KonzeptioNerd

Useful Week, London

I am (well, was) in London for Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Week and there’s no Wireless in the conference room. There’s not even electricity. I failed to charge my MacBook during the first night, but even if I had, my batteries wouldn’t last through eight hours of structured note taking. Then again, with airport off, they might as well …

Now, I can imagine why they’d want to prevent chatting, blogging and quite generally casting from their sessions, although … Nielsen embraces the idea that setting knowledge free is quite an efficient form of marketing. They even hand out the slides from their presentations (on dead wood, though) and if someone really wanted to stealthily video and cast the sessions, a few hours of forced asynchronicity probably won’t deter them.

Usability Week is organized and run professionally and with apparent routine. But when I asked for an outlet, Nielsen’s staff couldn’t even imagine what I’d want it for. After all, they provided paper for note taking. This isn’t first conference they run for web designers. There must be intention behind so explicitly not supplying the level of connectivity that’s now common whenever web people meet. Can’t figure it out, though.

And while I’m nagging, there’a a certain lack of usability to the way they administrer lunch here. There are two tracks, at least one of them with about a hrundred participants. They all have lunch at the same time, and there are about a dozen tables tops to accomodate them. Those who cannot cram around one of those tables have to sit elbow by elbow on chairs lined up against the walls, balancing plates on their knees, hunched over their food.Tomorrow, I’ll rush for lunch and hope I’ll get a little conversation out of being able to actually look at someone over our food.

Cut. Restart.

I was in London for Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Week. The Usabiliy in Practice session provided efficient and fun access to about 50 years of testing experience that will certainly the improve the way I plan, run and process tests in the future. Nielsen had a surprising emphasis on the quallitative, there were hardly any ROI calculations and instead a pile of good tips for conducting low-fuss, result-oriented tests.

Some insight:

• Do your own recruiting
• Write everything down during tests
• Create a common shorthand that the team will stick to for notetaking (original quote, note-taker’s assumption, problem / error etc.)
• Use collaborative methods for result-generation and analysis
• Organize findings / presentations by topic, not by page reviewed

Most interesting:

We did one group-exercise on paper prototyping that was rather exhilarating. Kara Pernice set a though timing and in a rush to get anything done at all, we actually accomplished quite a bit. The testing session with a human “computer” shuffling bits of paper was surprisingly effective and the opprotunity to redesign (just a little) while testing gave quite good results. We definitively need to try more of this at the agency.

Certainly worth the trip up from Germany.

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