Author: Michigan UXPA

Introduction to Usability: An Interactive Discussion

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Wednesday October 22, 2008

Steelcase Learning Center in Grand Rapids

If you are interested in learning the basics and benefits of user centered design and how to introduce it into your organization, then Introduction to User Centered Design is your chance! Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus, Director of User Experience at Perficient, and Mike Beasley, the president of the Michigan UPA, will lead a
discussion that gives you the opportunity to pose your questions to a couple of user experience experts. You can learn about such things as:

  • What IS Usability?  Can you touch it? Can you measure it?
  • How can you incorporate it into your organization?
  • “Usability,” “User Experience,” “Human Factors,” “Information Architecture?” What’s the deal with all these names?
  • What can my website analytics tell me about the usability of my site?
  • How you can use user tasks and goals to organize your website.

After an introduction to the basics of usability, they will open the floor to questions. You will set the agenda for this discussion through the questions you bring, so come prepared!

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UXnet @ The Henry Ford’s “Out of this World”

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Saturday, December 6, 2008

The Henry Ford, Dearborn, MI

Host: The User eXperience network (UXnet)

Date: Saturday, December 6, 2008

Time: 9:30am – 5:00pm

Location: The Henry Ford

Street: 20900 Oakwood Blvd

City/Town: Dearborn, MI

Visit to The Henry Ford with your User Experience colleagues. See the special exhibit “Out of this World” and other parts of the museum (and Greenfield Village if the weather is good). There MIGHT be a special time/place to meet your UX colleagues, but there might not. If we all go on the same day, we will run into each other as we visit the museum, and that may be enough.

Acrobat: Features, accessibility, and version 9

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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Ann Arbor, MI

The next Refresh Detroit meeting will be 6:30pm, Wednesday, June 18, 2008 at Ann Arbor SPARK in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. We are fortunate to have Adobe representative Doug Halliday lead the presentation.

Doug will highlight features in Acrobat, including creating PDFs, sharing, forms and usability. He’ll also discuss the new features in the upcoming Acrobat 9 version, due for release in mid-summer 2008. Adobe expert Greg Pisocky will join our meeting remotely to explain the accessibility features in Acrobat.
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How Remote Contextual Inquiry Got Us Up-Close with Users

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Wednesday June 4, 2008

TechSmith, Okemos, MI

Joanna Markel and Serena Rosenhan, ProQuest

As members of the User Experience Design team at ProQuest, a company that produces information products for libraries, we wanted to know more about how our users approach research. While we routinely conduct usability tests and evaluations as part of our product development processes, we needed a new method to help us answer questions about the tasks and situations for which our products are designed. We turned to contextual inquiry and designed and conducted a series of field observations of college students doing library research. After conducting 13 rather time-consuming in-person observations, we modified our methods to remote online observations and quickly discovered that there were unexpected benefits to this approach in addition to time-savings.
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