PRESENTATIONS
Tuesday March 15th, 2005
9:15-10:30
Keynote: Experience Design Unplugged
Peter Morville
President, Semantic Studios
www.semanticstudios.com
Intelligence is moving to the edges, flowing through networked computers, wireless devices, empowered users and distributed teams. Ideas spread like wildfire. Innovations emerge from uncharted borderlands. Information is in the air, literally. We're navigating a wilderness between physical and digital reality, and the journey has just begun. In this provocative talk, Peter Morville illuminates the future of user experience in a connected world by analyzing the brilliant successes and miserable failures scattered throughout today's fragmented web. He explores strange connections between social software, convergent architecture, pervasive computing, tangible media, search engines, semantic webs, and ambient findability. In addition, Morville presents an adaptive framework for user experience that will bridge the gap between today's designers and tomorrow's architects.
Peter Morville is widely recognized as a founding father of the information architecture field. He coauthored the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and has more than a decade of experience consulting with joom.com/nl/, including AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute, Vanguard, and Yahoo!. Peter is president of Semantic Studios, vice president of user experience for Q LTD, and co-founder of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture. His work has been featured in numerous publications, including Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal. Peter's new book, entitled Ambient Findability will be published by O'Reilly Media in 2005.
10:45-NOON
How Field Research Improves Web Usability
Stephanie Rosenbaum and Laurie Kantner
Tec-Ed, Inc.
www.teced.com
Rosenbaum and Kantner present a methodology that makes field research practical for improving web usability, illustrated with case histories of field research on websites conducted by the presenters and their colleagues. The methods include ethnographic interviews and field usability testing. The case histories include ethnographic interviews in the homes of consumers to learn how they choose and use websites. Rosenbaum and Kantner will also discuss the following:
- Field usability testing of web-based medical information resources with physicians and primary-care practitioners.
- A multinational field study in which participants compared two versions of a company's web site.
1:00-2:00
Driving Web Development through User Success Metrics
Tom Brinck
President, Diamond Bullet Design
www.diamondbullet.com
After about a decade of mainstream Web design, a majority of websites still seem to be difficult to use: content is ambiguous, screens are cluttered with confusing and unimportant details, and all too often we give up looking for the products we know ought to be there. How can we lead our design teams to create successful sites? While design should be guided by usability principles and design theories, in the end our design religion must be grounded in accountability to the success of the end users. This approach involves diagnosing problems in user testing and collecting clear, objectives measures of user performance throughout the design process. We'll look at this approach on case studies in education, health, and government, and discuss how grounding the process in data collection can save time and lower project risks.
2:00-3:00
Avoiding Navigational Pitfalls: Designing for the Five Fundamental Web Navigation Questions
Jason Withrow
Internet Professional Department, Washtenaw Community College
Website navigational issues often fall into five categories:
- Where am I?
- Where am I going?
- Where can I go from here?
- What does this website contain?
- How do I get to...
This presentation focuses on best practices for answering these questions and includes numerous examples that showcase both successes and failures in implementing website navigation.
3:15-4:15
Practicing Multi-Channel Information Architecture: Creating the Satisfying Retail Experience
Jean-Paul Carmichael and Dana Hawes-Davis
Fry, Inc. www.fry.com
This session will discuss the most innovative features and strategies that have emerged for creating satisfying multi-channel retail experiences. Carmichael and Hawes-Davis address questions such as: What is a satisfying retail experience? What are the success stories of multi-channel retailing and how did they come to be? What are the challenges in creating multi-channel retail experiences? In addition they examine the ever-changing role of the information architect in creating and influencing these experiences by looking at several case studies.
4:15-5:30
The State of Web Site Usability: A Panel Debate
Tom Brinck, Diamond Bullet Design, Inc.
Christopher Farnum, ProQuest
Jean-Paul Carmichael, Fry, Inc.
Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus, Compuware Corp.
Stephanie Rosenbaum, Tec-Ed, Inc.
Jason Withrow, Washtenaw Community College
The moderator will initiate the panel debate with 1-3 questions or challenges.
Panelists will be given a brief time in which to comment or respond.
During the last 15 minutes, udience members will be able to ask or submit questions for the panelists to answer.
The panel session will close with summary comments from the moderator, and the audience will immediately be invited to the reception.
This format is intended to create a natural transition and continuation of discussion as everyone moves to the reception, providing a comfortable environment for audience members and panelists to interact on a more personal basis.
6:30-8:00 PM
Today's Internet Solutions, Customer Wants & Needs, and "Appropriate" Internet Solutions for the Future
Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus
Compuware
This final session (for those who wish to remain) will reflect on the internet solutions of today. The objective is to engage the audience in determining how well customer wants and needs are being satisfied by these evolved solutions, and to elicit ideal solutions for the future.
