IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM

7:00 PM, Thursday, June 16, 2011

IBM Innovation Center, 404 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA

Rethinking user research for the social web

Dana Chisnell

While the Web has evolved from flat documents to being fluidly ambient, we’re using the same user research and usability testing methods and techniques we were using in 1994. We know that conducting usability tests can tell us where people get frustrated. What will testing reveal about frustrations with interactions people have with other people online? When interaction is protean, how do you derive a task scenario? What are the success criteria? When you have large-scale social, individual workarounds turn into functionality and social norms. Etiquette evolves organically. What’s that test look like? In this session, Dana will boil these questions down to 5 major issues UXers working in the social Web are grappling with and share experiences from SxD pioneering researchers.

Dana Chisnell has helped thousands of people learn how to make better design decisions by giving them the skills they need to gain knowledge about users. She has observed hundreds of study participants for dozens of clients to learn about design issues in software, hardware, web sites, online services, games, and ballots, helping these organizations perform usability tests and user research to inform design decisions for products and services. These days, her pet topics are election design, usable security, and researching social interactions mediated by technology. She’s the co-author, with Jeff Rubin, of Handbook of Usability Testing Second Edition (Wiley, 2008).

The IBM Innovation Center < https://www-304.ibm.com/isv/spc/waltham.htm> is located at 404 Wyman Street, Waltham. There is free parking in the garage at the north end of the building. To reach the meeting room, walk out the front of the garage and around to your right to the front door of the building. Directions to the room will be available when you sign in at the front desk.

We will be taking Dana to dinner at the Green Papaya after the talk at about 9pm.

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at https://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.

For more information contact Peter Mager (p.mager at computer.org)

Updated: March 10, 2011.