Pat’s Point of View

Yesterday I presented a short session at Oz-IA 2010, entitled Five user research methods you’ve probably never seen…

I departed from the norm and rather than talk about the five methods I listed in my presentation outline, I went for something a bit more cheeky and light-hearted; the dangers of field research! The idea came to me because so many people I know who have done user or market research have told me stories about the weird and scary situations they’ve found themselves in out in the field. (In particular Stephen Cox and Raymond Van Der Zalm gave me some great anecdotes!)

I got some decent laughs so I was pretty pleased—and relieved—about that. I ended with a practical demonstration of the tongue in cheek self-defense techniques I had talked about, for which I must say a huge thank you to Gary Barber and Oliver Weidlich who volunteered to take part!

A few people have asked me if I’m going to talk about the five methods I originally said I would, and yes I will as there is obviously interest in those topics! Stay tuned.

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be speaking at this year’s Oz-IA conference, October 6-9 in Sydney. I’m running a pre-conference workshop User Research Methods for Information Architecture and I’ll be giving a short presentation during the conference on Five user research methods you have probably never seen.

The workshop is a new version of one I’ve run a few times before, updated with new examples and activities. The presentation will give a short intro to a few research methods that are not so common in the IA field.

Hope to see you there!

On Friday I presented with my colleague Alun Machin at the first day of Oz-IA 2009, the 4th Australian Information Architecture conference. It was a great day, with good company to keep us talking and some interesting stuff to keep us thinking. The venue was quite good too, my first time at Star City Convention Centre as it happens.

Unfortunately I couldn’t make it for the second day of the conference due to family commitments, which is a shame since the programme looked even better for the Saturday!

Our presentation on our new SuperRacing site (not yet live at the time of writing thissite is now live) went down well considering we had to cram everything we wanted to talk about into 25 minutes. The slides are shown below.

After two conference presentations in one week, it’ll be a while before I make another appearance, not to mention that I’ll be pretty brain dead for a while after the new baby arrives.

Today I gave a talk entitled Prioritising user experience at Ark Group’s Information Architecture – Designing and managing information structures for improved web access and usability conference.

I tried to make the topic a bit more interesting (read controversial) and I think it went quite well.

I covered two main topics, firstly I outlined why I think user experience (UX) should be prioritised over information architecture (IA), and then I discussed prioritising UX within the organisation.
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At this year’s Oz-IA conference I’ll be presenting a short session entitled Bringing them online: using design research to identify online opportunities with my colleague Alun Machin.

It’s all very hush hush at the moment because we’re operating under an embargo, but the general gist of it is how user research can inform the design process for a product (in this case a website) that pertains to an activity that is normally an offline experience.

We’ll talk about how we identified the audience’s “information ecosystem” and found an opportunity for our website to fit in with that in a useful way.

We’ll also talk about the very different groups within that audience and how we catered for each.

Alun will then talk about the transition into design and go through the process we followed.

And if all goes to plan we’ll be able to unveil the new website resulting from all this work!

All this in 25 minutes, including questions :)

Update: if you promise to come along and watch our preso you can use this discount code: PK0265. Use it to get $100 off when you register for OZ-IA.

I’m very pleased to have my first article How to combine multiple research methods: Practical Triangulation published on Johnny Holland. Here’s a taste:

All research methods have their pros and cons, the problem comes when you rely on just one method. I’m often disappointed when UX and IxD practitioners describe the research they do, and it’s obviously very one dimensional. They only do surveys, for example. Or they only do usability testing at the end of the project (it’s quite alarming but this practice does continue).

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This is where the concept of “triangulation” comes into its own. Also known as “mixed method” research, triangulation is the act of combining several research methods to study one thing. They overlap each other somewhat, being complimentary at times, contrary at others. This has the effect of balancing each method out and giving a richer and hopefully truer account.

This will of course be one of the many topics I will be covering in my full day workshop on design research methods for UX practitioners at UX Australia 2009 – a 3-day user experience design conference to be held next week (26-28 August 2009) in Canberra (Australia).

Sadly, I’ve had to pull out of presenting at the inaugural UX Australia conference. My talk, entitled “Watching eyeballs: A multi-faceted case study of eyetracking in UXD”, has been getting a lot of attention and would have been quite interesting for all involved. The reason? my source of content has disappeared since I can’t make use of any projects being conducted at News Digital Media*.

My design research workshop is still going ahead though, which is great news.

* My contract ends before the conference, and thus I will no longer be an NDM employee. So there’s a little blogosphere bombshell for you, I am on the market! :)

I’m very happy indeed to announce that my Research methods for user experience design workshop has been added to the UX Australia program (workshops held Wednesday 26th of August in Canberra).

I’ve revised key aspects of the workshop, leveraging the experiences from some recent projects as examples, and allocated a full day. I’m looking forward to this!

What’s it all about

User experience design, and user-centred design (UCD) in general, requires an understanding of users and their needs and designing with those needs in mind, balanced by factors such as business objectives and technical constraints. Without a solid understanding of these inputs into the process, design is blind.

“Design research” is the process of uncovering and understanding those needs, whether it be direct user research or other means of gathering requirements. Yet, even some experienced web designers, developers and UX practitioners don’t feel well-equipped to take on the research aspects of their projects.

In this one-day workshop, Patrick Kennedy will present the fundamentals of design research from the ‘user experience’ perspective. Specifically, the workshop will be conducted in the context of organising and designing information systems such as websites, intranets and software applications.

This workshop will introduce design research, explain the fundamental principles and teach some simple techniques. The aim is to give the audience a heads-up on the subject and point them in the right direction so they can integrate research into their own work or just better collaborate with design researchers.

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I spent today at Ark Group’s Strategically Managing Intranet Developments conference, which I blogged about before.

There were some good things being said, and by real people who have done the hard yards. They’re not “industry luminaries”, but people out there in the trenches working out how to create effective intranets. Grounded and real are two words I would apply to the conference.

Then there was my presentation, a tad more abstract, but I felt it went well. Slides below.

I felt compelled to steer my presentation towards audience participation, if only because of the collective knowledge in the room; about half the room were presenting at the conference so I was learning as much, if not more, than I was dishing out. That’s the downside of being a consultant, you rarely get that rich experience that in-house staff have. Some great examples were offered by the audience, complementing my own examples.

There were one or two people twittering, you can follow the conversation on #smid.

Happy to hear your comments on my slides, either here or on slidehsare.

I will be speaking at Ark Group’s Strategically managing intranet developments conference from March 2nd to 4th, on the topic of Re-engineering your intranet with user-friendly architecture. To quote the brochure:

This session will take a case study approach outlining projects undertaken by Patrick Kennedy for clients within Australia

• Assessing user psychology: identifying needs and analysing behaviours
• Streamlining processes to simplify work flow and usability
• Personalising the intranet experience by creating user centred design

Hope to see you there!