UXPA Boston 2017 Conference

Accessibility evaluation and design can be daunting, even for those who believe that designing for inclusion is a moral and legal imperative.

The practical steps to ensure product and service accessibility can appear complicated. There are formal and informal sets of accessibility guidelines which require interpretation to apply. Technologies evolve, bringing both better assistive technology support and more opportunities to break existing solutions.

Moreover, key issues are emotionally loaded as advocates fight for human rights, designers strive to innovate, and corporations seek to maximize profits and avoid litigation. The demand for accessibility support accelerates globally as individuals shift into their elder years in unprecedented numbers.

The bottom line, however, is that Accessibility design and evaluation needn’t be difficult or confusing. Processes can be learned, guidelines can be clarified, and ultimately Accessibility is simply part of UX. This panel will provide a reality check on the current state of accessibility, offer advice from experts regarding setting reasonable expectations and sharing practical advice for success.

We will base the discussion on real-world scenarios to allow us to frame and explore a number of critical topics. For example:
How to interpret accessibility guidelines, especially for new technologies

• Effective accessibility evaluation techniques
• APIs and better developer tools for automating aspects of accessibility
• Coping with legal realities and the threat of lawsuits
• Forthcoming changes in ADA and “Section 508” federal standards 
• Collaborating with designers, advocates, thought leaders, and other internal business stakeholders

Bring your own stories and questions as our panel of experts share their experiences and debate the most effective ways to make great accessible products and services.

The U.S. FDA and international regulatory bodies require usability testing of medical devices, products, software, and systems as part of their overall validation. Manufacturers must demonstrate that all potential use-related hazards have been identified, prioritized, and mitigated. The method for demonstrating this is human factors/usability engineering (HF/UE) validation testing. However, the way we conduct these studies is in many ways different from the way we conduct studies of non-medical products and systems.

This topic is relevant to the Boston UX community given the convergence of consumer and medical devices, as well as the rise of wearable technologies and the apps that interact with them. This presentation will cover the key aspects of HF/UE validation (a.k.a. ‘summative’) testing and what the FDA expects in the final HF/UE summary report.

Importantly, this session will consist of half presentation and half Q&A, with the audience driving the discussion toward current issues, questions, and challenges that are relevant to them.

Journey maps are not a new concept. Traditionally, researchers use qualitative insights to tell the story of a customer’s journey to inform design. However, this approach doesn’t always give visibility into the entire picture. That’s where quantitative data comes in.

Analytics and metrics can easily be integrated into the traditional journey map structure, providing additional insight into customer behavior and business impact. By matching the right data with each touchpoint, we can better understand the gravity of pain points, the business impact of new opportunities and how a customer’s experience impacts their overall satisfaction.

Do you dream of a future when computers have truly replaced humans, and research analysis is almost instantaneous? Reality check: it’s not going to happen. Turning all that data into information will always require some difficult thinking – by a real human. But rapid research means less time for analysis, and hastily drawn conclusions are more prone to bias. How do we address the need for speed demanded of us while retaining confidence in our findings?

In this presentation, I’ll share tips for increasing the efficiency of our research without sacrificing quality. We’ll start with a toolbox of usability measures that make planning a study faster and easier. We’ll talk about designing data collection systems that facilitate analysis, and reduce the time spent reading through notes or re-watching videos. Finally, we’ll let computers save us time by doing the math, exposing hidden patterns, and rendering beautiful visualizations.

Three 10-Minute Talks:

• Starting and Running a Customer Design Advisory Board by Mary Beth Raven: A customer design advisory board is a group of customers/users who agree to provide early feedback on your UX designs.  This talk explains the benefits of forming a board compared to other customer groups like user groups or beta testers. It covers how to recruit participants, level of commitment to ask for from your partners, how to get past legal and confidentiality hurdles, and types of feedback sessions to organize. It also provides some techniques for running and maintaining such a program. 

• Featherweight Design Sprint: How to tame a feature-sized problem in 4 hours by Nathalie Baudrand: Not inventing a new product, but have a small tricky problem that needs to be solved? Me too! Rather than spending 5 days or even 8 full hours in a design sprint, as recommended by the books Sprint and Design Sprint, it is possible to rework the design sprint model to accommodate a smaller problem in 4 short meetings and still get the benefits and outcomes of a full design sprint without the cost. In this short talk, I’ll talk about how to run an abbreviated design sprint that takes only ~4 hours of stakeholder time to get to the outcomes you need and move your design forward. 
• Extraordinary Connections: 5 Ways To Leverage Relationships To Build Better User Research by Kristen Arakelian: Kristen Arakelian of EBSCO Information Services will share her 5 top tips for leveraging relationships to curate high-quality samples. She will share tips on which social media sites are worth investing time in to find recruits, and how her work to “understand the ask” led EBSCO Information Services to new understanding of their users, higher study pickup rates, and better-curated participant samples. Kristen will also provide insight about how to recruit for confidential studies, and disclose the key to finding your own “secret weapon” when it comes to recruiting for your own institution’s studies. Information and tips about how to recruit participants for accessibility testing will also be shared.  

For as long as I’ve been doing usability testing, it’s been generally assumed that displaying video of the participant to the observers--usually in a small picture-in-picture window--is a good thing. This participant picture-in-picture (PPIP) video theoretically increases observer empathy and helps convince even the most stubborn executive that their product makes users miserable. And as generating PPIP became easier--thanks to ubiquitous webcams and slick screen sharing software--it’s become more or less standard practice.

But after years of teaching people how to do usability testing, I’ve come to feel that showing observers the participant's face may not necessarily be a good thing. In fact, I think it's often an unnecessary and detrimental distraction.

In the past when I’ve expressed this opinion I’ve always prefaced it by saying “I know I may be wrong about this, because I seem to be the only person who feels this way.”

But when I started telling some friends that I was thinking of doing this presentation, I was surprised to find that some people in the field whose opinions I respect the most felt exactly the same way I did. As one of them said,

“My own main issue about showing the participant is that for me it really takes away from being able to concentrate on the interface and what the user is DOING and SAYING in relation to it. It’s hard to keep concentrating on this anyway and easy to get distracted, so why furnish a distraction that is NOT the main concern of the test?”

In this session, I’m going to try to make the case for not showing PPIP video to people overserving your usability tests.

As always, you can make up your own mind when we’re done.

You spend hours arranging, conducting and analyzing research sessions; how do you get the most insightful results from them? To be great user researchers, we need to avoid falling into mental traps that constrain our thinking and keep us from finding the most useful insights in our research.

Drawing on my background in cognitive psychology and my time as a user experience researcher, I’ll:

• lay out several “cognitive biases” that user experience researchers should note as they plan, conduct and analyze research
• detail strategies for countering those biases
• and present several case studies about places where researchers have fallen into (and successfully avoided cognitive biases)

Participants will walk away both with a better understanding of our biases and a few simple tactics for avoiding them at each phase of the research process.

As we collectively advance the field of UX research, 3 UX researchers present research techniques they have been tinkering with. Heather Wright Karlson is interested in the reactions of users at the conclusion of evaluation sessions when they reveal their feelings about their overall experience. Heather will share her emoji method to collect information about users’ emotions and engagement. Melanie St.James found inspiration in Journey Maps, typically used to summarize research. Turning the artifact on its head, Melanie used a journey map structure to conduct foundational research.  Erin Freeburger shares an alternative to a “shop along” where users interact with the FocusVision app “Revelation”, allowing the remote moderator to direct and respond as necessary.

As researchers, we sometimes take for granted that studying human behavior can be elusive to non-research stakeholders. Ambiguous, subjective, and difficult to interpret into insights, human-centered data requires expertise and practice to analyze meaningfully. While researchers are equipped to manage the ethereal process of raw data analysis, it can be difficult for non-researchers to understand.

A challenge many researchers face is describing the validity of their findings. Because human-centered data is more likely to originate from anecdotes, behaviors, and emotions, the steps it takes to translate them into findings is more of an art than a science. Hermeneutics, the interpretive processes of understanding, require significant study and appreciation to be executed properly. What many non-research stakeholders struggle to internalize is how to consider these unmeasurable processes of knowing.

The presenters will talk about a 5-step approach they use to introduce clients to human-centered data, and how they usher clients through the analysis process. Attendees will learn how and when to introduce non-research stakeholders into the broader research discussion, and how to directly engage with them at the point of crafting themes and insights.

Three 10-Minute Talks:

• 3 Secrets of Accessibility by Calvin Arterberry & Sunish Gupta: Despite recent advances in electronics and mobile technology, independent living by seniors And people with disabilities have become very frustrating and sometimes Impossible due to inaccessibility of many modern interfaces, for example in thermostats, appliances and smart wrist bands.

• Push It Real Good: Pushing Our Team and Design With 3D Touch by Paul Sisler: This presentation tells the story of our design journey with 3D Touch and offers guidance for teams who want to take advantage of 3D Touch in their mobile apps. 3D Touch measures the level of pressure one applies when pressing an iPhone screen, and allows for a different response depending on how hard one presses. Apple offers some guidance for using 3D Touch in their iOS Human Interface Guidelines, but 3D Touch is still new (released with iPhone 6S in October 2015). Teams aren’t sure what to implement, and users aren’t sure what to expect. We’ll introduce 3D Touch, talk about designs we considered for improving our app, share observations from a study we ran, and offer guidelines for using 3D Touch in your mobile app.

• The UX of Virtual Reality: A Practical Guide to Immersive Experience Design by Jon Ericson: The field of user experience is rapidly expanding to encompass new ways of interacting with people, data, and things. With companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Samsung, and Google leading the way, experiences per se are becoming products in their own right, and the cost of high quality virtual reality (VR) technologies and experiences has plummeted. The result? VR is being incorporated into the design process across many industries, and is altering not only the UX field, but the technological, economic, and social landscape of our world. This talk introduces fundamental design principles for VR. While many principles for designing 2D experiences still apply, new principles are needed when designing immersive 3D experiences. As with 2D interfaces, relatively minor UX blunders merely interrupt “flow” or lead to confusion. For example, a prominent app for Google Cardboard forces users to temporarily remove and rotate the headset in order to navigate between environments, thereby breaking the immersion. But because VR is so much more immersive than other mediums, more serious UX blunders or unethical design decisions can potentially lead to psychological distress, fatigue, nausea, pain, or physical injury. In order to design high-quality, effective, safe and ethical VR experiences, UX practitioners need to account for the subtleties of human sensory systems and perceptual processes. This talk provides an overview of virtual reality, and then outlines a variety of practical UX design principles and application areas for this emerging technology. Topics covered include visual perception, affordances, ergonomics, depth and motion cues, and designing for wayfinding. Practitioners will leave with fresh ideas for applying the unique advantages of this 3D medium to their existing 2D design processes. Audience members will also be directed to helpful resources including software tools, and low-cost VR solutions.

Those who attend this talk will learn how to use frameworks effectively at all phases of a study that uses ethnographic methods. Managing huge amounts of qualitative data requires a reapplication of techniques we already use as UX researchers. This talk uses examples from a 2-year ethnographic study to make concrete the ways frameworks can help bring user stories to the forefront, without sacrificing the objectives or richness of data.

One of the biggest challenges facing UX designers working with agile teams is providing user research in a quick, effective way. Design sprints take less time than in the past and development makes it difficult to slip user feedback into the mix. Traditional research takes time to design, set up, recruit for, run and analyze. Since that could span several sprints, “traditional” research simply doesn’t work in today’s rapid pace development, and the user experience suffers. Many organizations are tackling this challenge.

We’ve brought together 4 panelists who are using methods to address the issue of rapid UX research. Panelists come from both in-house teams and agencies. We’ll share our approaches and offer practical advice about how to do it, why it works and what could be improved. We’ll cover both unmoderated tests and more traditional moderated tests. You’ll learn some new approaches and get a chance to ask questions or share your own experiences.

PTSD is a growing concern for Veterans and their families. About 1 in 5 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans has PTSD or depression. This creates an ongoing need for clear, easy-to-use PTSD information and support. The VA is interested in improving their PTSD website to better meet the needs of their target audiences, particularly Veterans who have PTSD or are concerned they may have it.

To inform an upcoming redesign, the National Center for PTSD (NCPTSD) worked with [Company] to conduct extensive formative and usability research with Veterans with PTSD, their family and friends, and clinicians who treat PTSD.

In this session, we’ll talk about our research process from beginning to end, highlighting the voices of Veterans and their families. We’ll share lessons learned and address the knowledge gained from our human-centered design process.