Your Usability Speakers at Big Design 2012

Here is a dirty, little secret about the conference.  When we originally designed the Big Design Conference, we purposely organized it without a Usability track in 2009.  Since most of the organizers were usability professionals, our plan was to create a conference about more than usability.  To our chagrin (and delight), the post-conference surveys from the past three years have shown usability and design as the most requested tracks.  You won’t believe our line-up this year. You will love all of the speakers.  We received some great proposals, but these talks really stood out.

Svetlana Kouznetsova. Beyond Captions: Universal Access & Universal Appeal

Most designers will tell you that accessible design is simply good design because it provides universal access to people with disabilities. Universal access is really just the first of many benefits that accessible design provides.  In this talk, we are going to delve into methods, tools, and techniques available to deaf and hard of hearing people. We will also discuss why CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation or real-time captioning) provides additional benefit beyond universal access to more people, including foreign speakers, remedial readers, people with perfect hearing in noisy/quiet environments, event organizers, multimedia owners.

Darrell Benatar. Top Usability Mistakes: Lessons Learned from 100,000 Tests

As build your website, you may want to avoid many of the common usability mistakes seen from remote usability expert,Darrell Benatar (CEO ofUsertesting.com). In this talk, you will see video clips from usability tests that demonstrate common problems, which cause users to abandon your websites. Plus, you will see best practices for doing usability testing and leveraging web-based feedback tools.

Susan Mercer. Maximizing Your Moderation Game

A central tenet of user-centered design is getting good usability feedback to iteratively improve the design. Unbiased moderation is critical in usability studies to ensure accurate, unbiased feedback. Yet in the heat of the moment, even experienced moderators can struggle to avoid asking leading questions, accidentally skewing findings, and stressing participants. This interactive session will teach advanced moderation skills, such as refocusing a participant, that can make the difference between successful and less-than-successful outcomes.

Joe Dyer. Video Ethnography–Industrial Strength

Wielded correctly, video ethnography is one of the most powerful tools in the UX professional’s toolkit. It allows for unfiltered voice of the customer to drive design decisions and more importantly, is extremely advantageous in influencing key decision makers.

This presentation covers the basics and provides additional tips to avoid situations any rookie is liable to make. Armed with no more than some inexpensive to moderately priced tools and some planning, you can take your future data-inspired projects to the next level. But like any powerful tool (think chainsaw), there can be downsides. Let my mistakes be your guide in avoiding pitfalls.

Karl Steiner. Using an Integrated Usability Toolkit

Imagine having a set of integrated UX tools, where your personas, sketches, mockups, and other design artifacts were put into a single place. Now, imagine these design artifacts are linked together and available to your team in located all over the world. Well, Karl Steiner actually built it.

Catharine McNally, Sharron Rush, Lara Becker. The Accessibility Panel

Here’s your chance to ask a burning question about Section 508. Curious about some of the new accessibility technology and assistive services? Join Sharron Rush, Catharine McNally, and Janine Smith, as they talk about the current and future state of accessibility. This panel is moderated by Lara Becker.

Wilkey Wong. Mobile Eye-tracking Essentials

User experience testing on the burgeoning smart phone and tablet platforms is a recent development and eye tracking of mobile devices is at the cutting edge of UX. The usability of interfaces and applications on desktop computers has been successfully investigated for years. Handheld and mobile devices, however, present unique challenges because of their physicality and diversity of usage scenarios from the coffee shop to the subway.
When eye tracking is thrown into the mix, the researcher has even more factors to be attentive to. In addition to recruitment and stimulus design, data capture and analysis take on a whole new wrinkle with different eye tracking systems providing different interaction and measurement capabilities. This presentation seeks to provide a primer on mobile device testing especially with respect to approaches to eye tracking. We will raise key considerations that user experience researchers will want to keep in mind as well as important questions which can guide the selection of effective test technologies.

Who you gonna see? Register today!