I’m presenting a tutorial at the India HCI 2010 conference, IIT Mumbai, March 21

I am pleased to let you know that my tutorial proposal for India HCI 2010 has been accepted. I will be presenting a slide based interactive lecture/ tutorial on ‘Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India’ in the morning on 21 March, Sunday at the India HCI 2010 conference and would like to invite you to attend it.

Who should attend: Usability engineers and user experience practitioners who conduct usability testing of all experience levels, though this will be especially beneficial for those who work in a organization with an nascent usability engineering. or user research team or interested in creating one.

Registration: You can register for my tutorial using the online registration form (choose T 16).

Fees: Rs. 3000.

Here is a detailed description of the tutorial at the conference website. Details about the tutorial are also given below.

India HCI 2010- tutorial 16: Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India

Duration: Half day
Schedule: Sunday, 21st March 2010, Morning
Fee: Rs. 3,000
Participants: 10-25

Aim

‘Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India’ is based upon my experience working in an agile setting in an Indian organization that is set in stage 3 of Nielsen’s Corporate Usability Maturity description. The organization I work in creates Alexa Top 200 consumer websites where I conduct field and lab-based and summative and formative usability tests on both prototypes and the released product.

Cultural differences

1. India has a different cultural system as compared to the west. Its culture, values and language and ways of working and interfacing with people are different from those in the west. The difference is illustrated through Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions.
2. No book written on usability testing in India- All of the popular books on usability testing are written by western counterparts and understandably so, these are written in context of western users.

Organisation differences

1. As an industry member, I would estimate that the vast majority of Indian organizations are between stages 1 to 4 of Nielsen’s Corporate Usability Maturity description.
2. At a stage where usability testing is not formally integrated into the product development lifecycle, technical capability is only half the contributing factor to successfully establishing the usability practice as an essential organ of the company. The ability to engage with stakeholders in a way that they continually offer support to the usability initiative is the other half contributing factor to maturing the usability practice within the organization. It is therefore necessary that technical knowledge has to be supplemented by the addressing of ‘soft’ issues that to tackle organization bottlenecks in order to successfully execute usability testing so that value may be derived from it that is recognizable by stakeholders.

Content

Specific to usability testing in India, the tutorial in particular talks about various practical tips dealing with usability test moderation to avoid introduction of bias that may occur because of the PDI dimension (moderator-participant) of Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions.

Usability testing can only take place if concerned stakeholders realize its value and see it as an integral part of the SDLC. They ultimately hold the key to deciding how much of a role will usability testing play in the SDLC. Since Indian organizations have a different way of working from MNC’s and foreign firms, the other half of the tutorial will talk about how to work towards successfully demonstrating the value of usability testing into Indian organizations (set in stages 2 to 4 or Nielsen’s Corporate Usability Maturity description). It will talk about what challenges may be faced, what mistakes should one avoid, about why business cases and generic deliverable templates don’t work, how to deal with time and budget constraints, and how to deal with attitudes and successfully connect with stakeholders.

Please go through my presentation: Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India (slide 13 onwards) to get a brief idea of what the presentation will contain which will not be limited to the content in this presentation.

Who should attend?

Usability engineers and any user experience practitioners who conduct usability testing of all experience levels.

A short biography of the tutor

Abhay Rautela works as Senior Human Factors Engineer at a leading internet services company in Noida and is responsible for planning, execution and oversight of user research and usability evaluation across projects that mostly include Alexa Top 200 websites. He has conducted formative and summative usability evaluations on low (paper) to high fidelity prototypes and the actual product in all phases of the SDLC. He has also authored usability testing deliverable templates and guidelines and has defined an optimised usability testing process to streamline the usability testing process in his current organisation, in addition to authoring other user research deliverable templates.

Abhay has a BA (hons) Multimedia Arts degree with specialisation in usability and accessibility from Middlesex University, UK where he topped the batch. He has around 5 years of experience working in different areas of user experience, most of it being focused on interaction design and usability evaluations and user research. He has conducted trainings in the past on accessibility, streamlining the usability testing process and card sorting at Sapient (a leading international IT consultancy) and InfoEdge (a leading Indian internet services company) in addition to presenting at Bar Camp on usability testing in India.

Abhay has also recently been requested to contribute a chapter for a book on user experience which includes other known contributors who have authored and co-authored UX books. Abhay runs a website on usability engineering that is featured in AllTop along with other authoritative websites on user experience. His articles, posts, UI prototyping libraries and website visual design have been published, featured, included, pointed and showcased in Usability News (BCSCHI), Wireframes magazine, Evolt, Axure prototyping application website, SlideShare front page, Business Week’s Business Exchange and WaSP Interact among other places (links here).

He also runs two websites (that are slowly gaining popularity) for the User Experience community- The UX Bookmark and UX Quotes which he conceptualized, designed and now curates content on. In the past, he was manager of FlashMove, Singapore (world’s first Flash special user group) and presently heads The New Delhi UX Book Club and the SlideShare Web Accessibility group.