Currents 2004 Workshops
Friday, February 27

Workshop A: Personas: Bringing Users Alive
                        Whitney Quesenbery

Workshop B: Taking Printed Documents Online – That Work!
                        Brian Fleming

Schedule

Personas: Bringing ‘Users’ Alive  -  Whitney Quesenbery

Whether you call it "market segments" or "user groups," the analysis for a new product includes understanding the people who will buy, use, or use what you are creating. Personas are the missing link uniting product features, user interface, documentation, and marketing to create highly usable products. They help us communicate what we know about the people who use our products in an engaging, efficient way. And, they let us get beyond statistics to a portrait of users that helps us use this information to make design decisions. Personas are an increasingly popular way to encapsulate and share user research - a low-cost, high impact way to make users come alive for the entire team.

This workshop will use discussion and activities to:

• Examine market research and usability techniques to understand what information each can contribute to the process of user analysis.

• Analyze user data to define a set of personas that represent the most important people for a specific product.

• Decide what information to include in a persona to make them useful in the design process.

• Look at storytelling techniques and how they apply to communicating personas.

Whitney Quesenbery is a user interface designer, design process consultant, and principal consultant for Whitney Interactive Design, LLC (www.WQusability.com). She is an expert in developing new concepts that achieve the goal of meeting business, user, and technology needs. She has extensive user interface design experience and has produced award winning multimedia products, user interfaces, web sites, and software applications.

Before starting Whitney Interactive Design, she was a principal at Cognetics Corporation, leading projects that ranged from online financial news retrieval to hospital management software, web applications, and corporate information tools for companies such as Novartis, Deloitte Consulting, Dow Jones, McGraw-Hill, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, and Eli Lilly.

Whitney has worked with many companies to implement a user-centered design process. She was one of the key developers of LUCID, the Logical User-Centered Interaction Design framework, which provides a basis for developing specific methodologies for usability.

She is President of UPA, and the past-manager for the STC Usability SIG. She is the recipient of both Distinguished Chapter and SIG Service awards, and created the Excellence in Usability Award.

Taking Printed Documents Online – That Work!  -  Brian Fleming

Because the printed documents they were created from were never designed to display online! There are major differences between print and online documents and how they are read. Learn how to effectively transport printed documents (with minimal effort) to an online format so they are read.

This workshop covers the design and organization issues most overlooked by those converting printed documents into online documents. Learn all the pitfalls to avoid and considerations for changing a document’s distribution method effectively. You will learn by taking a Microsoft Word document to an HTML document and a PDF file (using Adobe’s Acrobat Distiller.) These real-world exercises will have you effectively designing and changing printed documents into online formats that will get read.

Brian has over twelve years practical experience providing award-winning documentation and training, and he teaches technical writing at Kennesaw State University’s Continuing Education department. Brian is also the founder and president of HelpWrite, Inc. HelpWrite, a five-year old company, employs twelve technical writers and trainers that provide technical writing and training services to companies worldwide. Before HelpWrite, Brian worked as a technical writer and trainer for six years after retiring from twenty years active duty in the Navy as an electronics technician and master training specialist.

Copyright © 2003 STC Atlanta Chapter