Kudos to Jyotika Malhotra and Mira Jelic for organizing Toronto's inaugural UsabilityCamp to coincide with World Usability Day. I attended the event last night and enjoyed both the presentations and conversations with fellow attendees.
In addition to co-organizing UsabilityCamp, Jyotika is a Marketing & Communications Consultant and AIMS Correspondent. She sends in the following summary of the event...
It’s happened. They came (over 150 of them!). They listened. They used. The first official UsabilityCamp at the Gladstone Hotel has now been put comfortably to bed.
The event all started with an idea Mira Jelic had to celebrate World Usability Day here in Toronto. Mira and I met at the AIMS Geek Dinner a couple of months ago and the next thing you know, I was co-organizing this event with her.
Inspired by CaseCamp, we wanted an event about usability that would bring together the industrial & product design, new media and business communities. We wanted to engage, inspire and encourage conversations amongst you usability and designer types – whether your world revolves around consumer products, websites or the latest killer app. It was all about Canadian innovation and in keeping with the theme of WUD 2006, about making life easier.
Ilona Posner of the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab kicked things off by showing us an interactive, multi-sensory experience where kids use their bodies as controllers to play. Basically, kids can experience what it’s like to be a frog or a cat using technology but they have to do it through physical activity. The next phase of the Lab’s project is cooperative design with children with physical mobility issues as active members in the testing and design process.
Sapient Canada’s Brett Maraldo spoke about the evolution of web usability. He showed examples of how far corporate sites have come in taking their users into account, by making things, well, more intuitive and usable. They jokingly referred to usability’s coming of age as Usability 2.0? Hey, I laughed.
Lynn Miller from Autodesk added some insight on user-centered design and Agile software development and the benefits of running the interaction design track concurrently with the development track. Autodesk makes 2D and 3D software tools like AutoCAD, used by many designers worldwide.
ConceptShare’s Bernie Aho wowed the crowd with a demo of their online collaboration application made for designers of all kinds. It basically allows you to mark up mock-ups and get input from design team members, located anywhere with a web connection, with everyone literally looking at the same page. Good to know that Scott Brooks and Bernie are going to call Canada home, even when they hit the big time.
The presentations were capped off by Michelle Ivankovic of Umbra. Can you say that you’ve got an innovative soap pump named after you? Go look in your kitchen or bathroom – chances are you’ve got something designed by Michelle in there. She spoke about the evolution of design and how even hugely successful products were improved upon based on user need and experience.
So the first user test results are in. We, the organizers, learned from this, too. Hold more events – got it. Do it in a bigger space with more room to walk and mingle – got it. (Who knew that 300 people would want to attend our first event? Well we do, now!) Keep the mix of design worlds going – got it.
Check www.usabilitycamp.org over the next few days for some of last night’s presentations. Look for our next event in late winter/early spring. Thanks to everyone for coming out to this one and for all the great feedback.
Usability is hot – got it.
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