Workshops

Pre-Conference Workshop: Monday 8th June 2009

User Experience Design for Touch Screens, Trackballs, and AJAX

With Scott Weiss

Executive Director, Human Factors International

 

This workshop will span six hours of presentations and discussions, intended to bring product marketers and designers up to speed on the available technologies, with frank round table talks about design strategies, challenges, and opportunities. Four sessions will be presented, informing delegates deeper and deeper into the methods for design for the latest UX technologies: touch, mobile trackballs, and AJAX.

UX Design Intro & Review

User Experience design is evolving to include seduction and persuasion. This first session will review first principles of user experience design:

• Personas (taking user segments and turning them into “real” people)

• Scenarios (taking use cases and turning them into user stories)

• Storyboards (creating comic book-style visual stories to make concepts more realistic)

Mobile AJAX

AJAX on the desktop enable designers to specify exact placement of graphics, to have widgets interact on the same screen without server round trips, and for animated, interactive UIs in web-enabled applications. This session digs deeper into what AJAX technologies are available to the developer, and how to approach design from a seductive and persuasive perspective.

Touch

Touch has revolutionised mobile phones, from iPhone to Android to Pre and beyond. This session covers how designers and product managers can envision and create products that leverage the technology in innovative and compelling ways, to delight and invigorate customer uptake. An introduction to the engineering technologies will be followed by a set of UI principles with video examples.

Trackballs

User interfaces that leverage touch or a five-way directional keypad have a certain set of design standards, but what about trackballs? Gaming, productivity applications, and basic interaction capabilities of the phonebook, messaging, and call management require different approaches to input, navigation, and data entry. This session explores design, documentation, and user research strategies to understand how this technology can be effectively deployed.

Discussions & Exercises

Throughout the day, group discussions will clarify concepts and bring ideas home to delegates. Short, group exercises will not only make learning styles more interesting, but further deepen learning. Scott will also share video clips from custom usability research prepared specifically for this workshop. Delegates will be given electronic copies of slides as a takeaway, along with a wrap-up document sent by email as a follow-up.

Bio:

Scott Weiss is the Executive Director for Human Factors International's London office, where he leads UI design, usability research, user experience curriculum development, and usability institutionalisation efforts for clients including AT&T, BT, GSK, Thomson-Reuters, Vodafone, and many others. He is well known for his passion for the mobile user experience, his first book, "Handheld Usability" and related blog (http://handheldusability .wordpress.com), and his frequent and world-wide public speaking and teaching. Scott has spoken in the US, UK, Europe, Singapore, and Hong Kong on wide ranging mobile user experience topics. He recently spoke at Informa's Mobile User Experience conference in London on the iPhone's competitive opportunities, where he also taught a workshop on User Experience Strategy and Implementation. He chaired Handsets World USA in San Diego, where he also presented the Mobile Design and Development Platforms workshop. He presented Documenting Mobile 2.0 Information Architecture at the Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam, and presented Mobile Social Networking at the Monetize Web 2.0 & Mobile Social Networking Conference in London.