Dave Cooksey: Taxonomy Validation
The goal of taxonomy testing is to confirm that a taxonomy’s structure enables users to find and use content. For many practitioners, this means simple card sorting. But there are other means of validating a taxonomy. This presentation describes taxonomy validation methods that go beyond typical card sorting: Delphi card sorting, remote card sorting, usability testing, and search analysis. We’ll also discuss optimal ways of using mulitple validation methods togehter and review why taxonomy testing is needed in the first place.
Dave is Founder & Principal at saturdave, a user experience consultancy based in the City of Brotherly Love. Dave specializes in strategically informing design through user research and testing, crafting user-centric taxonomies, and providing solid design documentation.
Dave is actively involved in the user experience community in Philadelphia and serves as Chair of PhillyCHI, an academic and professional group for those interested in Human-Computer Interaction, User Experience, Usability and other related disciplines. PhillyCHI hosts monthly meetings and socials for students, academics, and practitioners who share a common interest in user experience.
Dante Murphy: State Mapping
As websites have transitioned from a series of hyperlinked static pages to rich, interactive applications, the traditional means of documenting their structure and behavior has struggled to keep pace. Site maps fail to capture the detailed interactions on and across pages, use cases fail to show the relationship between activities, and data flow diagrams ignore the nuances of presentation and user choice.
Enter the state map. Evolved from scenarios and storyboards, the state map demonstrates the flow of information and interaction across all of an applications possible activities for all user types. The state map is a foundational design element, able to inform detailed technical, behavioral, and aesthetic design.
This session will demonstrate the creation and use of state maps in three key situations; defining and pitching a concept, designing an application, and reverse-engineering existing applications to facilitate comparison and gap analysis.
Dante is the Vice President of User Experience for Digitas Health, the health agency of Digitas and a global leader in digital and healthcare communications. His responsibilities include ideation, design, testing, methodologies, and building a world-class multi-disciplinary design practice.
Dante’s career in application and experience design began in 1996; previous to joining Digitas Health in 2006, Dante was a Principal Information Architect at GSI Commerce. Assignments and clients include Toys R Us, Siemens, Radio Shack, Sony, Burberry, NFL Football, Vanguard, adidas, Merck, Astra Zeneca, Palm, and numerous others.
Jared Spool: Revealing Design Secrets from the Amazon
On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.
If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers.
Bio: Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.
