UPA NZ (Members-Only) Discussion Group

Friday 31st March

For details please contact nikki at optimalusability.com

In 2006 the monthly Wellington meetings will be open to UPA NZ members only.
Several times a year we will also hold open events for the wider usability community. To stay notified join our Wellington mailing list.

UPA NZ (Members-Only) Discussion Group

Friday 17th February

A dozen local UPA NZ members intensively discussed eye-tracking, tab navigation, and the information architecture of intranets.

(If you are a full UPA member living in the Wellington region and weren’t notified of this event then please notify the UPA NZ secretary).

UPA NZ speaks at the Web Standards Group

(Note: This is not a UPA NZ event, but we recommend you go along!).

• Date: Thursday 17th November
• Time: 4.00pm - 6.30pm
• Venue: National Library Auditorium, cnr Molesworth and Aitken Sts
• Cost: $25 at the door includes food and drink!
• RSVP: meetings@webstandards.net.nz - when rsvp-ing please let us know all those attending so we can provide name tags. And it is important to RSVP for our catering requirements.

Cheques should be made out to: Wgtn Web Standards Group

Receipts will be available for those who require them.

Meeting speakers

We have two great speakers lined up for the meeting.

First up, and in partnership with the New Zealand Chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association, we’re celebrating World Usability Day (on November 3rd) with a presentation by Justine Sanderson. Justine’s talk will be on “Usability - Just do it!”

Usability: you’ve heard about it, you know it’s the right thing to do, but how do you go about incorporating it into your daily practices? In this talk, Justine will attempt to cut through the usability jargon and myths, encourage you to adopt a user-centred approach in everything you do, and introduce you to a number of user research and usability testing techniques that are simple, rapid, cost-effective and that can be easily integrated into an iterative design cycle.

A little about Justine.

Justine is the founder and managing director of Userfaction, an Auckland-based usability and user-experience agency.

Justine has over 10 years experience in the IT industry in roles ranging from end-user support to business analyst. Before founding Userfaction, Justine had applied usability principles on a diverse range of software and system development projects.

Since founding Userfaction, Justine has consulted on projects in the banking, telecommunications, travel and retail industry, including intranets, content management systems, and e-commerce websites. Clients include the University of Auckland and Saatchi & Saatchi.

Justine is a member of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA). She is currently working with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on the Industry Usability Reporting (IUSR) Project.

Justine holds a BA in Linguistics & Psychology from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Our second speaker is John Rankin.

John Rankin is co-owner of Affinity Limited, an information technology management consultancy based in Wellington. He specialises in helping clients to formulate and implement business strategies and systems for managing their information and knowledge. He is particularly interested in how organisations can harness the web to enhance the value of knowledge-based work practices.

He first got involved in automated typesetting in 1982, when asked to create an interface between a bus timetable database (which he wrote) and a phototypesetter (which the public information group had just bought) to publish timetable brochures. He has spent the last year juggling the demands of client assignments and creating a web-based typesetting system in his spare time.

His business partner, Carmel Joe, the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology GPSRD scheme, and the wizards at VUW’s School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science have made this possible.

John will be talking about, “From Web to Print”.

Annual paper consumption doubles every 4 years. One of the things people do is print web pages of interest: an invoice for an on-line purchase, a product specification, a long and interesting article. Printing a web page sometimes doesn’t work very well: it has extraneous navigation elements, the right hand edge cuts off, images and tables are split across pages.

What do people designing web sites need to do to make the print experience a positive one? There are several techniques and we’ll discuss the most common approaches, their strengths and their weaknesses. We’ll talk about whether, in a digital world, print still matters.

The talk will describe an open source project, funded in part by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, that links a web site to a typesetting engine, enabling on-demand generation of printed output. With a couple of clicks, information seekers can compose individual pages, predefined lists of pages, and selected search results into pdf files composed for print. A simple form lets visitors control layout such as paper size, duplex or single-sided, and font style of heading and body text.