World Usability Day is soon over - now we can focus on cool techiestuff for another year.

I spent my afternoon in a conference center listening to three different speaches; prototyping, stop-desiging-for-paper and society vs. citizen. I will comment below:

Prototyping

This speach was about the benefits of using prototyping early in the process. It covered different prototyping tools covering everything from post-it to HTML-code via white board and Adobe Flex. The speach was a bit short and atleast I missed some touch with real cases. Is it just me that finds it harder to leave a huge offer on a pre-study involving an interactive HTML compared to when the pre-study was delivered on pictures or pure text for example.

stopdesigningforpaper.com

This was hopefully an eye-opener for many in the audience. The speaker showed us examples on how we still, 15 years later, very often design web-pages as we would have done for a paper media. He showed examples on how a design grows and smalls depending on the device. He didn’t covered the need to find information that has the right weight for the upper right corner, something that’s important to people with two monitors but that’s enough important for laptop users to not be shown or atleast be shown at the end, off-screen, of the page. There’s a site for this ‘movement’ aswell: stopdesigningforpaper.com with a linked in youtube video with the speach in english.

Society vs citizen

In my country we have a lot of insurances covered in the taxes. For example when I need to stay home from work because of my or my kids sickness. The organisation behind these money transfers are enourmos. Actuallt they are so complex and huge that no ones really can say how much the administration costs vs how much money is transfered. Really scary. The speach gave us an insightful view over this complexity for example that there are 12 different steps in the ‘wizard’ we use to report a sick child. He covered the focus on mental mind and showed the problem in giving the user a good mental mind when he sees the form for reporting sickness compared to the enourmos paragraph that coveres the rules around this insurance.

I’m happy that I took the time to visit this event and would like to say Thank You to all involved, especially Logica, Tieto Enator, Antrop and InUse.