I’m in the Dallas Fort Worth airport waiting on my delayed flight to arrive as I travel back to Indiana – home sweet home. The past five days I have been an attendee at Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Week. This conference was spectacular! Currently, I’m exhausted from five days of information overload, but completely ecstatic about all of the things that I learned and all of the resources I have to look through.
In the future, it’s my plan to write about each session I attended more in depth. First, though, I want to write a brief over view about each of the five sessions I attended.
Mobile Website and Apps
This session covered three topics
Devising a strategy
Understanding mobile usability facts and recommendations
Learning how to create your own usability tests for mobile devices
An interesting fact directly from the training was that the average user session on a mobile phone was only 72 seconds.
User Experience Basic Training
This session was a great overview of user experience. This session included these topics:
Foundations and principles of UX
UX in the project lifecycle
Research methods
UX teams and roles
Stages of UX maturity and
UX challenges today
One of the most interesting takeaways from this session was plotting the maturity of our own organization and discussing how we could become more mature.
Human Computer Interaction
This session covered
HCI through history
Perception, cognition, and action of humans in HCI (Humans in HCI)
Computers in HCI
Interaction styles
Universal design
Complex interface features and
Development for HCI
An interesting takeaway from this session was that in a web environment symmetry of design had no effect on preference and users preferred designs with the fewest compositional elements.
Human Mind and Usability
This session covered more of the theory and psychology behind people and their relationship with computers. We stived to understand psychology concepts that affect design in order to
anticipate what people will do andÂ
explain why people did it.
After, we talked about how we could apply these concepts to design challenges that we face today.
Usability Testing
This was probably my favorite course. It was taught by Marieke McCloskey, who I had teach three of my five sessions. It was hands on – which definitely helped learn and apply the four previous days of things I learned. We covered the entire usability testing process including
Planning what to test
Writing effective tasks
Facilitating smooth tests
Studying logistics
Writing accurate and helpful notes
Analyzing the test correctly and
Presenting findings in both informal and formal ways.
Over the next few weeks, it’s my goal to go over my notes, the slides, and the studies they provided to cement this information in my memory. My hope is that I’ll be able to start implementing the things I learned in our project life cycle at Purdue for several upcoming projects so that I can remember all of the wonderful information I learned. I’m so happy that I was able to attend this conference and look forward to continuing my education in Usability.