90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Date: Tuesday 11th August, 6.30pm – 10pm
Location: iCrossing, Central Brighton, BN1 1ND
Price: Free, but you must book a ticket on stubmatic

This free event will be comprised of three parts – two talks and a demo!

1. Carsten Schmitt & Poppy James are coming down from Bunnyfoot to give a short talk on “How to run successful international user research projects”
2. Rob Gillham of Human Factors International is going to give a talk on “Designing for Persuasion, Emotion & Trust on the web”
3. The Bunnyfoot team will be giving an eye tracking demonstration, over drinks & nibbles

1. How (not) to run successful international user research projects

Speakers: Carsten Schmitt & Poppy James, Bunnyfoot.

• User research across several countries – be it surveys or user tests – has its own challenges. Some of them are well known (but nevertheless often forgotten) others are unexpected.
• Poppy and Carsten – a Briton and a German – do not aim to give you the ultimate 101 of international user research. A lot has been written about that already. What they do want to do instead is to talk about their own experiences to show you which problems you could encounter before you even start your testing abroad and what could happen if you don’t have that foreign language expertise in-house.
• Prepare to be surprised, shocked, and, hopefully, amused. And the end of this talk you should be able to add a few bullet points to your checklist for the next international project (bullet points will be provided).
• Some of the topics include “Foreign affairs – Managing multi-national clients” and “Parlez you Italiano? Language issues beyond ‘translations’”

Carsten Schmitt & Poppy James are consultants at Bunnyfoot, a User Experience Consultancy that’s passionate about Eye Tracking. Bunnyfoot’s clients include the BBC, the COI, Virgin Holidays, and Yell.com to name only a few.

2. Designing for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust On The Web

Speaker: Rob Gillham, HFI

• Since the early ’60s, Social and Experimental Psychology Research that has taught us a great deal about the nature of persuasion in human psychology.
• In recent years, there’s been a flurry of books and articles on the subject – after all, persuasion is part of the elusive magic recipe for success in business. What’s been lacking, however, is a selection of case studies that give a solid understanding of what works and what doesn’t in the context of human-computer interaction.
• This is exactly where Rob Gillham’s talk picks up. Rob will give a talk covering the underpinning Psychological research and insights from HFI’s own research findings.
• Rob’s talk involves a 1 hour sneak peak into HFI’s ‘Psychology, Emotion & Trust’ training course, normally only available for paying customers.

Rob Gillham is a Project Director at Human Factors International (HFI), the world’s largest UX consultancy with offices in UK, US, Germany, India, China and Singapore.

3. Audience Participation Eye tracking demo

• After the talks we’ll be cracking open the beers (and wine and snacks) for an eye tracking demo from the Bunnyfoot crew.
• To make it more fun, we’ll be accepting submissions from attendees. Feel free to email Harry Brignull with your site screengrabs, art, or naked photos (1024×768 PNGs are ideal).
• Submissions will be drawn at random from the pile and used in the demo. (PS no naked photos).

This event is sponsored by Madgex and iCrossing.

There are certain kinds of user research that require extreme video analysis, where you literally have to transcribe every utterance, gesture and movement, and a single hour of footage can take almost a day to analyse. You can imagine this is a painstakingly tiresome process, so this open source app by IBM researcher Eben Haber seems like it would be pretty useful:

The app is called Video Note Taker and it does exactly what it says on the tin. Once you’ve learned a few key combinations you can easily scrub back and forth through the footage at different speeds, bind each line of your notes to a timestamp in the video, and then (here’s the clever bit) jump to the point of in the video that each timestamp corresponds with.

There are a number of other apps that provide similar functionality – including Microsoft’s OneNote, the captioning tool in Techsmith’s Camtasia, and a whole ream of dusty-looking academic apps. However, since Video Note Taker is free, simple, and easy to learn, I can see it being quite popular within its niche.

Video Note Taker requires Quicktime and Java, and runs on both on Windows and OS X.

→ Find out more about Video Note Taker

(Found via Melissa Cefkin on the Athrodesign mailing list).