User-Centered Design

Miovision will be sponsoring the topic on User-Centered Design (UCD)!

Topic Description:

User centered design seems like something that we should be taking for granted in 2016. It’s one of those things that you don’t notice when it’s done well. So you might ask yourself, are there really any designs that don’t have the user in mind? Well, besides the familiar UX mistakes that we sometimes see on web pages, consider these less-than-ideal situations:
• having to give contact info more than once during a single support call

• missing a deadline for a feature that 99% of the end users wouldn’t notice

• having to compile and install a software package just to watch a video on Linux

• production yields suffering because of an unwarranted aggressive spec

Many thorny design decisions in the tech world often can be (and should be) solved by reframing the problem keeping the users in mind. Yes there are obvious gaffes like the location of the Windows 8 shutdown button. But there are also the seemingly impossible problems like: "our users don't save often enough and keep losing their work" which can only be solved when we ask what the user really wants (i.e., autosave + a good way to revert).

We’ll discuss some basic user-centered design principles that all of us (not just UX developers) can use. And we’ll discuss an interesting case study where even Computer Vision applications - which are not typically known as user facing endeavours - can both help and be helped by human interactions.

Speaker:

http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/9/2/a/d/600_453217549.jpeg

David Swart received a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Waterloo and works in the Computer Vision team at Miovision in Kitchener.

At Miovision, David writes software that turns traffic video into data. One of David's key roles is to find ways to combine inexact computer vision algorithms with human interactions to get the best of both worlds.

Outside of work, he continues his interest in mathematics by engaging in "recreational scholarship" and community-building through the Bridges Conference, an annual event about the connections between mathematics and art.