World Usability Day 2012 - Workshops

Besides the Apple presentation in the previous blog, other presentations were given by people from different companies and consultants on their approach to user centered design. This gave a lot of differnt insights.

After lunch the workshops were planned.

My first one was by the University Twente about participatory design. They developed a tool to facilitate this process by a game. The aim of this game is to include users in exploration and establishment of requirements of products, software or environments which are to be used in complex, activity flow oriented situations.
The case during the workshop was to develop a weight loss app for an insurance company. It was really fun to do and it stimulated the process of discussing by providing a flexible envrironment to start with with predefined roles. The parcipatory workflow design game will be available soon in the UCD Toolbox

The second worshop was about the UCD toolbox itself by Tristan Weevers. The UCD toolbox is to find, learn and apply methods for UCD. Determining the right method from the over twohundred available methods is extremely difficult and the knowledge about these methods is not centrally available but spread over a large amount of sources. The UCD toolbox provides a filter, compare and get info sequence to facilitate this selection process. The filtering process is based on what you are creating, what the goal is and how much resources you have. Based on this a basic comparison is provided of the most usefull tools. After selection of one of the choices more information is provided about the methods including indepth information and possible tweaks. It's not online yet completely but we were able to work with the prototype which really looked great. This will allow easy communication with different stakeholders about usability. Keep an eye on www.ucdtoolbox.com to see when it comes available.

World Usability Day 2012 - Apple design

Visit the conference home page here.

Design in general is discussed in this session by Apple. However, many of these ideas for products can and should also apply to medical devices to ensure adoption and make them more user friendly.

The revival of apple was really started with the iPod which became a more wellknown brand than Apple itself. Now they sold 380 million iPods in 11 year.
1. How to design a good product
I=I2 innovation is iteration on iteration.
Design should not be about the product but about the experience.
I=A2 Innovation is an application.
People want the application not the product itself.

Target your audience! Make the devices not for the 'nerds' but for the regular users. Addressing the right people is really important. Apple design for the 12 o'clock flashers (people that have devices in their home with the clock flashing at 12 o'clock). In Apple the software teams include people from all kind of different people like musicians, etc to make sure what is developed makes sence to 12 o'clock flashers.

Bond with your user!
I=U2 innovation is what a user wants. Don't ask the user but look at what they do. Observe the user to see what they want.

It's not the feature set that counts but it's all about the user experience!

The lock down of IT in organizations causes a second layer of communication where users use devices and tools that are public. Organizations need to allow BYOD because if they don't they will lose their best people because they want to have the possiblities available. Apple allows organisations to block certain capabilities of their devices in the organizational network, e.g. disable the icloud ability.