I’ve been busy, though it’s probably not terribly apparent here. I’ve been hoping that someone would author accessible content about spaces of all kinds, and position it for an audience that’s new(ish) to UX. I imagined that this piece of work would bring together related concepts in architecture, built environments,….
User Experience design and usability can be a really challenging thing to explain. What makes it even more difficult is that everyone seems to have their own interpretation of it. Invariably the word “design” trips most everyone up, often making i…
One of the fastest (& incidentally cheapest) “bang for your buck” type of User Experience techniques is the good old trusty heuristic evaluation. Essentially, a heuristic evaluation (aka expert review, usability audit, site audit) is a discount us…
Following our warm-up exercise in observation, I divided the class to conduct observations at two different exhibits that feature games. In this exercise, I asked students to spend at least 30 minutes observing and noting visitors & pain points wh…
In my second class, we took the fly-on-the-wall user research technique over to Vancouver’s Science World. As a class, we first took a look at an exhibit that often puzzles visitors because it’s not entirely obvious how one interacts with it. Simp…
Following hot on the heels of empathy, my next class was designed to dig a bit into guerrilla user research techniques. Personally, I’m a big fan of hallway tests or interviews, but usually before I even go there, I like to do a bit of investigati…
This class project is one of my favorites; one that I wished I did back in grad school. But back then, all we got was this one anecdote which was always trotted out when a professor wanted to talk about user studies: an ethnographer who donned the…
This team had the markers flying soon after prototyping commenced because they had the workflow mapped out in advance. Their prototype was by far the most colorful and elaborate. They made good use of accordion folding for drop down menus and used…
This group of students also mapped everything out on the whiteboard first, then moved to paper. In many ways, mobile feels the most natural to do with paper. I wonder if it’s because mobile has to focus on keeping things simple? Or is it the tacti…
This team worked out their overall flow/architecture on the whiteboard first. They then moved over to paper, repurposing some transparent nametag holders (you know the kind, you get them at conferences with a lanyard attached) to create product ov…
