5 weeks you wiki “teams” will: • Find all sorts of pertinent resources, link to them from our wiki • Incorporate book reviews and white papers as appropriate • Come up with some design-a-rama for the wiki – maybe some visuals, some IA • At some point we’ll “go live” – ooh, first perhaps one team of two will do as their final project a usability evaluation of the usability wiki!

17. For next week • Send me your white paper topics. Due 4 weeks from today. • More reading per syllabus. • Usability test plan (for your final project) due in 6 weeks. Will help with pointers to templates. • Next week – we’ll talk about wiki progress and fine-tune.