The second annual usability marathon is taking place in Moscow between October 12 – October 21, 2009. The event combines UX experts from around the world with presentations from Bill Albert, Daniel Szuc, Robert Schumacher, Susan Wolf, Paul Sherman, Jeff Sauro, Tim Bosenick, Amy Cueva, Michael Hawley and Kim Goodwin.
For those of us who cannot be in Moscow, the conference is held via webinair and recorded sessions will be available on their website after the event. Best part is that it free and it is available to everyone via a simple online registration process. Therefore, making it an excellent experience for a user like myself.
The 11 hour difference did not keep me for attending some of the sessions, below are some of the highlights:
Bill Albert from Bentley University starts the marathon with his lecture with “Beyond the UX Lab: Exploring Large-Scale UX Research”. He discusses the opportunities, strengths and limitations for applying large scale studies to UX experiments. Bill stresses the importance of testing in the early stages of development and also compares qualitative and quantitative methods. His new book “Beyond the Usability Lab: Conducting Large-Scale User Experience Studies” will be published in January 2010 by Elsevier/Morgan Kauffman.
Bill Szuc is the principle of Apogee and has co- produced the Usability kit. In his presentation, Bill talks about how to approach businesses with the topic of Usability. His approach is to highlight how usability can help businesses with their design processes and refrains from doing the ROI argument. Bill give examples of products that are not user friendly and then compares a well integrated user experience like Apple with their Iphone, Ipod, Itune, and Istore. He also stresses the importance of talking to businesses in a language that is comfortable to them and to avoid jargon terms.
His presentation at the UX Marathon website:
http://marathon.uidesign.ru/szuc.html
Next one on my list was Jeff Sauro from Oracle USA and his presentation is on Applying Statics to Usability Testing. As a Six Sigma black belt trained statistician, Jeff has extensive knowledge in statistics and begins the presentation with a crash course in Stats 101. He covers the concepts of mean, standard deviation, interval confidence, null and alternate hypothesis. Jeff applies it to the UX by taking the average time to complete tasks and the satisfaction scores of users. His presentation brought back a flood of memories from my first year stat course at university and he offers a link to his website with tools. Very useful.
His website: http://www.measuringusability.com/
I attended a second session with Jeff on Friday, the topic was Measuring User Efficiency. He demonstrates the importance of measuring efficiency in an environment such as a large call center where users were performing repetitive keyboard strokes. He uses the Keystroke Level Modelling to gauge user completion time.
Jeff uses the example of renting a car in Boston with Budget Rent a Car and he shows that it is possible to measure user time accurately with KLM. I thought Jeff went a little fast as he toggled multiple screens in his presentation and I found it a bit difficult to completely understand him. Nevertheless, he is an excellent speaker and I will listen to his presentation again when it becomes available on the UX Marathon website.
The next UX session will be held on Monday, October 19th at 7am (PST) with Amy Cueva.
More info can be found on the UX Marathon website: http://marathon.uidesign.ru/
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