InfoTart

Yay! My workshop proposal for the Boston chapter of the Usability Professionals Association was accepted!

The full-day workshop is entitled “Introduction to Mobile User Experience Design”. It’s targeted to UI designers primarily, both UI designers who are looking to make a permanent move into the mobile industry and those who may be working on something like an enterprise software mobilization project (such as making CRM data available to mobile devices). Read more and sign up for the workshop at:

http://www.upaboston.org/workshops.shtml

Usability professionals will also benefit greatly from the workshop. During usability evaluations or tests of a mobile product, the researcher needs to be able to distinguish between issues that users have with the platform (the OS), the hardware itself, and the software.

As the mobile UI designer/client, I want the researcher to break out their findings with an emphasis on usability issues in the software itself, and to have issues with the platform and device put into an appendix. We’ll want to track the platform and device issues separately so that we can look for optimization opportunities for that platform or device form factor, but we generally have little to no control over these issues — just potential opportunities for workarounds.

I also want to see smart, thoughtful analysis and recommendations from the usability researcher. That requires a certain degree of knowledge about what we as mobile client software developers do and don’t have control of because of device or platform limitations. After, mobile devices aren’t PCs. For example, mobile devices have no mouse, limited opportunities for integration with the telephony and PIM applications, small screens, limited colors, no “context menus”, etc. I am disappointed and unimpressed when I see recommendations from usability folks when they forget about these limitations. (And yes, I speak from experience with that last comment.)

Anyways, for UI designers and usability folks who live in the Boston metro area, I hope you’ll consider coming to the workshop. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, very interesting and educational (for me, too), and hopefully the first in a series of mobile-related workshops with yours truly.