Who: Brandy Fortune
What: Usability for Designers & Developers
Where: RoundBox Global (Directions)
When: Thursday, May 8 6:30PM

Usability for Designers & Developers
Have you ever wished you had factual data to show your manager in order to prove a point about functionality you believed strongly in including or removing? Have you ever gotten frustrated by your clients requesting you change an image or add a button to a page? Have you ever wondered if in the end the design changed so many times it lost its original purpose?

Session Detail
If you can answer yes to any of these questions then this session is for you. Learn how usability testing will allow you to put factual information behind design direction and functionality, while improving the quality of your product.

Technical "how-to" presentation, user will leave session knowing how to conduct their own usability tests and will have example protocol testing documents to build their own tests on, as well as a list of which equipment to buy and an overview of how it all works together.

  • Part 1: How I came to be involved in usability testing.
  • Part 2: Participatory Design & User Testing - What value does it have? Why should you do it?
  • Part 3: Participatory Design Sessions - Creating Mood Boards based on user feedback and brainstorming, picking a design direction. (Real world example screens from Cingular.com resulting from Mood Board exercises)
  • Part 4: Iterative User Centered Design Sessions - Showing multiple designs to users. (Real world example design comps from internal Customer Sales Portal)
  • Part 5: Usability Tests on functional areas - Live and Protocol Based sessions. (This will include protocol examples, transcripts, data extraction, as well as how to present findings and recommendations)
  • Part 6: How to facilitate, How to setup equipment. (Detailed list provided for equipment purchases)
Speaker Brandy Fortune currently works for AT&T (formerly Cingular Wireless), the United States largest wireless carrier. In April 2003 Brandy was a part of the team that made Cingular Wireless was one of the first commercial websites to embrace CSS layout and XHTML. As Brandy moved back and forth between creating clean and simple user interfaces and coding them, she mastered the translation of design into code.

Throughout her career Brandy was continually exposed to Information Architecture and Usability Studies, this fueled her desire to create designs that had longevity and document-able success. Brandy was granted a promotion and left the "Human Centered Design" group within Cingular to move into the Sales organization, to proliferate the Usability Methodologies she had found to be successful over the years.

Please RSVP to info [at] xdatlanta [dot] org