Reviews: Conference Reviews

Future London Academy’s UX and Digital Design Week 2017 took place August 14–18, in London. Throughout the week, we visited a variety of design studios and product companies and learned a lot about the way they work, including their projects, products, processes, management, culture, and all the things that shape them. The lineup for the program was great as always, featuring Moving Brands, Microsoft Lift, Territory, Deliveroo, Moo, Made by Many, NomNom, Monese, Analog Folk, Firedrop, and Andrea Picchi.

In this review, I’ll provide an overview of the conference, describing its

• organization
• venue
• hospitality
• content
• presenters
• proceedings
• community Read More

How long is your typical project? Are you working in 6-week agile sprints? Running monthly usability tests? Trying an A/B test for a week? Updating a Twitter stream hourly? The demands of Internet time keep us focused on shorter and shorter time intervals, with experiences measured in days, minutes, or even the first 50 milliseconds of exposure to a Web page, according to a team of researchers at Carleton University in Toronto led by Gitte Lindgaard. [1]

What happens if you turn that around and think in terms of months, years, or lifetimes? Longitudinal studies look at long-term user experience. Usually, that means over a few months or possibly a few years. But recently, at the European Survey Research Association Conference, I learned about some much longer-term studies that offer some lessons about how to conduct our rather shorter investigations. Read More

A CHI 2006 Course: Presented by:

• Marti Hearst, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley
• Preston Smalley and Corey Chandler, eBay User Experience and Design

The CHI 2006 program provided this course summary:
Learn the advantages of and strategies for using faceted metadata for integrating browsing and search of large information collections. Examples are drawn from formal studies and results of real-world applications.

Sometimes first impressions are a great way to gauge the likelihood of a successful experience. This wasn’t one of those times. I was deeply concerned that I’d signed myself up for some esoteric discussion on the proper use of metadata, but pleasantly surprised to find a real-world interface solution for dealing with large information collections—exactly what the summary said this course would cover. Read More