Usability Week 2010

Designing Complex Applications and Websites 3

  • London: Tuesday, May 18
  • San Francisco: Wednesday, June 16

Lynn Pausic
John Morkes

Full-Day Tutorial

Day 3 of this course covers how to deal with special challenges that complex systems bring to information architecture, navigation, content and terminology, and visual design. The course also explores additional interaction design patterns, data analysis and research techniques for testing patterns, how to create effective style guides, and ways to communicate designs in lieu of traditional specifications (which don’t work here). An end-to-end case study demonstrates how to apply this course’s processes and techniques throughout a project’s lifecycle.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

  • Improve upon traditional design communication methods (why traditional specifications don’t work)
  • Create style guides for content and designs containing interaction patterns
  • Apply your brand elements in data-rich environments
  • Employ interaction patterns for Social Web
  • Design a Software as a Service offering
  • Conduct user testing with patterns and report pattern testing data

Course Outline

Information Architecture and Navigation: Common Challenges and Solutions

  • Scaling navigation: How deep should the rabbit hole go?
  • Moving between multiple software modules or websites
  • Getting started
  • Adaptive dashboards
  • Accessing metadata
  • When wizards aren’t enough
  • Supporting incremental learning

Content and Terminology

  • Guidelines for content in complex applications and websites
  • The importance of all those little words
    • Labels
    • Titles and headings
    • Button names
    • Link style
    • Help
  • Applying domain-expert terminology
  • How to test content and terminology
    • Which techniques are best
    • Key questions to ask

Online repositories for design and development (aka Keeping your patterns, personas and design research data handy)

  • “Living Specifications”
  • Style guides
    • Business value for complex systems: Why style guides are critical
    • Incorporating patterns into Interaction Style Guides
    • Content Style Guides
    • How to create and implement style guides

Visual Design

  • Testing considerations with patterns
  • Identifying new patterns in user testing
  • Keeping track of your user testing results and potential patterns
  • User testing findings driving pattern development
  • Testing the appeal of your user experience

Day 3: Testing Tools and Techniques:

  • Role of brand in complex situations
  • Applying brand elements to data-rich environments and avoiding usability problems
    • The squint test
  • Color, affordances and visual cues for data tables and complex displays

Day 3: Interaction design patterns for complex situations:

  • Social Web for business and consumers
    • Promoting and managing content on social platforms
    • Communicating non-typical user status and profile details
    • Streaming content and activity displays
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) considerations

Communicating designs

  • Why traditional specifications don’t work
  • “Living Specifications” and alternative approaches
  • Why and how to make friends with your developers

Project lifecycle for designing complex applications and websites

  • Case study: End-to-end lifecycle of applying processes and techniques
  • Considerations for Agile
  • Considerations for Waterfall

Reviews of course participants’ work examples (as time permits)

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lecture, real-world examples, exercises, Q&A and discussion throughout.

Handouts

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend

This course is intended for people engaged in designing, defining or testing user experiences for complex applications and websites. This includes information architects, interaction designers, visual designers, usability specialists, user researchers, technical writers, product managers, business analysts, UI developers, and managers of these disciplines.

See Also:

This course is a companion to Designing Complex Applications & Websites 1 and Designing Complex Applications & Websites 2. To learn the topic in depth, we recommend that you attend all three days, but each is structured to offer a valuable single-day experience.

Instructors

photo of Lynn Pausic Lynn Pausic is Co-Founder and Principal at Expero Inc., a consulting firm specializing in the definition, design and usability of user experiences for complex applications and websites. Lynn leads the User Experience Design practice at Expero. Lynn has worked with companies of all sizes from many industries to design hundreds of successful user experiences. Recent clients include Digital Globe, Charles Schwab, Freescale Semiconductor, GSI Commerce, Intel, Monotype Imaging and Servigistics. Previously, Lynn was the Director of Product Management for 2Vox, an early-stage company focused on wireless security and provisioning. Lynn has also worked as a Director of Human-Computer Interaction, a Senior Interaction Designer, and a Consulting Manager. Lynn has spoken on various topics related to user experience and design in many forums and professional seminars, such as Carnegie Mellon University’s HCI Institute, Cornell University’s Media Lab and ACM’s SIG-CHI conference. Lynn holds a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University. Lynn has presented tutorials at Nielsen Norman Group conferences since 2006.
photo of John Morkes John Morkes is Co-Founder and Principal at Expero Inc., a consulting firm specializing in the definition, design and usability of user experiences for complex applications and websites. Morkes leads the User Research and Usability group at Expero. His recent clients include eBay, Monotype Imaging, Intel, Sprint Nextel, TiVo and the European Central Bank. Previously, he was the Director of Human-Computer Interaction at Trilogy Software, where he led efforts to improve the usability of configurator-driven websites for Nissan and Ford, which Forrester Research rated as the two best consumer sites in the industry. Morkes has worked as a usability engineer for Sun and HP and as a journalist for Wired and R&D Magazine. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University and master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Northwestern University. He has presented tutorials at Nielsen Norman Group conferences since 2000.