One of the fastest (& incidentally cheapest) “bang for your buck” type of User Experience techniques is the good old trusty heuristic evaluation. Essentially, a heuristic evaluation (aka expert review, usability audit, site audit) is a discount us…
Agile in other contexts Many moons ago, I chatted with a woman about utilizing agile in other contexts and have since wanted to see it in action in a non-tech environment. I recently got a grant for a technology-fuelled neighborhood garden and we’…
Following our warm-up exercise in observation, I divided the class to conduct observations at two different exhibits that feature games. In this exercise, I asked students to spend at least 30 minutes observing and noting visitors & pain points wh…
In my second class, we took the fly-on-the-wall user research technique over to Vancouver’s Science World. As a class, we first took a look at an exhibit that often puzzles visitors because it’s not entirely obvious how one interacts with it. Simp…
In the so-called Real World, we designers sometimes find ourselves stepping a bit outside of the realm of design and more into the shoes of an analyst. To use an analogy, we need to untangle a bunch of knots to be able to proceed. Knots like figur…
Last week was Reading Week (the Canadian version of Spring Break?) which should have given me some extra time to post up the latest happenings in class, but alas, it was not to be. We’ve moved onto the second project of the course which focuses on…
