Speakers: Swetha Sethu-Jones and Georgina Cox About the talk: As businesses recognise the value of usability insights, more and more teams want to integrate regular usability testing as part of their design process. Yet often they don’t have the time or budget for a fully-fledged usability testing programme. So how can usability testing be made more flexible and cost effective? This talk will highlight the potential for quick and collaborative approaches that deliver maximum value, and for project teams to engage in the actual research. Using our real-world usability experience, we’ll elaborate on how rapid testing can encompass several lab sessions carried out in a single day, with simultaneous analysis and a follow-up workshop. To demonstrate how effective this smart approach is in practice, we’ll talk you through a case study on how System Concepts delivered rapid usability testing for Kingston University. We’ll share both client and consultancy perspectives of how this process worked – including the benefits of this process and the obstacles we faced during implementation. About Swetha: Swetha holds a BSc in Software Engineering and an MSc in User Interaction Design. She is a co-organiser of The Research Thing, a meet up for fellow user experience (UX) geeks, and is a member of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA UK), where she is involved in the organisation’s mentoring scheme. Swetha provides UX consultancy and training, and offers experience of a wide range of UX projects spanning mobile, web and connected TV platforms. She has been working in UX since 2010, and has built up a strong portfolio of experience using qualitative and quantitative research techniques as well as interaction design. The numerous projects Swetha has led have involved usability and user experience evaluation, information architecture, persona development and concept evaluation employing a variety of methodologies. Prior to her career in UX, she gained experience as a front-end web developer, which inspired her to further understand how people use technology and how it meets their needs. About Georgina: Following her childhood dream of working for Smash Hits, Georgina started her marketing career at Emap (now Bauer Media), firstly in radio and then moving into women’s and teenage lifestyle magazines (although, sadly never actually for Smash Hits). After taking time out travelling in South America, she decided to move into charity marketing and spent several years in the health, disability and children’s sectors with a short stint working for a promotional gifts company in Guangzhou, China. Georgina has been at Kingston University since 2010 where she works alongside a team of Business Development Managers to generate income through commercial services for business, including short courses and professional training, academic consultancy and research services, and summer schools and residential programmes for both international professionals and students. This talk was part of our HCID Open Day 2017, a free conference run by the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design (HCID) at City University London.

• published: 18 Jul 2017
• views: 39