Meeting Details for January 10, 2007

The January meeting of UsabilityNJ will be held on Wednesday, January 10, 2007 at Pershing Technologies in Edison, NJ (click for directions). Social hour starting at 6:30 PM. Presentation starting at 7:00 PM.

Topic: Designing for Diverse Audiences:
Are We More Alike Than We Think?

Speaker: Whitney Quesenbery

Please RSVP to rsvp [at] usabilitynj [dot] org if you plan to attend the meeting.

Talk Summary

What happens when a site has to appeal to a wide range of people with different usability needs? Can you make one site work for all of them, and if not, how do you sort out conflicting requirements?

Last summer, the web team at The Open University set out to design a site to introduce the university to a new audience: teenagers leaving secondary schools. But it also needed to work for older adults, and people with low English literacy just learning about higher education.

Recent usability research reports for these three audiences suggested that one site would not fit all, but there was considerable overlap. In the end, they launched a single site, built around a few simple plain language guidelines.

Whitney will share those guidelines and how her team transformed some long, dense pages of information written by academics into information that helps visitors take the first step on their journey to a university degree.

Speaker Bio

Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Interactive Design
Whitney is a user interface designer and usability specialist with a passion for clear communication. As the principal consultant for Whitney Interactive Design she works with companies around the world to develop usable web sites and applications.

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