Category Archives: General Discussion

Dr. Susan M. Dray Receives Fulbright Award to Panama

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Dr. Susan M. Dray, President of Dray & Associates, Inc., has been awarded a Fulbright  Scholar grant to teach and do research at the Technological University of Panama during  the 2013-2014 academic year, the United States Department of State and the J. William  Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board announced recently.

susanDray will lecture, do research and build bridges between academia, industry and  government in Panama, as well as  throughout the Latin and South American human-­centered design  community.

Dray is a consultant specialized in doing field research for her clients. She played a huge  early role in the development of the discipline of human-­‐ entered design, particularly  adapting field research methods for use in product development, from shaping  fundamental product concepts and strategies to interaction design. She has taught  thousands of people about field research, has worked in 25 countries and has a long list of  publications, honors and awards.

She is one of approximately 1,100 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad  through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program in 2013-­2014.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program  sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding  between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The primary  source of funding for the Fulbright Program is an annual appropriation made by the U.S.  Congress to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.  Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations in foreign  countries and in the United States also provide direct and indirect support. Recipients of  Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as  well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. The Program operates in over 155  countries worldwide.

Since its establishment in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late U.S. Senator J.  William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright Program has given approximately 310,000  students, scholars, teachers, artists, and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and  conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared  international concerns.

Fulbright alumni have achieved distinction in government, science, the arts, business,  philanthropy, education, and athletics. Forty-­‐four Fulbright alumni from 12 countries have  been awarded the Nobel Prize, and 81 alumni have received Pulitzer Prizes. Prominent  Fulbright alumni include: Muhammad Yunus, Founder,  Grameen Bank, and 2006 Nobel  Peace Prize recipient; Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia; Lee Evans, Olympic  Gold Medalist; Rita Dove, former U.S. Poet Laureate and 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry  recipient; Riccardo Giacconi, Physicist and 2002 Nobel Laureate; Amar Gopal Bose,  Chairman and  Founder, Bose Corporation; Renee Fleming, soprano; Jonathan Franzen,  Writer; and Daniel Libeskind, Architect.

Fulbright recipients are among more than 40,000 individuals participating in U.S.  Department of State exchange programs each year. For more than sixty years, the  Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs has funded and supported programs that seek  to promote mutual understanding and respect between the people of the United States and  the people of other countries. The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is administered by the  Council for International Exchange of Scholars, a division of the Institute of International   Education.

For further information about  the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State’s  Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, please visit our website at  http://fulbright.state.gov or contact James A. Lawrence, Office of Academic Exchange  Programs, telephone 202-­‐632-­‐3241 or e-­‐mail fulbright@state.gov.

Session Spotlight: Research Methods Roulette

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Yet another of the amazing Tutorials at UXPA2013 comes from Susan Mercer and Dan Berlin. In Research Methods Roulette, you’ll gain key insights into which UX research methods should be applied under which circumstances. 

Interested in this tutorial? Register now! (As of this writing, there are still a few early bird slots left!)

And now, Susan and Dan:

Susan Mercer and Dan BerlinWhat are your go-to methods for user research? If you’re like many of us, you rely heavily on interviews and moderated usability tests. But are those methods going to give you the information that you need? Or are there other methods out there that are better for your particular project?

Are you trying to uncover new insights into how prospective users perform certain tasks today? Contextual Inquiry might be a better method than interviews. Are you trying to understand the context in which customers use your mobile application for payments in retail environments? Ethnographic observation is likely a better method than in-lab moderated usability testing.

The key is to understand your project goals, and from that, you can pick the right research tool for the job. In our tutorial, Research Method Roulette, Susan Mercer and Dan Berlin of Mad*Pow will review different research techniques, discuss when they are applicable, and convey the best practices for conducting the different types of research.

In our full-day tutorial, we’ll cover various types of research methods – their pros, cons, and for what situations they’re best suited:

  • Ethnography
  • In-depth interviews
  • Surveys
  • Diary studies
  • Contextual inquiry
  • Collaging
  • Card-sorting
  • Focus groups

We’ll then take a deep dive into different types of usability studies:

  • In-person, moderated
  • Remote, moderated
  • Asynchronous, unmoderated
  • Desirability studies
  • Eye-tracking and biometrics

But don’t worry – this won’t be a full day of boring lecture! We have several activities planned for attendees to select and plan their own research studies for different situations. This gives you a chance to put in action what you’ve learned and get some experience that you can take back to the office.

The final part of the tutorial will cover research best practices – all the things that will help turn a challenging project into a smooth-running one:

  • Ethics
  • Documentation
  • Recruiting
  • Client management
  • Note taking
  • Study moderation
  • Qualitative and quantitative analysis
  • Reporting

Our goal is to provide an information-packed tutorial to give new practitioners a head start in facing research projects, and to provide some new perspectives to more experienced practitioners. Most importantly, we want attendees to learn how to choose a research method for their project – no matter what the situation.

We hope to see you there!

Flight is booked. Ready for UXPA 2013!

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7159044411_4e24afbf5cAre you making your travel plans for UXPA 2013 in Washington, DC?  I know I am, and I registered with one of the precious few Early Bird special rates left .  This will be my fourteenth (consecutive) UXPA conference, dating back to 2000 in Asheville, NC, and I can’t think of a year when I’ve been more excited to go.  The theme, Collaboration, is so integral to everything that UX is about.  Every day we collaborate with our users, with developers, with product management, and with our UX colleagues.  UX professionals have truly become the conduit that product and service development projects center around.  Our ability to move fluidly through all of the phases of the development lifecycle, and to collaborate with every type of stakeholder, has been noticed by leaders in nearly every industry.  We are making inroads in medical devices and informatics, in mobile development, in gaming and playtesting, and in the design of end-to-end customer experiences.

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While I’m of course excited about all of the great learning experiences that the conference will bring, I’m most excited about the networking opportunities.  I’ve met so many awesome UX practitioners over the years, and I’m able to call on that network of peers for professional development, for advice on a design, or just to go grab a drink and talk about UX.  I think that what makes UXPA better than any other professional conference in our field is that it gives so many opportunities for our community to get to know each other, to work on things of common interest, and to build our personal and professional networks.

DCI’m also looking forward to being in Washington, D.C., and inviting our international peers to our Nation’s Capital.  The conference is right on the heels of July 4th, so I’m sure the city will be in a very festive mood.  The conference hotel puts us in Dupont Circle, which is easy walking distance to some of the best restaurants in the World, from every locale in the World!  A few Metro stops away are the Smithsonian museums, the National Mall, the Capitol Building, the White House, and the Washington Monument.  For sight-seeing enthusiasts, Washington, D.C. is a great place to visit.

Finally, I’m looking forward to sharing all of the great things that UXPA is working on.  Our new website will be going live.  Our online version of UX Magazine HAS gone live (as of this week!).  We are planning for our other 2013 conference in Shanghai in collaboration with UXPA China in November.  We will be rolling out our mentoring program, announcing a number of strategic partnerships, debuting a number of Special Interest Groups, and finally, introducing our new membership model and dues structure.  This will offer a set of compelling, comprehensive, and meaningful benefits that make sense for UXPA members worldwide.

I hope to see you all at UXPA 2013.  Please come up and introduce yourself!

RichGunther_001

Rich Gunther
President, UXPA International
rich.gunther@uxpa.org

User Experience Magazine is online

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I’m delighted to be writing about a project that opens up a fine collection of user experience articles to a wider audience.

User Experience has been a quarterly magazine in print since 2002, delivered by mail to members of UXPA (formerly UPA).

From now on, each new issue will also be available online.

The online format means that readers all around the world will have instant access to each new issue. The responsive design means that you can read it on the desktop, tablet or handheld device with equal facility. Accessibility has also been a key consideration.

Language is another consideration for an international organization. Abstracts for all articles will translated into Chinese (simplified), Korean, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

User Experience has published many excellent articles over the past ten years. The editors are excited to be able to make them more readily accessible, and look forward to welcoming many more authors and articles to the collection in coming years.

The latest issue (13.1 – “UX Careers”) is being made freely available, along with each of the four issues from 2012. New issues will be “members-only” for an initial period, and then will become open-access as the next issue is published. The archives are being brought into the new format and will also be open-access.

Please share your reaction to the new medium. User Experience will continue to be a valuable resource for members, and for the UX community at large.

Thanks

Readers will appreciate that a project like this involves many people, most of whom are volunteers.

Special thanks are due to Whitney Quesenbery who, in a moment she may have had reason to regret, said to Susan Dray (then Director of Publications): “How hard can it be?”

Whitney, with strong support from Susan, set up the project and managed it with a passion and conviction that was infectious.

The Managing Editors, Aga Bojko and J.O. Bugental, with Associate Managers Chelsey Glasson and Mindy Maxwell, provided their active support and assistance, and smoothed the path.

Ann Walter and Anne Kostick helped to migrate content, and to set up guidelines that will be invaluable as we move forward. There are many interesting differences between print publishing and online publishing.

Alice Preston, ably assisted by Claudia Gutierrez, took on the huge job migrating the existing translations, and setting up the additional languages. Alice has assembled a team of volunteers who help ensure that the translated abstracts are both linguistically and technically accurate. They all patiently accepted the fact that it made sense to rewrite some of the abstracts for the online medium, even though this involved late nights, looming deadlines and shifting sands.

Tom Biby cheerfully revisited the banners from the print versions, helping deliver new versions that were consistent but optimized for the online medium.

Chris Koster pulled many rabbits out of hats. His in-depth knowledge of the magazine and UXPA’s hosting and authentication arrangements created many short-cuts.

A whole host of others rolled up their sleeves and did whatever was needed. At the risk of omitting someone, they included Paul Linton, Christine Danko, Frank Tagader, Andrew Rivera, Katie Derthick, Aaron Marcus, Pascal Rettig, Cynthia Kamishlian and Nicole Tafoya.

Finally, special thanks are due to our developer, Milenko Subotic, who patiently dealt with a difficult client and delivered a site that we feel represents an excellent beginning.

Call for On-Site Conference Volunteers

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Jingya Yu, UXPA2012 conference volunteer

Jingya Yu, UXPA2012 conference volunteer
(photo courtesy of Tom Tullis)

The 2013 UXPA Conference will provide inspiration and stimulation through workshops,
exhibits, and tutorials to increase our attendees’ passion for leading the way in user experience. In addition, the conference aims to provide sessions to explore all the collaborative relationships, techniques, and team-oriented practices that enrich the user experience profession.

We are building a team of committed volunteers to help with a variety of behind-the-scenes activities such as staffing the information booth, helping at the registration desk, and assisting session chairs and tutorial instructors. In return, volunteers receive greatly reduced conference registration fees and the opportunity to interact closely with leaders in the user experience field who will be attending the conference as speakers/presenters, conference planners,
and participants.

 

Learn More

To learn more about the UXPA 2013 conference and the volunteering opportunity (benefits, expectations, fees, application process), please visit the conference volunteer site. If you have any follow-up questions or need more information, please do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you!

 

Sign Up

If you are interested in this unique opportunity to volunteer for the UXPA 2013 conference in Washington, D.C., please complete the online volunteer application as soon as possible. We will make our selections in a couple of weeks.    

 

Have Questions?

If you need more information or have questions, contact the UXPA 2013 conference volunteer committee at volunteers2013@uxpa.org.

 

Thanks for your consideration!

Promise Ziegler, UXPA 2013 Onsite Volunteer Chair
volunteers2013@uxpa.org

Hard Choices

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So we got a lot of great submissions for the UXPA conference in DC this year.  A lot.  316 to be exact.

These submissions have all gone through blind peer review.  We aimed to have every submission reviewed by 5 reviewers, but settled for 3.

We’ve made the first draft of the conference schedule and sent out acceptance/rejection letters to all those great people who submitted proposals. The overall acceptance rate was approximately 26%, and some categories were even lower (presentations were closer to 15%).

This is the hard part of the job – turning away some great proposals that would have been amazing in our program.  So why do we do it?  And how do we make those decisions?

Here’s a little peek behind the curtain…

We believe in blind peer review.  So we rely on the recommendations of the reviewers, the scores they give, and their comments about a proposal.  This is hard to do after the fact when we see the names and say, “Oh! That’s so-and-so!  They are AWESOME! I don’t want to reject them.” But for blind peer review to work, we can’t let names/reputations cloud our judgment.  We have to trust. And we have to remember that UXPA has never been just about a name  – we’ve always tried to be about good, practical talks that will help people with their career/work/job.  So how do reviews work?  Reviewers receive “sanitized” submissions (meaning all trace of identity removed) and they rate the submissions across several categories on a 1-5 scale, with 5 being the most positive rating.  The overall numeric average of ALL submissions was 3.73. (highest 4.92, lowest 1.72) For accepted submissions, the average was 4.09 (highest 4.92, lowest 2.98). For rejected submissions, the average was 3.60 (highest 4.83, lowest 1.72). 108 submissions were rated 4.0 or higher, and we only accepted 85 submissions.  Tough choices.

submissions2013

A cool chart Danielle made illustrating the above numbers.

We believe in a balanced program.  This is where the conference committee has to make some hard choices.  If the top five best reviewed talks are all about agile, should we offer a skewed program that has a lot of agile talks and perhaps lacks in another area?  Sometimes we have to reject perfectly good proposals because we have “too much of a good thing”.  For example, this year we had a lot of submissions on usability studies, agile, and accessibility that were recommended for acceptance.  So many, that these three topics could have easily taken up the entire program.  We had virtually no submissions recommended for acceptance on information architecture, content strategy, or UX strategy.  So we used the scores to pick out the best of the usability, agile, and accessibility submissions and left some room to accept other great submissions on a wider variety of topics.

We don’t believe in creating idols, icons, or heroes.  So if one person submitted 4 great talks, all of them recommended for acceptance, we might not put them all in the program.  First, we don’t want to do that to someone – giving presentations is hard work and very draining.  I don’t care what anyone says: no one wants to present four talks in three days.  And we find that the quality of the later talks can generally suffer as the energy-level of the presenter wanes.  But we also don’t want to be seen as putting any individual out there as “the face of UXPA” or “the poster child” for a specific topic.  So you may see some names twice in the program: they earned it.  They submitted multiple great proposals.  But you won’t see them three times.  We’ve got to draw the line somewhere!

We only have so much space.  We don’t want to run a ten-track conference that costs thousands of dollars to attend.  We don’t want to create a monstrous event where you are unlikely to run into half the people at the conference or where you miss 95% of the talks because you can’t physically attend everything.  We do want to make choices difficult for our attendees: choosing a session should be hard because they should all be good.  So that means we simply had to reject some submissions that had been recommended to be accepted.  There wasn’t enough room.

We support both advanced practitioners and those just starting out in the field.  Because of this, we need to make tough choices regarding program offering.  We need to ensure we have a well-balanced fundamentals program and we need to have a diverse and interesting offering for the “veterans” of our field.  Sometimes we can ask a submitter to alter their topic to meet the needs of a specific audience, but sometimes a topic just doesn’t fit into the need for either audience.

So that’s how you ended up with your program.  It’ll be up on the website shortly and registration will be open.  Our early bird rates are fantastic, but they’re limited to the first 200 people.  When you peruse our schedule, know that it was put together with love, sweat, and the hopes and dreams of the entire conference committee.  We’ll be adding our keynotes and a few other featured speakers over the next month or two, so keep checking for new and exciting additions to the program.

Registration opens this month, stay tuned for details.

We look forward to seeing you in DC!

Christina and Danielle

 

 

Thank you!!

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thank you note on post-it

Creative Commons licensed image from flickr user Ben Fredericson (xjrlokix)

UXers, you continue to amaze me.

Both the reviewer survey and submissions are now closed. I’m thrilled to report that a record 413 of you signed up to be reviewers! And it’s a good thing, too, because we have over 300 submissions to evaluate!

Without a quality program, there’s no conference. So thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for everything you are doing to help ensure this year’s event is top-notch.

What’s next?
Good question. Here’s how it works:

  1. First, a small team looks over EVERY submission to make sure they really are anonymous. We’re pretty hardcore about reviews being purely about merit.
  2. Then we hand them over to our fabulous team of reviewers. Reviewers will be assigned 3-5 submissions to evaluate based on their responses to the reviewer survey. (If you said you were interested in mobile, we’ll try to direct those kinds of submissions to you. Ditto for specific submission types, like Tutorials or Ignites.)
  3. The reviewers look carefully at each of their assigned submissions and ask themselves questions like, “Is this any good? Would I want to go to this session? Do I even have enough information here to understand what the speaker is planning to talk about? They have two weeks to do this very important work.
  4. Subcommittee chairs look at the reviewers’ feedback and make recommendations about which submissions they think should be accepted.
  5. A subset of the conference committee will meet in person during the second weekend in March to establish the conference program.
  6. Allowing some time for follow-ups of any issues that come up during that meeting, submitters will be notified of their acceptance status in late March.

 

Then what?
More exciting things!

  • Registration will open just as soon as we can let you know what it is you’re registering for (that is, what the conference program looks like).
  • And there will likely be a second call for proposals for Idea Markets and Posters, so if you didn’t get your submission in, or if your talk didn’t quite make the program, that’s another avenue you can pursue.

 

As always, looking forward to seeing all of your smiling faces in Washington, DC!

-Danielle & Christina

Government Track at UXPA 2013 DC

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Are you working for the government (any government)? Or are you doing government-related work? Have you done research that would be of particular interest to government usability practitioners? Consider submitting it to UXPA 2013!

Because UXPA will be in Washington, DC this year, we’re hoping that many of our colleagues in the government will join us in a special government track this year. The sessions will be part of the main conference and open to all, but the sessions in this track may be of particular interest to those doing work in or for their government. We are hoping for a variety of submissions representing the local, state/provincial, and national levels of countries all over the world.

So if you have an idea for presentation, panel, poster, or any other UXPA session that you think might be especially of interest to government usability professionals, please submit your proposal! The deadline is February 6! If you have any questions, please contact Jean Fox at government2013@uxpa.org.