2005 RM CHI Meeting Archive

January 11, 2005

Designing Usability Into Products: the Engineering, Art, and Psychology of Prototyping. Joint meeting with RMIUG.

Speaker: Bill Pawlak, Inovdesigns Inc.
Location: National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder

Most of us want our products and services to be not just useful... but usable to our customers. When done properly, usability studies can help reach that goal. But formal usability testing often gets the short end of the stick when budgets and timelines are tight.

This talk will explore some cost-effective tools and techniques for designing and evaluating the usability of systems. We'll focus on the benefits of creating prototypes-- for a hardware device, a web portal, a web application -- and answer questions:

Why bother? Prototypes take time, so why can't the customers tell us what's not usable?
When is the best time to do prototypes? How can they fit into an insane development schedule?
Can an interactive prototype really replace formal usability testing, or should we do both?
What are best practices? Things to avoid?

Bill Pawlak is the President of Inovdesigns, a User Interface (UI) Design and Analysis company focused on making the world of technology easier for people to use. Bill has over 10 years of multidisciplinary experience designing, testing, and developing user interfaces for software, web-based, and mobile applications. He has applied his expertise to everything from very large, complex systems such as Air Traffic Control to desktop software systems to rich internet applications. Prior to founding Inovdesigns, Bill led Customer Experience efforts with Seurat Company for clients such as RE/MAX International, Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Microsoft, P&G, and Agilent. Bill's educational background is in Human-Computer Interaction and Industrial/Cognitive Engineering.

Slides (pdf, 1.1 MB)

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July 13, 2005

Usability Conferences Redux: Summaries of CHI and UPA 2005

Speakers: Larry Marine, Intuitive Design . Nancy Shepard, Webroot
Location: Celtic Tavern, downtown Denver

Two of the premier 2005 conferences for usability are CHI and UPA.

Join us for an informal discussion of those conferences with Nancy Shepard (former Rocky Mountain CHI chair, who attended CHI in May) and Larry Marine (who attended and presented at UPA in early July). They'll share their notes on trends that could affect user-experience work... what was interesting, what was popular, and what was controversial.

Many of you may know Larry Marine through various design-oriented discussion lists or groups. Larry started Intuitive Design as a usability consulting firm after graduating Don Norman's Cog Sci program at UCSD in 1990. He performs the complete range of UCD services including user research, interaction design, and evaluations on software, web, and medical device projects for clients such as GTE, Sony, American Airlines, IMS Health, Ericsson, and FedEx. Larry recently moved from the crowded beaches of San Diego to the clean air and grand vistas of Colorado Springs. No regrets.

Nancy Shepard has over twenty-six years in the computer hardware and software industries with experience in user research, interface design, usability testing, and heuristic evaluations. She specializes in applying user-centered design methods, human factors research, adult learning theory, and ethnographic research methods to help companies design more usable products and information. She has worked for both large and small companies including Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Mastercard International, IBM, Qwest, and AT&T Bell Labs. She is currently the User Experience Manager at Webroot Software in Boulder.

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September 26, 2005

Backseat Drivers: Usability Challenges for Groupware

Speaker: Neill Kipp, Kipp Software
Location: Celtic Tavern, Denver

When it comes to groupware -- things like Wikis, content management, workflow management, video conferencing, and online reality games -- multiple users can bring multiple challenges to the user interface. As a result, usability considerations often "drive from the back seat."

How can we design groupware to be more usable? We'll look at examples including Yahoo!IM, Microsoft Outlook, SMS texting, Portland Pattern Repository, Informa Wealth Management System, Aetolia MUD, Army MRES, and ConquerOnline. Along the way, we'll expose some cooperative-work theory, share some war stories, and suggest approaches in these problem areas:

Cake Mix Paradox (Startup Costs)
My PC is MINE (Interface Inertia)
The Camera Adds Thirty Pounds (Telepresence)
Crush, Undo, and JTWROS (Shared Undo)
Societal Contingencies (Latency and Privacy)

Neill A. Kipp is founder, president, and principal software architect of Kipp Software Corporation. He is Honorarium Instructor in Computer Science for the University of Colorado at Denver, where he teaches graduate classes in "Usability Engineering" and "Groupware Design." Prior to founding Kipp Software, Kipp designed the groupware interfaces for the Wealth Management System, with its multi-million dollar deployment to thousands of users and double-digit growth.

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