How is usability different across cultures? Based on experience from practicing usability in Canada, USA and Asia, this presentation will provide an overview of differences in culture between North America and Asia, how these affect usability and provide insights on how to adapt usability research to different cultures. (152)

The popularity of eye tracking continues to increase among usability practitioners. Using case studies as examples, this presentation will focus on how to design and conduct usability tests involving eye tracking, and how eye movement data can effectively supplement conventional measures, providing insight into the origins of certain usability problems. (290)

This paper identifies the limitations of traditional usability metrics and presents a process to increase their meaning by adapting Six Sigma methods. We define how common usability metrics can be evaluated in terms of a standardized defective rate or quality level and explore the benefits of this data transformation. (259)

Knowing the development and opinion from other nations is essential for designing usable product for different cultures. This presentation will provide insight and practical experiences about how we offer swift and free information exchanges between UI practitioners in the west and in the Far East by a bilingual webzine. (182)

Usability began as testing, and testing is still an essential part of the discipline. Over the last two decades, testing has grown from a "quality assurance" role, and the choices for methodologies has grown. What are the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to testing? When is the best time to use each methodology? What do you do with all the data you collect? (6088)

Communication across cultures is no doubt a challenge, as all of us must have experienced. Still, a segmentation into cultures is but a construction of the mind, one that results from the similarities and differences we find striking. Focusing on differences is a natural, but limited approach: we have much to gain from recognizing similarities, too. Moreover, taking cultural differences into account does not necessarily mean doing as the others do: adapting is not imitating. Strategies that seem countercultural can sometimes be more effective, more consistent, and more profound. Finally, cultural differences proven statistically by empirical research are valid for the materials and the groups studied only: we should beware of extrapolating them to other materials or to other groups, and of applying them to the individuals within these groups. These three themes—segmentation, strategies, and statistics—are developed in this presentation. (6070)

We describe a usability test analysis method that makes development teams more likely to incorporate design recommendations. It accomplishes this by decreasing the time to generate usability findings, improving the communication of usability findings, increasing the credibility of the usability analysis, and building trust with the development team. (203)

We report methodological considerations and results from a laboratory usability test of six electronic voting machines. Methodological issues include selecting participants – should they represent the electorate or community most likely to have problems, i.e. rare computer users? Results will connect satisfaction data to behavioral data (problems) observed in video records. (280)

This is a case study of an effective approach to finding an optimal design solution. We used an online study to evaluate six different navigation methods for the same website and chose one based on the results. (234)

As usability practitioners, we spend a lot of time thinking about where boxes go. Sometimes we forget to think about what goes inside those boxes. This presentation will focus on a basic tool of the trade – personas – and how they can help our design teams make important decisions about content. (149)

Our research concerns establishing ergonomic evaluation methods. We are interested in defining, validating, and testing ergonomic criteria for evaluating interactive systems. We are also interested in usability test procedures, methods of evaluating mobile systems, and remote testing. (6188)

Five practitioners will present 10-minute talks that highlight best practices on topics that include: role playing and experience prototyping, integrating UE teams into business models, using "difficult" personas to train usability moderators, portable and remote usability, and using chat to conduct virtual focus groups with deaf users. (263)

TiVo considers User Experience a core business asset. Our user-centered design process remains grounded in user needs research and design iteration which allows us to meet both business and user goals. We will outline and discuss in detail our five-phase process. (225)

How do you make your software learnable when your users won’t read the manual, the tutorials, or even error messages that pop up on the screen? How can they learn what they don’t know they need to know? This presentation is a collection of UI design strategies that can help you "think outside the docs" to deal with this problem. (201)

The commonly practiced definition of usability goals and task analysis will be extended into in-depth analyses. The takeaways are relative, context-sensitive weighted definition of usability goals and the use of link analysis. The resulting benefits are more practical information to better support the user interface design and testing. (183)

Designing usability lab tests of instant messaging services, whether conducted on a hand-held device or a computer, presents unique challenges for the testing team. This presentation describes three text instant messaging and video instant messaging studies and the technology and techniques used to instill realism and maintain rigor. (214)

We will demonstrate common challenges and solutions for accessible design, based on an in-depth analysis of 1000+ accessibility issues documented in real projects, and engage participants in discussing opportunities to optimize user experience for different groups of disabled users. (231)

Building bridges to other cultures is more than discovering what appeals and is useful to people in them. It involves the process of becoming a cultural bridge-person, one who understands one’s own cultural roots and responses and can function effectively between and within many cultural contexts. This session is devoted to exploring how the head (knowledge), the heart (attitude) and the hand (skills) are essential to bridging cultures. We will explore ways of culture learning, intercultural skill building, and becoming more empathetic in intercultural relations. This highly interactive session will include exercises, specific examples, and a general review of useful and usable theory from the field of intercultural communication.

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Defining usability requirements at a project’s start improves the chances the end product meets users’ goals and creates a satisfying user experience. Writing testable usability requirements is challenging because much of the input is subjective. Learn to create measurable usability requirements that focus development on user goals throughout product development. (177)

Usability practitioners often lament that what comes out of universities is not helpful to them. They see limited practical value in the published research. At the same time, academics are asking how can and should current practice help push the discipline, the course content, and the teaching. At least one university actively solicits practitioners’ input in the design of its HCI curriculum. This panel discussion, between three academics and two long-time practitioners, will address these and related issues that can bridge the gap between academia and practice. (305)

More and more organizations are creating distributed, global software development and user-experience design teams. In this presentation, we outline key cultural and methodological challenges to engaging in successful global user-centered design and software implementation efforts. We draw from our own experiences as global usability team leaders, and those of others (shared at an earlier workshop) to identify solutions to the challenges of global teams and remote usability. We also seek to highlight benefits of working in global team structures. (310)

Usability professionals often tout the benefits of user-centered design. But can we show the benefits in a measureable way? This presentation shows the results of a web site "makeover," which employed user-centered design techniques and resulted in significant usability improvement. (154)

Usability is a team effort, including developers, managers, marketers, and more. In many organizations, though, usability is the "new kid on the block," while these other professions are both established and entrenched. How do you integrate usability into an organization? How do you sell the idea that usability can lead to better products? How do you approach working relationships so that usability really can make a difference? How do you balance usability with schedules, costs, technical issues, and all the other real-world constraints? (6091)

Incorporating network technology into public and semi-public locations creates new challenges and opportunities for rethinking the design process. Network technology allows any object or space to be transformed into a portal for communication. We will discuss available network technology, starting with a brief history of networked objects and concluding with current trends and future prospects. We will look at the design process we use in the conception and production of embedded networked objects and how the process changes according to the technology employed. Through group work, using low-tech materials, we will explore what kind of non-verbal communication can be had between strangers. (6076)

Analyzing qualitative data collected in usability studies can be challenging. How can we efficiently organize our observations to discover usage patterns and build personae? What are the advantages and tradeoffs of different approaches? This presentation describes three methods of organizing usability data based on study complexity and reporting requirements. (193)

Canada is recognized worldwide for its leadership in eGovernment. During the development of e-services for international clients the Government of Canada conducted in-person research in several countries. This presentation describes how the different needs, values, behaviour and perceptions of users in different countries and cultures shaped e-services for international audiences. (224)

This presentation tracks the design lifecycle for a complex feature in a graphical software application developed with an Agile methodology. It details how our Usability team employed design strategies(focusing the design vision, designing "just-in-time,"iterating one cycle ahead of developers), and determined our design tactics (increasing design iteration velocity, reducing project documentation, improving communication with developers). This allowedhigh UCD standards to be achieved, even during rapid, 4-6 week development cycles. Detailed design iterations will be presented. (186)

This session brings together two new models: A much deeper understanding of older adults as users and a new way of doing rapid, useful heuristic evaluations based on personas and high-level tasks. We report the results of a major research study funded by AARP in which we have successfully used this new method on 50 Web sites. (220)