• When: 12-1.30pm, Tuesday 2 Sep 2008
• Where: Ground-floor conference room, Statistics House, The Boulevard, Harbour Quays
• Who: Anyone (UPA members and non-members)
• Cost: Free!

Agenda

• Natural User Interfaces (Zef Fugaz, Click Suite)
• Design Strategy (Lulu Pachuau, Provoke Solutions)
• Tree Testing (Dave O’Brien, Optimal Usability)

DON’T GET GUI - GET NUI!

The brave new world of Natural User Interfaces

Zef Fugaz, Click Suite

Multi-touch is one of the most talked-about interaction paradigms, with the iPhone raising awareness of what’s possible. But even single-touch screens and the burgeoning trend of multi-user interfaces represent significant interface design challenges.

Removing the mouse, the keyboard, and even menus and buttons from the user experience might seem radical, but therein lies the path to the natural user interface, or NUI, which could herald a major shift in interface design.

Zef will talk about the basics of designing for touchscreens and gestural interfaces and look at what’s happening in NZ and overseas.

Zef’s focus is ‘experience design’, which encapsulates user research, interaction design and information architecture.

DESIGN STRATEGY

Lulu Pachuau, Provoke Solutions

Most web projects lose focus, taking longer and costing more than we estimate at the start. There is constant scope creep and feature-itis that tends to crop up during the course of our web projects. With new technologies emerging every day for the web, it is hard to know what to use let alone what to do first.

Having a strategy for your website means knowing where your investment is focused and how you can measure the return. Whether you’re selling things, providing services and information or promoting your company, it is imperative to any business to have a road-map that gives you a big-picture view of where you are going and potential opportunities along the way.

This talk will present tips and techniques on how to develop a plan on what to focus on, to help guide your web projects, technology decisions and how to present it back to your stakeholders through design.

Lulu Pachuau is an interaction designer and an experience design consultant at Provoke Solutions in Wellington.

TREE TESTING

A New Way To Evaluate Your IA

Dave O’Brien, Optimal Usability

When you work on information architecture, card sorting is a great way to get user input and generate ideas. But once you’ve come up with an IA (or several candidates), what’s the quickest way to find out how well it works?

At Optimal, we’ve been experimenting with a method called tree testing, designed to get objective data about the findability and labeling of items in a tree. We’ve built a simple web tool that lets us quickly test an IA on real users, without having to build the site itself.

Dave will talk about tree testing as a method, building a web tool for it, and what he’s learned so far from running tree tests with clients.

Directions

Access by road is from Aotea Quay at the traffic lights near the stadium. Parking is pay-and-display.

There is also a footpath beside the sheds and construction site on the harbour side of Aotea Quay, and a bridge walkway from the railway station and stadium. Get to the walkway from the north end of several rail platforms, and from the steps opposite East Day Spa on Thorndon Quay. Because of construction, you now have to go up onto the walkway ramp and then down steps to The Boulevard to get to the front door.

Please sign in at reception, then head left through the library. Tea and coffee will be provided.

See you there!

• When: 12-1.30pm, Tuesday 3 June 2008
• Where: Ground-floor conference room, Statistics House, The Boulevard, Harbour Quays. Further details below.

• RSVP by Friday May 30 to upanz.wellington@upa.org.nz

Emotion and Design

Edgar Rodriguez, Victoria University

Edgar Rodriguez is an industrial designer, lecturer, and PhD candidate at the School of Design at Victoria University in Wellington.

“The emotion that products elicit is an increasingly important area of research for Design. While designers had long relied on intuition to attempt to understand users’ affective experiences, new methodologies allow us to address them more specifically. A more detailed understanding of emotional reactions can create more appropriate user experiences and allow design managers to make better informed decisions.

This talk will present some methodologies used in Industrial Design to assess users’ emotions. It will present some examples of design projects based on assessment of emotions for companies such as Philips, Samsung, and Studio Santachiara. Finally, the talk will present a framework that suggests a relationship between emotion and behaviour in Design.”

Directions to get to the venue

Access by road is from Aotea Quay at the traffic lights near the stadium. There is also a footpath beside the sheds and construction site on the harbour side of Aotea Quay, and a bridge walkway from the railway station and stadium. Get to the walkway from the north end of several rail platforms, and from the steps opposite East Day Spa on Thorndon Quay.

Parking is pay-and-display. You need to sign in at reception, then head left through the library. Tea, coffee, juice, and snacks will be provided.

Hope to see you there!

Designing Xero

Philip Fierlinger, Xero
Philip Fierlinger is the Lead Interaction Designer for Xero (xero.com), the online accounting software company that listed on the NZX earlier this year. He will describe the interaction design process used to create Xero, sharing his insights into the different design techniques used to build such a complex online application quickly yet effectively. He will also discuss how those techniques are evolving as the company and the software grows.

UPA 2008 Conference Brain Dump

Trent Mankelow, Optimal Usability
The recent UPA conference attracted around 800 of the brightest minds in our field to Austin, Texas for 5 days of workshops, tutorials and conference presentations. Trent was lucky enough to attend and will be giving a rambling download of what he learnt, including the conference highlights and what it was like to present a workshop.

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