Patrick.

Japadog. Guu. Salt Tasting Room. Rodneys. Granville Island. West Vancouver.

-----Original Message----- From: ixdaor at host.ixda.org [mailto:ixdaor at host.ixda.org] On Behalf Of Chris McLay Sent: Monday, March 08, 2010 12:24 AM To: pat at usabilitycounts.com Subject: [IxDA] Coming to Vancouver

Hi all,

I'm heading to Vancouver next week for a holiday and to explore the city and surrounds.

Does anyone have any recommendations of things a travelling Interaction Designer must do, or placed they should visit?

All suggestions welcome!

Thanks, Chris

(((Please leave all content below this line))) Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Discussion! Manage Account .. http://www.ixda.org/user/27323/notifications Discussion Guidelines .. http://www.ixda.org/guidelines

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Matthew Nish-Lapidus.

Hi Everybody,

The moment is finally here, IxDA.org is going down for the launch of our new platform.

This means that the website AND mailing list will be offline for the afternoon while we get everything ready to go on the new site.

*Important Steps to Get Your Account Running*

When the new site launches, we need existing members to take a simple step to get access and continue your participation. We need you to visit the new website in order to request a password.

Existing members will need to request a password:

1. In the header of the new site, select “Request password.”

2. Enter the email address associated with your IxDA Discussion subscription. The system will generate a password and send it to you.

3. To log in to the site, follow the link in the email you receive. Then you should change your password to one that you want to use.

By following this process, your member profile will reflect all your previous activity at IxDA.org.

See you at the new IxDA.org!

Matt Nish-Lapidus & the rest of the IxDA Board

Harry.

Counterpoint:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/02/27/lesson-from-madlibs-signup-fad-do-your-own-tests/

(found via hacker news)

Elizabeth Bacon.

Also a reminder of important steps YOU need to take after the new site launches. We need all existing members to take a simple step to get access and continue your participation with your previous history connected to the future. We need you to visit the new website in order to request a password.

1. In the header of the new site, select "Request password."

2. Enter the email address associated with your IxDA Discussion subscription. The system will generate a password and send it to you.

3. To log in to the site, follow the link in the email you receive. Then you should change your password to one that you want to use. By following this process, your member profile will reflect all your previous activity at IxDA.org.

See you on the other side!

Cheers, Liz

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss? post=49680

David Poteet.

we've got a lot of research data from interviews with students and mental models that have guided various designs of student life sections. Contact me at david at newcitymedia dot com and I can send it to you.

Here are a couple of example links: http://www.vt.edu/student_life/ http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/students http://roanoke.edu/Student_Life.htm

Tufts students have created their own student portal which isn't pretty but it gets the job done! http://www.tuftslife.com/

There's certainly nothing I would call "rules" or standard formats though. The key is understanding what's most important to YOUR students.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss? post=49676

Will Evans.

She is no longer there - but when she was there - I believe she was not responsible for the Bac'n.

~ will

On Sep 9, 2008, at 1:07 PM, Andrew Jaswa wrote:

> But Bac'n is so tasty! Is it anything like spam?
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Will Evans
> <will at semanticfoundry.com
> wrote:
>
> I believe we have a friend over at LinkedIn - Christina W. who can
>
> apologize
>
> for LinkedIn's Bac'n generator :-)
>
>
>
> I have come to despise Bac'n.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Dave Meeker <meekerd at gmail.com
>
>
> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> All -
>
>
>
>
>
> Please forgive my LinkedIn Request.
>
>
> I am about to fire off an email to them to tell them that the user
>
>
> experience of adding your friends from email is pretty poor,
>
>
> seeing as
>
>
> how every single person in my gmail account happened to get an email
>
>
> from them last evening... including about 5000 people I don't even
>
>
> know.
>
>
>
>
>
> I sincerely apologize for this!
>
>
>
>
>
> (and LinkedIn... I'd like you to apologize also!)
>
>
>
>
>
> Sorry folks,
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Dave
>
>
>
>
>
> Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
>
>
> To post to this list ... discuss at ixda.org
>
>
> Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe
>
>
> List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines
>
>
> List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> ~ will
>
>
>
> "Where you innovate, how you innovate,
>
> and what you innovate are design problems"
>
>
>
>
>
> Will Evans | User Experience Architect
>
> tel: +1.617.281.128 | will at semanticfoundry.com
>
> aim: semanticwill | gtalk: wkevans4
>
> twitter: semanticwill | skype: semanticwill
>
>
>
>
>
> Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
>
> To post to this list ... discuss at ixda.org
>
> Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe
>
> List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines
>
> List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Andrew Jaswa
> andrewjaswa.com
> wsuug.org
>
> Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
> To post to this list ... discuss at ixda.org
> Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe
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> List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help

Joe Sokohl.

In other words, forewarned is forearmed.

When the new ixda.org launches Sometime Sunday, a body of the Interaction '10 videos will be present in the Resources section. Needless to say, the complexity of getting all 60 or so videos titled, tagged, compressed, and uploaded takes time &amp; bandwidth.

So it is likely that the IxDA '10 videos will be in the process of being uploaded early next week, rather than at launch time. Just keep checking back...and we'll also keep you up to date.

REMINDER As of Sunday, February 28, at 0800 PST/1100 EST/1600 GMT, ixda.org and the discussion list will go down for the changeover. Shouldn't take too much time.

Sara Lin.

This is the student life section of Cornell website: http://www.cornell.edu/studentlife/index.cfm

Pretty simple layout. The purpose of the pages on this site is to redirect students to other portal or resources.

William Hudson.

Don -

Here's an interesting article on how people's perception of being watched affected their behaviour. I admit that it's not a web-based study, but there may be more on this out there: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/3/412.full

Regards,

William Hudson Syntagm Ltd Design for Usability UK 01235-522859 World +44-1235-522859 US Toll Free 1-866-SYNTAGM mailto:william.hudson at syntagm.co.uk http://www.syntagm.co.uk skype:williamhudsonskype

Syntagm is a limited company registered in England and Wales (1985). Registered number: 1895345. Registered office: 10 Oxford Road, Abingdon OX14 2DS.

Attend our courses on Ajax design &amp; usability, card sorting and web usability: CHI 2010 Conference (Atlanta, Georgia) http://www.chi2010.org UPA 2010 Conference (Munich, Germany) http://bit.ly/8x9NU

-----Original Message----- From: discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com [mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of Don Habas Sent: 19 February 2010 20:57 To: IXDA Subject: [IxDA Discuss] How to Get People to Answer Honestly

I'm designing a long application for a financial product. We need people to answer some personal questions ...

Whitney Quesenbery.

Have you looked at BJ Fogg's work on persuasion- - * http://captology.stanford.edu/resources.html

*There is some good material on credibilty and how to use it to persuade.

You might also look up Florian Eggers work. He did some work around trust in ecommerce sites several years ago. Here's one paper: portal.acm.org/citation.cfm? id=633352

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Aneesh Karve <aneesh.karve at gmail.com
>wrote:

> Nielsen outlines 4 methods for communicating trustworthiness
> (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990307.html):
> 1 - Design quality
> 2 - Up-front disclosure
> 3 - Comprehensive, correct, and current
> 4 - Connected to the rest of the Web
>
> I would add, for legal text and instructions:
> 5 - Brevity
>
> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/01/31/easy__true/
> cites research by Alter &amp; Oppenheimer that indicates the following:
> 6 - Easy-to-read fonts encourage honest responses to questionnaires.
>
> That said, if you desire a careful, planned response:
> 7 - Reducing the fluency of the text, via an unclear font or reduced
> contrast, encourages more careful answers.
>
> There's more in the Globe article on fluency and disfluency. I
> highly recommend it.
>
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> Posted from the new ixda.org
> http://www.ixda.org/discuss? post=49514
>
>
>
> Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
> To post to this list ... discuss at ixda.org
> Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe
> List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines
> List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
>

-- Whitney Quesenbery www.wqusability.com

Storytelling in User Experience Design www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/storytelling

Dave Weinberg.

love it in that it bridges data (collection) with story and context (with a potential dash of surveyMonkey)- and YOU are the main character so naturally you get drawn in. Not sure it would work for all types of DC but things that involve some kind of service or a way to personalize the mundane with humor. good stuff!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss? post=49660

Adrian Howard.

Hi folks,

Today's the last day for submissions to the User Experience stage of Agile 2010 - and we'd love to have some more submissions. So if you've been vacillating on whether to submit or not now is your last chance.

You can submit sessions and find out details of speaker compensation at http://agile2010.agilealliance.org/speaker.html

Submissions aimed at the User Experience stage should be submitted to the Technical theme. Adding a "ux" tag to your submission will help us find your proposal more easily. If you have any questions please just contact us.

Our goals are to

* Put practical user experience skills into the hands of the people who need them - whatever their role * Communicate that user experience is a rich, deep discipline that can help agile teams build better products

The User Experience stage has 11 session slots this year and we're relying on you to fill them with some great sessions. Help us promote a shared vision of user experience in agile teams by submitting:

* Experience reports of user experience practice in agile projects - whether a great success or a dismal failure we want attendees to learn from your experiences

* Demonstrations of user experience practices and techniques - show attendees how user experience methods can help agile teams build more successful products

* Tutorials on user experience practices for agile teams - help attendees acquire the practical skills and knowledge they need to improve the user experience of their products.

* Talks, workshops &amp; panels - promote the effective application of user experience skills and practices in agile teams

We want the stage to engage and inform. Something out of the ordinary where the audience can challenge their preconceptions in an entertaining way and learn something new. If you have an idea, even if you think it might a bit _too_ out of the ordinary, please submit it for consideration.

Let us know what _you_ want to see in the User Experience stage. Is there a tutorial you would like to see or a subject you would like to hear discussed? Is there someone from the agile or user experience world you would like us to invite? If you have a topic or presenter in mind, please let us know.

Thank you for your interest. We're looking forward to meeting you in Nashville this August.

Sincerely,

Adrian Howard &amp; Darci Dutcher

PS If you know of a person who group who might be interested in submitting something - please pass this message along or point them towards http://agile2010.agilealliance.org/users

-- http://quietstars.com adrianh at quietstars.com twitter.com/adrianh t. +44 (0)7752 419080 skype adrianjohnhoward del.icio.us/adrianh

This is more than a list, it's a community. Participate online: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/experiencedesign/Yahoo! Groups Links

<*
> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/experiencedesign/

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<*
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: experiencedesign-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

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Joe Sokohl.

We&#146;re almost there. Almost. The new ixda.org is about to launch. Check out Liz Bacon's blog entry about Conan: http://bit.ly/9kxQAn

To make the change, we have to let ixda.org go dark for a bit. Starting at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (GMT &#150; 5 hours), ixda.org will not be available. In addition, you will not be able to post to the list through email, either. Mi dispiace.

But in a few short hours from the time we initiate the upgrade, ixda.org will reappear&#151;better, more powerful, smarter, and better-looking than before.

Many thanks for your patience and forbearance. See you in a few!

IxDA Board

Laura Klein.

I just want to second Hilary's mention of the use of bucket testing (aka. multivariate or a/b testing) for these sorts of small things. You can quickly get significant results, and once you start a/b testing things, you'll find all sorts of little tweaks you can make to dramatically increase important metrics like conversion, revenue, and retention. This is an especially good way of testing things that users might not even notice in a regular usability test but that can have a really big impact on your business.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss? post=49669

elana.

I'm working on a site for an electronic product launch (pretty much will be its own category). Think of the launch of Tivo, Blu-ray, GPS devices, iPhone&#133;

I'm looking for inspirational sites (or sections of a site) that did the some, or all, of the following really well:

- Explanation of the product&#146;s value proposition, benefits and how it can enhance your lifestyle (Tivo totally changed the way we watch TV)

- Features/tools/content that get people excited about a new technology or provides use cases or demos of the product (http://www.dysonairmultiplier.com/ is good example)

- A tool that helps people make sure they are prepared for the product (A Roku machine requires high-speed Internet connection &#150; what if you wanted to test your Internet speed before purchase.)

The inspiration sites do not have to be limited to the electronics category.

Please send me anything that comes to mind! I&#146;m interested in sites that range from clean and simple (apple) to one that is more exploratory (dyson fan).

Thanks so much.

Hilary Bienstock.

Josh,

At Yahoo!, they treated these types of issues by running a Rolling Study every month -- a usability study where anyone could throw in a topic. Money for this study came out of a central budget rather than from any team's individual budget. There were usually 4-6 topics per test. The upside was that very small questions got tested even if they wouldn't warrant a whole test, or if the team didn't have budget for testing. The downside was that a) recruits couldn't be specific to the users of each project, b) coordination of studies was a very big job, and c) it was frustrating for the person running these studies not to be able to follow the issues through. I'm not sure I'd recommend this.

If small issues come up occasionally, it might be appropriate to tack them on to the end of a test of another topic -- if it only takes a minute or two, that shouldn't be a problem.

However, for the question you mentioned below (terminology around pricing, what's your goal? If it's to assess whether users understand the various terms, then lab testing is appropriate; however if, as I suspect, the goal is to find out which term converts best, then a bucket test is the most appropriate way to find this out.

One of my clients is currently investigating remote usability services like http://www.usertesting.com/. This could be another solution to small questions, but we haven't tried it yet, so I can't speak to that from experience.

In sum, as with anything, it depends on the question you're trying to answer -- but I have found that keeping a running log of small issues and trying to sneak them in to the ends of other usability tests can often work well and be the most time-effective way to investigate these issues. I'd certainly be interested to hear other approaches, though.

Hilary

Hilary User Experience Hilary Bienstock, Principal hilary at hilaryue.com :: 310.883.5818 :: fax 310.829.2839

From: Josh Evnin <jevnin at gmail.com
> To: discuss at ixda.org Sent: Thu, February 25, 2010 6:26:46 AM Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Quick &amp; easy methods for usability testing micro-interactions?

Hey everybody,

I'm looking for suggestions for ways I can usability test some micro-interactions on the site I'm working on. We've worked out a bunch of the big questions - the flow and IA seem to be working, the visual design is adding to the content, and users are enjoying themselves on the site - but a handful of issues regularly pop up that I would like to be able to test out with some users. I'm talking about really little stuff like whether an item with a variable price should be displayed as:

"Starting at $5.00" or "$5.00+" or just plain old "$5.00"

How do you test the little things as they come up? Do you save them all up until you've got enough to warrant full testing sessions with users, or do you use other methods to knock out these little questions?

Thanks!

Josh

Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... discuss at ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help

Josh Evnin.

Hey everybody,

I'm looking for suggestions for ways I can usability test some micro-interactions on the site I'm working on. We've worked out a bunch of the big questions - the flow and IA seem to be working, the visual design is adding to the content, and users are enjoying themselves on the site - but a handful of issues regularly pop up that I would like to be able to test out with some users. I'm talking about really little stuff like whether an item with a variable price should be displayed as:

"Starting at $5.00" or "$5.00+" or just plain old "$5.00"

How do you test the little things as they come up? Do you save them all up until you've got enough to warrant full testing sessions with users, or do you use other methods to knock out these little questions?

Thanks!

Josh

Abi Jones.

What's funny is that this is a lot like 'Cloze' activities I used when I taught 3rd grade: http://www.learnnc.org/reference/cloze activity

Susan Doran.

I also appreciate it for its literal/actual implementation. And, as Stephen says, for its idea and feel--it's engaging, respectful, low-key, and evocative of play!

It's also gently, radical, which I *love*. It is completely user-centric rather than "corporate data collection"-centric.

I'm thrilled in addition to be all the above: it's effective.

NICE work!

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Stephen Collins <trib at acidlabs.org
> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 8:35 PM, Brandon E.B.Ward
> <brandonebward at gmail.com
> wrote:
>
> I thought this was an interesting (i.e. more fun) take on the traditional
>
> web form. I also find it compelling that using the MadLib format
> increased
>
> conversion by quite a bit.
>
> I'm about to begin redesign for an online version of a large and
> complex form for a government department here in Australia. I have
> litle to zero chance of using this approach (and it might not work for
> the form, anyway), but I wonder how much of the overall *idea and
> feel* I can sneak in?
>
> Maybe in some A/B... :)
>
> Clever work!
>
> Steve
> --
> Stephen Collins
> trib at acidlabs.org | +61 410 680722 | @trib
>
> acidlabs | Conversation. Collaboration. Community. | www.acidlabs.org
>
> This email is: [ ] bloggable [X] ask first [ ] private
>
> Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
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--

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Susan Doran 55 Morning Street Portland ME 04101 207-774-4963 (land) 202-296-4849 (cell)

/susandoran (facebook) @susandoran (twitter) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joe Sokohl.

When the new site launches next week, a key enhancement is the addition of a job board.

This board allows you to post details of your job offering within a clear, directed form. You will be able to define the job title, details, full- or part-time or contract, and rich-text details. You can also target specific IxDA local groups where you want to post the job (as well as it being available in the full job board).

So make sure you come back to the site early next week and post your jobs!