Forms 101

Finally I managed to put online the slides from the short presentation I gave 2 weeks ago at CodeBits 2008, it’s in portuguese only and it’s entirely based on Luke Wroblewski latest book – ‘Web Form Design’.

Luke kindly provided a discount code for anyone interested in buying the book or his recent webinar “Modern Web Form Design”, just use the code ‘CUSTODIO‘ -> http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/

Mind the Gap

Playful Interfaces

SAPO Unplugged 08: the day after :)

Still recovery from a tremendous (and the funniest possible) fall down the stairs at SAPO Unplugged 08! To anyone attending (me included) it was one of those memorable moments that it will be hard to forget! Thankfully all I got was some bruises and some pain (which hasn’t yet entirely gone), but other than that I’m ok!

I think it was a nice opportunity to talk about Usability. Some trends, applications and side-effects of it’s use in the development process. Something we don’t get to talk about enough!

SAPO unplugged was an opportunity to see the work in progress of Pedro Branco from the Minho University about facial expression usage as a form of human-machine interaction.

Óscar Mealha and Florim from the hosting University of Aveiro presented their work in progress for a software application aiming to help measure and analyze the underlining structure of websites, a powerful tool i’d say to help correct and perfect user navigation across websites, minimizing critical paths while optimizing the overall user experience with less clicks and choices!

Henning Fischer from Adaptive Path was in charge with the keynote and we give an inspiring presentation entitled “Stop Designing Products” which wasn’t entirely about usability but an important call for action in achieving better and more engaging user experiences with the products and systems we design and develop!

Last but not least! Bruno Figueiredo and Ivo Gomes completed the program and delivered two very interesting presentations, Bruno presented and explained some of the decisions behind the project that produced the latest SAPO Homepage. Ivo showed up the power and easiness of paper prototyping and how easy and power it is for software and products development.

I talked briefly about the undergoing quality and usability project at SAPO for which I’m currently responsible, about it’s goals and how it’s being applied.

I hope those who managed to attend it liked it as much as I did, and might have taken something back to their works other than a good laugh about the falling “star”

RFH: Playful Interactions

I’ve been working on a presentation about a special aspect of interface design: the need for PLAY! Boring interfaces don’t go far! And we as Humans have this inner desire for play so the more engaging a service/site is the better especially on the web where our attention span is so scarce!

Although the hard core of the presentation content is done (I’ve made a demo of it at Tecnonov last Saturday), and I’ll be posting it online in a couple of days, but the thing is that I would love to enrich it with a lot of good and bad examples of interface design! My Request for Help here is precisely for that, I would love to hear from your most loved or hated interface designs that you have to work everyday! Please drop me an email with a screenshot and why you actually that particular ’strong’ feeling about it! I promise to give full acknowledge of each submission if it actually makes it to final presentation!

Email: pedro (.) custodio (at) gmail (.) com

Quality & Usability

[pt]
Aqui no blog o silêncio tem sido rei! Enfim, muito por causa do trabalho confesso, em particular pelo facto de desde o mês passado ser o novo responsável no SAPO pela Qualidade e Usabilidade. Não é tarefa fácil e outros houve que já tiveram esta pasta e em boa verdade desbravaram muito do caminho que agora me é proposto percorrer. Sem perder muito tempo em explicações e em termos gerais passa por integrar um processo de qualidade no actual processo de desenvolvimento que já existe dentro do SAPO! Só posso dizer que é de facto uma tarefa monstruosa e não é de longe ‘pêra doce’ como se costuma dizer, mas nada como um desafio, certo?

A propósito deste tema, ontem a convite da Associação de Profissionais de Usabilidade (APPU) fiz uma apresentação no Seminário de Usabilidade 2008.

A apresentação, até por ser um projecto tão recente foi um bocadinho dar a conhecer aquilo em que estamos a trabalhar em termos de usabilidade (já que era de usabilidade que ali estávamos a tratar) e nesse sentido dei o meu testemunho sobre o processo de integração da usabilidade enquanto factor de peso na qualidade e como é que conseguimos integra-la na já complicada ‘equação’ que é o processo de desenvolvimento de software. Isto é tudo novidade, pelo que não vale a pena falar em sucessos garantidos ou regras de ouro ou sequer dizer que no SAPO somos especialistas nestas matérias, não o somos! Mas estamos a trabalhar a sério para o sermos! Por isso a apresentação acaba por ser um resumo e uma apresentação de algumas das ideias que estamos a usar e uma prova que o simples facto de termos iniciado este caminho já é um sinal de mudança no sentido certo! Digo eu, claro!

Sem mais demoras, aqui estão os slides. No final deste post encontram alguns links para os materiais que eu refiro durante a apresentação:

Documentos anexos:

• Plano de Reunião (KickOff)
• Folha de Observação
• Escala de Satisfação – SUS

[/pt]

[en]
This blog as been more than quite and the major reason (besides the usual tons of things I get myself involved with) is the project I’m writing about in this post: since last month I’m responsible for Quality and Usability at SAPO, an Herculean task to re-think and integrate Quality on the already existing software development process. Big indeed, but then again, there’s nothing like a challenge, right?

This post is about just this, and taking the fact that yesterday following an invitation from APPU I gave a presentation during the 2008 Usability Seminar on the subject, in particular what we’re trying to achieve with the overall quality process. Being an Usability centered event I focused mainly on the usability part of the overall quality process and gave a testimony on how we’re integrating the U factor on the quality process. Much of this work is just starting so I won’t pretend I’m an expert or that we at SAPO have loads of experience is this matters… as many people would agree there’s a lot of work ahead and even more that desperately need a change. My feeling about it, is that by starting this process and posing the questions we’re already changing in the right direction

So without further due, here’s the slides. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find some links for the materials I mention on the slides:

Supplemental Materials:

• KickOff Meeting Plan
• Folha de Observação
• SUS – A quick and dirty usability scale

[/en]

Online Communities Clinic Workshop

LIFT08 is happening this coming week in Geneva, it’s concept is very similar to the one we tried to accomplish in SHiFT (which we hope to deliver yet again this year – three full days of workshops, talks, social activities and discussions to get a look at the most important technological trends and meet the people behind them.

After almost didn’t make it this year (time constraints and in the end Patrícia not being able to come along), in the end I’ll be in Geneva to take part of this amazing event and I’ve even proposed an an experimental workshop on Online Community Design Patterns.

This workshop is the evolution from my “Conversational Design presentation“, that I presented last november at the Web2Expo in Berlin . Back in November I tried to squeeze a lot of information in a 50 minute presentation and although the feedback was more than positive, the fact was that I had to leave quite a lot out. The initial presentation aimed to be more practical than theoretical, so in a sense the move to a workshop makes more sense, workshops enable participation and sharing, so in the end we’ll manage to hear, learn and test a lot more than my ideas on this subject.

Read the rest of this entry »

Conversational Design

I just got back to Portugal, and thankfully with it also go back to the old good connectivity, I’ve managed to upload the presentation from Web2expo in Berlin into SlideShare, not without some trouble, it seems that their size limit (30Mb) was a bit lower than the one I had so I just managed to cut down the presentation into a 2 part presentation:

Conversational Design – Part 1

Conversational Design – Part 2

I’ll write down my notes from the presentation (as soon as I get some sleep) since some interesting topics that didn’t make their way into it because of the time, and others were just the result of the nice feedback I got at the end of the presentation.

Hope you enjoy it, and most of all take some key ideas from it to your projects!