This week I had the privileged of speaking at the Michigan Usability Professionals Association (MIUPA) meeting. I can’t explain what a great group of people they are, I feel humbled being around so many people with much more formal experience and training than myself.
My Approach
Although I come from a computer science background I love usability, user interaction and user interfaces. My approach has always been ad-hoc and unscientific. I like to just sit back and watch or ask random people in their natural settings and see how they react. Which ultimately leads to an ever evolving UI based on these observations and actions.
This method comes from my belief in the release early, release often agile development methodology. Small incremental steps that lead to the full result while making improvement along the way.
Usability Professionals
The audience was primarily usability professionals who pretty much do this for a living. So although I created the presentation above it really did not get used. I made the presentation more of a discussion about everyone’s experiences and how mine synced or collided with theirs.
The best part was a group from MSU’s Usability & Accessibility Center came all the way from Lansing. It was great to hear and talk with them about similar struggles higher education web professionals have.
Thank You
Overall it was a great meeting with most people staying after to talk further. I wanted to thank the MIUPA again for hosting me and the Southfield Public Library for providing a rocking facility.
Nick DeNardis, associate director of web communications at Wayne State University will discuss his approach for reviewing and creating usable web sites.
A lot of people are involved with planning and constructing a single web site. How can you break through the administrative barrier and focus on your users?
Become an authority as a web professional and fend off requests that don’t meet your users goals.
Create a plan for testing and modifying the web site based on your users needs and how they actually use your site.
I will focus on higher education where a lot of sites offer the same “product”. Identify strategies to stand out and care about your users.
View your site from an outsiders perspective, does it pass the “ten second test”? Can you find the information you need?
And last but not least, did you take enough time to care about users with special needs?
Nick is the Associate Director of Web Communications at Wayne State University. As host of the video blog, EDU Checkup, he reviews higher education websites from the point of view of a first time visitor, while critiquing the design, information architecture and code of the sites.
He is a staff writer at .eduGuru, a higher education marketing and web development blog. He takes an active role in the higher education web community by sharing his thoughts and real world analysis in the Wayne State Web Communications Blog.
Nick is also an officer for Refresh Detroit, a group of web professionals whose goal is to promote web standards, usability, and accessibility and to spread the knowledge of web design in the Detroit and Ann Arbor Michigan areas.
Location
Southfield Public Library, “The Meeting Room”
26300 Evergreen Rd
Southfield, MI 48076 (map) Website
(248) 796-4200
Price
$10 – UPA Members
$5 – Full-time students and people between jobs
$20 – All Others
RSVP
RSVP to events@miupa.org (ensures we have enough food and drink for all)