UX @ DevWeek 2013

It’s DevWeek! The London Barbican Centre hosts the UK’s largest developer conference. Close to 600 developers are here - and so are we. Infragistics is represented with a booth and we’ve had a lot of interesting conversations already.

 

 

There are nine parallel tracks, so tons of talks to choose from. Obviously, it’s a developer conference, so the vast majority of talks are development-related. Following the same successful approach from the past years, they organizers have sprinkled in a couple of UX-related talks. I’ve given two out of three:

- User-centered Data Visualization

- How to assess User Experience

The third talk, by the way, was a talk about the Windows 8 design language (formerly known as Metro). For your reference, our very own Kevin Richardson has given a webinar about the same topic recently. See here.

In the “How to assess UX” talk, we’ve had some fun in a live-demonstration of usability testing. A brave guy volunteered to try out a software product: Windows DVD Maker. I often use this product for demonstration purposes because while it’s a very useful application that comes free with Windows 7, it provides some challenges for users.

During the Q&A of my data visualization talk a guy made the great point of saying that visualizing data the right way is just half of the equation. You also have to ensure that you visualize the right data. And that is probably the hardest part. I don’t how solve this problem, especially since it seems to go beyond user experience design, but in my experience it helps to play around with data you have and see what story it tells. Oftentimes, once you have a visualization in front of you, it provokes questions, e.g. “There seems to be a trend over the last 5 years. What about the previous 5 years? Can I extrapolate the next 5 years?”. Anyway, I was just happy to get that kind of thoughtful comments. After all, “visualizing the right data the right way” is of the same stimulative nature than “building the right product the right way” – and that is what user-centered design is all about.