March Recap- 7 Minute Soapbox on User Experience

 In our March 7 Minute Soapbox event, we had uxWaterloo members share their ideas in an open format!  The only catch was that they had 7 minutes on the podium.  Our volunteers braved this challenge and shared some great insights with our group!   Notes from each session have been posted below and thank you to all of our volunteers for sharing their ideas.

 We hope to see you at tonight’s uxWaterloo event, where Tammy teWinkel shares her insights from working in usability at RIM!  For more information about tonight’s event and to register, please visit: Confessions of a qualitative girl in a quant-filled world at RIM.

Mark Connolly

 Mark shared information about the usefulness of realistic data in UI mockups.  He explained that the right time to move away from fake to realistic data in your designs all depends on the project and the audience.  Sometimes you move onto realistic data early on, to get more feedback from users in testing.  But, be aware that there is some overhead with doing realistic mockups in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. 

 Sandra Loop

 Sandra showed us how she has used PowerPoint to explain concepts.  This has been a useful technique for her, as it’s very easy to share files with team members and it is a fast way to explain a concept to a development team.  She proved that the animations that are built in with PowerPoint allow you to explore a new or unusual design problem and to work on showing possible alternatives. 

 Karen Cecile

 Karen shared a story about her parents’ adventures with technology.  She emphasized that when designing for the general market, we should always keep seniors in mind.  Seniors often have unique needs and conducting a quick interview may help you quickly understand ways to tailor a product or design to them.  

 Tom Robinson

 Tom shared his journey through his personal experiences in usability.   He explained that during school, he focused on development.  As he worked in various positions and throughout grad school, the purpose of usability became clearer and he gravitated toward a user-centered approach.  While discussing, the group agreed with Tom and thought that having usability courses available in design/development course curricula would help promote usability.

 Robert Barlow-Busch

 Bob based his talk off of Jane McGonigal’s book, “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.”  This book outlines that real life can be changed into games.  For example, Prius has a fuel monitor that shows your fuel economy.  People change their driving behaviour and become better drivers because of this game.   Other examples of games are Runkeeper, which changes running into a game, and Chore Wars, which turns chores into quests. Overall, we should consider how games motivate us and can help us become better people!

 Maryam Ashoor

 Maryam let us know that when she was visiting the Google China site, she found that she could no longer navigate back to the www.google.com site.  She also mentioned that you should test to see if your webpages are translated by search engines.  You should take cultural factors like colours and text into consideration when building a webpage that will be globally accessible.