Posts Tagged ‘ux camp’

UX Camp in Vancouver

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
UXCV09

UXCV09

Woke up one chilly morning on a Saturday to attend the UX Camp held at the Vancouver Film School.  I have always been interested in user behavior so I wanted to check out what I could learn from this conference. Even though it was held very early in the morning (8:00AM is very early for me on weekends) and the fact that I haven’t had any coffee yet . . .

When I arrived at VFS at 9AM, the introductions were just about to start (I was glad I didn’t arrive 30 mins. earlier).  I learned that there would be 2 breakout sessions afterwards, a theater makeover session and a remote usability session . . . I attended the remote usability one thinking it would better suit my needs in the future if ever I decide on doing usability analysis on any of my website projects.  I learned a lot to say the least . . . and I got to find out what kind of tools (mostly software) they use for usability testing.  The most testing I have ever done so far is HCI (Human Computer Interaction) through various multivariate (A/B) testing and analysis of user behavior from traffic logs or google analytics.  Suffice it to say that I’m surprised by the quantity of people in Vancouver who are actually doing this fulltime.

Panel Discussion

Panel Discussion

The second session I attended after coffee break was a panel discussion on user research.  Again, I felt like a fish out of water . . . these “user experience” professionals really take this seriously and they have their own set of jargon. There are words like prototyping, card sorting, contextual inquiry, task analysis, role playing, etc.  I know these concepts but I didn’t know that there were actually terms for them.  User experience, analyis, testing has really gone into a complete science.

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Slide 1

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Slide 2

I guess I will have to stick with Webtrends and Google Analytics for now. Besides, I already have my hands full with new web technologies.