Reading group archive

Previous reading group topics
When	Topic	Readings	Discussion questions
Thursday September 7, 2006. 4-5pm.	Card sorting	Maurer, D., Warfel, T. (2004), Card sorting: a definitive guide. Courage, C., Baxter, K. (2005), "Card sorting", Understanding your users: a practical guide to user requirements, pages 414 - 447. Nielsen, J. (2004), Card Sorting: How Many Users to Test.	What are the benefits of performing a card sort and when should it be performed? How do you conduct a card sort? How many users should you test in a card sort and why? How do you analyse the data? Or at what point do you consider the link between cards to be too weak?
Friday May 26, 2006. 4-5pm.	Promoting UCD in the organisation	Kuniavsky, M. (2003), "Creating a user-centered corporate culture", Observing the User Experience, pages 505-527. Nielsen, J. (2005), Evangelizing Usability: Change Your Strategy at the Halfway Point, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050328.html Nielsen, J. (2006), Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 1-4, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html Nielsen, J. (2006), Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 5-8, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/process_maturity.html	What are some ways of promoting UCD within the organisation? What usability maturity level does Monash have? What about your team? What could be done to move to the next level of usability maturity?
April 27, 2006.	What to evaluate in a usability test?	Stone, D., Jarrett, C., Woodroffe, M., Minocha, S (2005), "Deciding on what you need to evaluate: the strategy", User Interface Design and Evaluation, pages 439-451. Dumas, J., Redish, J. (1999), "Defining goals and concerns", A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, Intellect, Ltd., pages 109-117. Kuniavsky, M. (2003), "The Research Plan", Observing the User Experience, pages 57-65.	What are the different kind of usability requirements you could test for? What questions will an evaluation strategy hopefully answer? Why is it important to create one? What are some of the key sources of goals/concerns you could cover in an upcoming usability study? Briefly describe Kuniavsky's process for developing goals? How do you think Kuniavsky moves from specific questions to task scenario/descriptions?
February 17, 2006.	Developing task scenarios	Stone, D., Jarrett, C., Woodroffe, M., Minocha, S (2005), "Preparing Task Descriptions", User Interface Design and Evaluation, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco. Pages 466-468. Kuniavsky, M. (2003), "Creating Tasks", Observing the User Experience, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco. Pages 270-275. Dumas, J., Redish, J. (1999), "12. Creating task scenarios", A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, Intellect Ltd., Exeter. Pages 171-182.	What are the characteristics of a good task? What are some of the other consequences of having tasks which aren't doable? Should you give participants a written copy of the task? Why? Write a task scenario. Is there a website/application you are presently developing? If not think of a piece of software you commonly use and write a task scenario.
April 19, 2005	Ethics in user research	Ethics in Human-Computer Interaction Usability testing: revisiting informed consent procedures for testing internet sites Ethics, lies and videotape Principles of ethical conduct (from National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans) Who/what requires ethics approval at Monash?	Why should I need to worry about ethics-related matters? I'm not doing academic research. What ethics-related issues or problems might arise in my work with users? Do I need to get ethics approval for my user research work? In what circumstances? How do I get ethics approval?
September 7, 2004	User research: interviewing	Christina Wodtke, "Effective interviewing", Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, pp 76-79 Mike Kuniavsky, "Interviewing", Observing the User Experience, pp117-127. See also: resources on interviewing.	What are the benefits of interviewing users? Why would/should we bother with interviews? What is "non-directed" interviewing? Mike Kuniavsky says interview questions should "focus on experience, not extrapolation". Why does he say that? Who should you interview? How many people do you need to interview? Have you had any experience interviewing users? What did you learn from this?
August 9, 2004	User-centred design	Karel Vredenberg, et al "The Integrated Approach", User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach, Chapters 2 Raïssa Katz-Haas, "User-centred design and web development"	Who are the "users" in user-centred design (UCD)? What is UCD? What characterises UCD or differentiates it from other design approaches? Why is UCD considered beneficial? What are the drawbacks? What design methods do you use that are user-centred? Which ones are not?
July 12, 2004	Design patterns	Victor Lombardi, An introduction to pattern languages for interaction design (PDF) Browse through some of the pattern collections on this page of resources on design patterns for user interface design	In what ways do patterns differ from guidelines (last month's topic) and heuristics (May topic)? Would patterns be more useful to designers, and in particular novice designers, than heuristics or guidelines? What other advantages do patterns offer? What problems might be involved in using design patterns? What are their limitations?
June 7, 2004	Design guidelines	Tanya Rabourn, Making guidelines part of the team Jared Spool, Evolution trumps usability guidelines
May 3, 2004	Design heuristics	Jakob Nielsen, 10 usability heuristics Keith Instone, Site usability heuristics for the web Deniese Pierotti, Heuristic evaluation - a system checklist Gerry Gaffney, Usability evaluation checklist for websites (pdf 17kb) Bob Bailey Heuristic evaluations Mark Pearrow, "Heuristic evaluation", Web Site Usability Handbook, Chapter 6