User Experience Conference 2012: Link Blast
This post lists tools and websites I learned about today at the UPA Boston 11th Annual User Experience Conference.
Tools for Mobile Prototyping and Usability Testing
Although I’m familiar with wearable computers, especially for the military, and have developed for PDAs back in the day, I am fairly new to the current popular commercial mobile platforms like Android and iOS. So here is a blast of links taken primarily from Vijay Hanumolu’s UPA presentation “Whirlwind Tour of Mobile Usability Testing Apps & Services.”
Responsive Design
Vijay (who works at Mobiquity) mentioned Responsive Design several times, which means crafting a website/app as a single source of content that can automatically display in many types of devices/screens. The term assumes HTML with CSS3, although I suppose there could be other technologies used/tested for the same goals. Here’s a website that lets you test responsive design.
Detailed Design
- Adobe Shadow (Chrome plugin)
Inspect and preview web workflows on iOS and Android devices. - Blueprint for iPad
iOS UI Design app. - AppCooker
iOS mockups/prototypes app that uses the actual Apple UI. It can’t port to XCode yet (i.e. converting the mockup into the beginning of the working program) but they are supposedly working on a Mac application to do that. - Nokia Flowella
Prototypes/mockups (apparently just for Symbian)
And if it’s useful to see a static bitmap on [virtual] devices, there are these tools:
- Liveview
Remote screen viewing application. - Bjango Skala
View Photoshop files on remote iOS devices. - Responsinator
Web tool that shows a webpage on screen sizes of different devices. - Adobe Device Central templates (recently discontinued)
User Testing
- TestFlight
iOS beta testing on the fly - Apphance
A bunch of buzzwords all combined together. Some kind of test tool for Android and iOS.
And these ones have hardware for collecting data off of the user:
- Tobii
Professional eye tracking. - Looxcie Cam
Wearable camera. Not intended for usability testing, but could be used that way as a cheaper alternative. - Mr. Tappy
Mobile obvservation device.
Vijay also mentioned these general purpose crowd sourcing “micro labor” services that could potentially be used by UX / usability practitioners:
UX Metrics
Meng Yang (IBM) gave a talk about UX metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
- How to choose the right UX metrics for your product
Using the HEART (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task success) framework. - Task Success Rate
- The Single Ease Question (SEQ)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- System Usability Scale (SUS)
- CogTool
UI prototyping tool that automatically evaluates the design with a predictive human performance model (a “cognitive crash dummy”). - visual.ly
Infographic creation tool.
Other Links
- Designing for People Who Struggle with Reading and Attention
Slides & transcript from a talk at the conference. - Jonathan Abbett’s blog that covered some of the talks.
- Dana E. Chisnell, et al, “New Heuristics for Understanding Older Adults as Web Users.”
Dana gave a talk about a simplified persona model, using Attitude, Aptitude, and Ability. This paper appears to describe the predecessor model.
