An Evening With Rolf Molich
20
Sep
2018
19:00 - 21:00
Vodafone, 1 Kingdom St, London, W2 6BY
Many of us have been impacted by the results of usability evaluations such as heuristic evaluation and user testing sessions. If we have, then we have been influenced by the pioneering work of Rolf Molich. Rolf has worked with usability since 1984. In 1990 he co-invented the Heuristic Evaluation method with Jakob Nielsen; one of the most commonly used inspection methods.
In 2014, Rolf received the UXPA Lifetime Achievement Award from the User Experience Professionals Association for to recognise 30 years of work in the field, in particular his persistent work on the Comparative Usability Evaluation (CUE) project, which he managed from 1998 to now. CUE has shed light upon how practitioners conduct usability evaluations in the real-world.
Rolf is passionate about UX Certification. He is Vice President of the International Usability and UX Qualification Board (https://uxqb.org/), which develops and maintains the CPUX-certification scheme.
Schedule:
18:30 – 19:00: Drinks, nibbles and networking.
19:00 – 19:10: Welcome and Introductions.
19:10 – 19:40: Rolf delivers his first talk.
19:40 – 20:00: Break
20:00 – 20:30: Rolf delivers his second talk.
20:30 – 21:00: We conclude the evening with drinks and networking.
Ethical Dilemmas in User Experience
What would YOU do if your boss asked you to design a system with one or more unethical features? Can you recognise unethical design requests and unethical UX techniques?
This interactive talk will present a number of real-world examples of ethical dilemmas that Rolf has encountered in UX management, UX design and usability testing. You will be able to provide your opinions on the dilemmas through voting. Rolf will demonstrate that ethical dilemmas often creep in unexpectedly in disguise, and that they are often brushed away simply because they are inconvenient.
As HCI professionals we must make sure that our fellow humans perceive their encounter with UX and design professionals as pleasant without sacrificing the accuracy of our results. There are guidelines produced by professional organizations about how HCI professionals should behave. This talk provides real life examples about how to translate these guidelines into everyday behaviour.
What to say to your boss when they ask tough questions?
We’ve all been there. Sometimes our bosses ask us some tough questions or make requests that go against our better judgement:
- “Personas are costly to create and maintain. Do we really need them?”
- “Our developers are busy. Why don’t you leave them alone with your UX stuff? They’re really struggling meet the launch deadline.”
- “I want a carousel on the home page.”
- “We hired you to make our product interfaces look cool. What else can you do?”
- “We know our users well. Users love our products! What do you mean we have critical UX problems?”
Good answers to these questions depend on the usability maturity of the organisation. This informal and interactive talk will start by showing how our some of our users (managers, developers) view us, the UX Professionals. It will present a simple and usable maturity scale and suggest appropriate answers to selected tough questions based on the maturity level of the organisation.
You will get valuable feedback about the politics of usability in challenging environments.