Saturday, May 31 - Sunday, June 1, 2008
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Usability and Accessibility: User Research, Design, and Evaluation - Whitney Quesenbery
About This Workshop
Whether you are just learning about usability, or want to build your skills, this workshop will blend a strong focus on usability and accessibility concepts with practical exercises to learn how to put them to use. We will start with an overview of a user-centered process, looking at how we achieve the goals of usability and accessibility, and what questions we need to answer along the way. Then, we will look at some of the most popular techniques for learning about and from users. Whether you work on product documentation, Web sites, software applications, hardware products, or a mix of them all, this workshop will teach you practical techniques, and an approach for putting them together to improve the user experience.
Who Should Attend?
Any technical communicator (writer, editor, illustrator, manager, information designer) who wants to:
- Learn how to make their work more usable and accessible for everyone
- Contribute to the usability of products they work on
- Develop skills to focus their work on usability and accessibility
What Will You Learn?
Participants will gain an understanding of
A user-centered process
The relationship between usability and accessibility
How to make practical decisions about how to choose usability techniques effectively
Practical exercises will focus on:
- Core skills of observation and interviewing
- Practice conducting user research sessions, usability tests, and card sorting
- Consolidating user research sessions into personas
- Evaluating a product for usability and accessibility
- Analyzing and reporting usability results
The Instructor
Whitney Quesenbery is a user researcher, user experience practitioner, and usability expert with a passion for clear communication. She helps companies from The Open University to the National Cancer Institute learn about their users and create usable Web sites and applications.
Whitney serves on two U.S. Federal Advisory Committees on voting systems and accessibility regulations, working to improve the usability and accessibility of our civic life. She has served as president of the Usability Professionals' Association and manager of the STC Usability & User Experience SIG.
Her most recent publication is a chapter on storytelling and narrative in a new book on personas, The Personas Lifecycle, and she is hard at work on a book on Storytelling in User Experience Design for Rosenfeld Media. You can find her online at www.wqusability.com.