AHFE Conference
Conference Tutorials

AHFE Tutorials Program

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AHFE Tutorials and workshops are popular and attended by many researchers each year.  Half-Day tutorials at introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels, covering the entire spectrum of the conference. For previous years tutorial programs click here.

Hybrid Conference Mode: In order to give our participants more flexibility, we will offer the option to attend in-person onsite or virtual/online via the dedicated conference virtual platform. Participants are asked to select their preferred attendance option when submitting their registration.


AHFE 2024 half-day tutorials will be offered online on  December 8, 2024.


 Tutorial Group A - 8:00 - 11:00 (HST) Dec 8, 2024



Objectives
Maturity frameworks provide a structure for assessing key performance metrics of an organization and provide guidelines for assessment and growth in various areas of an organization.

Design maturity frameworks focus more on a human-centered approach in assessing the human motivational factors that create enjoyable and sustainable workplace practices. Identifying factors that improve or inhibit the productivity of processes can help individuals and organizations design better workplace experiences. This tutorial will introduce audience to the theoretical foundations of design maturity frameworks and suggest ways to build a human-centered model that is built around enjoyable and sustainable design processes, customized for individual and organizational growth.

Participants will learn
• Concepts of maturity frameworks and stages of design expertise
• Identify issues with existing design processes at an individual and/or organizational level
• Discuss practical solutions and develop a customized maturity framework for enjoyable and sustainable workplace experiences
The tutorial aims at identifying human factors that motivate individuals and organizations in developing design processes that generate enjoyable and sustainable workplace experiences. The content of the tutorial will benefit novice to experienced professionals and managers to rethink their own professional practices in terms of design expertise development and motivational processes at workplace.

Course Structure:
• This tutorial will include both presentations and practical work
• The presentations introduce concepts of design maturity and expertise development in professional practices
• Presentations will be followed by individual exercises and group discussions to identify motivational factors and productivity inhibiting factors at workplace

Target Audience:

The tutorial is designed for novice to experienced professionals in the academic and professional fields who are interested in learning more about design maturity frameworks and guidelines to apply these structures in their professional practices. The tutorial provides guidelines to adopt design practices and human-centered processes at individual and organizational levels.

Target audience roles: Designers, Managers, Developers, Researchers, Educators

About the Speaker(s) Joe Rothschild, team leader at Training Workforce Development Branch, Division of Laboratory Systems at the Center for Laboratory Systems and Response at United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Joe began his career at CDC in 2005 as a multimedia specialist in the Office of Workforce and Career Development (OWCD) and later transitioned to the National Center for Health Marketing (NCHM), and finally, returned to DLS as a Health Communication Specialist. Considered an agency specialist in Section 508 and Virtual Reality, Joe led the development of several firsts at CDC- The first Section 508 compliant Flash widget, The first VR laboratory training course, the first eLearning syndication system, and the first live-to-web microscope training webinar. Through these firsts, Joe received numerous innovation, public health impact, and excellence in communication impact awards.




Objectives
This tutorial presents examples from notable science-fiction films and videos that incorporate human factors, human-computer interaction (HCI), and user-experience (UX) design and show what lessons can be learned. The course begins with the advent of movies in the early 1900s (e.g., Melies' "A Trip to the Moon," which was later referenced in the movie "Hugo", 2011), includes “Metropolis,” directed by Fritz Lang, 1927, and concludes with the latest sci-fi movies/videos. Originally, many science-fiction movies, taking their cue from pulp fiction, focused on rocket ships, ray guns, and interplanetary travel. Later the scope of the stories broadened and deepened to future consumer products, psychological/social issues, and new technologies such as exoskeletons, robots, and artificial intelligence. Once a rarified genre and primarily products of Hollywood (with notable products from Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan), these films/videos now occupy a primary place in modern international popular media, and originate in China, India, South Korea, and Japan, as well as North America and Europe.

For many decades sci-fi movies showed technology in advance of its commercialization (for example, video phones and wall-based television displays, hand-gesture systems, virtual reality displays, and artificial-intelligence (AI)-based robots). In some cases, mistaken predictions about what is usable, useful, and appealing were adopted, sometimes because of their cinematic usefulness. In any case, these media have served as informal "test-beds" for new technologies of human-computer interaction and communication. They provide ample evidence for use in heuristic evaluations, ethnographic analyses, market analyses, critiques of personas and use scenarios, and new approaches to conceptual and visual design. As examples of speculative fiction, they have use beyond their entertainment value.

The course will explore issues of what is futuristic and what is not, attitudes towards technology, gender-role differences, optimism/pessimism about technology/society, and user-centered design characteristics (including typography and sign systems) in more than two dozen films and a half-dozen television shows from Europe and North America. Examples from China, India, South Korea, and Japan also will be referenced.

New for 2024: Many new examples of films from 2020-24 are cited and illustrated, including “Space Sweepers” (South Korea, 2021), “Dune” (USA, 2021), “Avenue 5” (USA, 2022), “The Peripheral” (2022), and “Three Body Problem” (USA, Amazon Prime and Netflix, 2024). Each year, new content is added to reflect the latest movies, videos, and trends. In addition, several new books about sci-fi movies have been published, such as Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents: The 100 Greatest Science Fiction Films, which are referenced, as well as the 2019 sci-fi exhibit “Cowboys in Space”, first shown in Austin, Texas, at the Bullock Museum. During a coffee break, for those who return quickly, some slides from that exhibit will be shown. As always, the tutorial notes show all lecture slides.

Participants will be informally quizzed about their recognition of the examples shown and about their analysis of contexts, technologies, business models, user communities, and designs. Discussion with participants about the significance of the film/TV examples throughout the presentation will be encouraged. Participants in this course will understand how science-fiction movies and television have/have not incorporated fundamental principles of user-centered design to achieve usability, usefulness, and appeal; will understand the development of science-fiction in the popular media over the past 125 years; and will understand better how to apply their professional knowledge to look at popular media with a critical eye.

About the Speaker(s) Aaron Marcus, Principal, AM+A
Mr. Marcus has been a life-long fan of science-fiction novels, magazines, movies, and television shows. He has been a member of HFES for more than 20 years and has lectured at HFES conferences. He organized two sci-fi panels at CHI conferences in 1992 and 1999, the first of which CHI acknowledged as the most popular event ever held at CHI up to that time. He edited a special issue of UX magazine about UX in Sci-Fi. He has given keynote lectures about UX in Sci-Fi in the USA, China, and Europe. He published as an e-book The Past 100 Years of the Future: UX in Sci-Fi Movies and Television (2012). He has lectured about HCI/UX in sci-fi worldwide.

Mr. Marcus has been researching and designing user-experiences since 1969. He received a BA in Physics from Princeton University (1965) and a BFA and MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University School of Art and Architecture (1968). He is an internationally recognized authority on the design of user interfaces, interactive multimedia, and printed/published documents. Mr. Marcus has given tutorials at HCII, SIGGRAPH, SIGCHI, HFES, UXPA , HCII and other conferences, and at seminars/workshops for businesses and academic institutions around the world. He has published 59 books and more than 300 articles, including Human Factors and Typography for More Readable Programs (1990), The Cross-GUI Handbook (1994), Mobile TV: Customizing Content and Context (2010), Graphic Design for Electronic Documents and User Interfaces (1992), The Past 100 Years of the Future: UX in Sci-Fi Movies and Television (2012), Mobile Persuasion Design (2015), HCI/User-Experience Design: Fast Forward to the Past, Present, and Future (2015), Cuteness Engineering: Designing Adorable Products and Services (2017), and Aaron Marcus: Way Ahead of You in Another Direction: The Lifetime Work in Design and Art of Aaron Marcus (Springer, in preparation, 2025). Mr. Marcus was the world’s first professional graphic designer to work full-time in computer graphics (1967), to program a desktop publishing system (for the AT&T Picturephone, 1969-71), to design virtual realities (1971-73), and to establish an independent computer-based HCI/UX-design and information-visualization firm (1982). In 1992, he received the National Computer Graphics Association Industry Achievement Award for contributions to computer graphics. In 2008, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) named him a Fellow; in 2009, SIGCHI elected him to the CHI Academy. He has been a Visiting Professor, Institute of Design, IIT, Chicago; College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, Shanghai; and Computer Science Department, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, China. He founded and has led the Design, User Experience, and Usability (DUXU) conference (2011-2024).

Mr. Marcus is Principal of Aaron Marcus and Associates (AM+A), a user-interface and information-visualization development firm with 42 years of experience in helping people make smarter decisions faster, at work, at home, at play, and on the way. AM+A has developed user-centered, task-oriented solutions for complex computer-based design and communication challenges for clients worldwide on all major platforms (client-server networks, the Web, mobile devices, appliances, and vehicles), for most vertical markets, and for most user communities within companies and among their customers. AM+A has served corporate, government, education, and consumer-oriented clients to meet their needs for usable products and services with proven improvements in readability, comprehension, and appeal. AM+A uses its well-established methodology to help clients plan, research, analyze, design, implement, evaluate, train, and document metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction and appearance. AM+A has developed ten concept designs for mobile persuasion design, documented in Mobile Persuasion Design (2015). AM+A’s clients include Apple, BMW, Google, HP, Kaiser, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Oracle, Sabre, Samsung, SAP, US Federal Reserve Bank, Visa, and Xerox. AM+A has received design awards from several organizations, including the International Institute for Information Design for the design of five mobile persuasion-based concept designs.




Objectives
Design reviews are often ineffective—way too often! We fail to achieve the goals of the review, have unproductive battles over personal opinion, and perhaps even leave in tears. Even experienced teams have these problems. We need to do better!
This workshop explores why traditional design reviews are often ineffective (hint: focusing on personal opinion or minor details never helps), practical tools to make reviews more productive, and different design review techniques. We will explore how to give and receive effective design feedback, and the value of using design review rules—especially for cross-function teams. We will work in teams to perform several design reviews of the same app (a baseline, a streamlined cognitive walkthrough, and a scenario review) to try the different techniques and see the pros and cons of each first hand.

About the Speaker(s) Everett McKay is Principal of UX Design Edge and a UX design trainer and consultant with global clientele. Everett's specialty is finding practical, intuitive, simple, highly usable solutions quickly for web, mobile, and desktop applications. Everett has over 30 years' experience in user interface design and has delivered UX design workshops to an international audience that includes Europe, Australia, Asia, South America, and Africa. Everett is author of "Intuitive Design: Eight Steps to an Intuitive UI", the definitive guide to designing intuitive interactions, and "UI Is Communication: How to Design Intuitive, User Centered Interfaces by Focusing on Effective Communication", a groundbreaking approach to UI design using human communication-based principles and techniques. While at Microsoft, Everett wrote the Windows UX Guidelines for Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Everett holds a master's degree in computer science from MIT.




Objectives
Oftentimes in UX research, we test different versions of an interface, aiming to understand which is best. We conduct A/B testing in the lab and launch live experiments, collecting data such as clicks and time on page. We collect data on user sentiment and satisfaction, and we think we understand which version will perform better in the wild. We come to a conclusion based on our data, but we never really know WHY one version performed better than the other. This makes it difficult to extrapolate our findings to other products and experiences we work on. It makes it impossible to understand if a version performed better due to the language or elements of the design. This is why it is important to test parts in isolation. In this tutorial, learn how to use the Testing Parts in Isolation (TPI) Framework: a rigorous methodology used by teams at IDEO and Google. This framework enables us to iteratively test content in isolation, or test design in isolation, separate from each other. Using this method, we can remove the confounds that exist when we test content and design together, so we can be more confident in the recommendations we make to clients and the overall experiences we deliver to users. This course in experimental design is specifically designed for UX researchers, UX designers, and UX content strategists and writers. But it's open to anybody who is interested in the intersection of content, research, and design, and anyone who wants to learn how to conduct experimental research better than before.
We will cover the basics of experimental design, design a study in which content and design are tested separately - both qualitatively and quantitatively - and conduct basic stats to analyze findings so you can share the findings effectively with stakeholders.
After this workshop, you will be able to:
- Understand and communicate the value of testing parts in isolation
- Design and conduct studies in which you test content alone and design alone
- Understand how to combine qualitative and quantitative methods when iterating quickly on both content and design
- Understand how to use basic statistics to analyze and present findings
- Understand how the framework can help you and your team align around the information users need, when they need it.

About the Speaker(s) Jen Romano, Ph.D. is an award-winning UX Research Leader, with 15+ years experience: in industry, academia and government; as manager, director, and individual contributor; strategist and executor. Jen has influenced some of the biggest and best UX orgs in the world (Google, Facebook, Instagram), speaking, teaching and being a keynote speaker at top UX conferences in the world (e.g., UXPA, WUC, HCII). She founded UXR Coach to help people make their UX dreams a reality. With small, instructor-led workshops, courses, and retreats, and personalized 1:1 coaching, Jen offers ways for people to have renewed confidence and skills to grow as a UX Researcher. Jen teaches graduate-level classes, trains UX professionals, and coaches people who want to up-level their research skills. She teaches at UC Berkeley and University of Maryland and has published more than 30 articles, chapters, and books, including Usability Testing for Survey Research, Eye Tracking in User Experience Design, and Modern Socio-Technical Perspectives on Privacy.





 Tutorial Group B - 11:30 - 14:00 (HST) Dec 8, 2024



Maturity frameworks provide a structure for assessing key performance metrics of an organization and provide guidelines for assessment and growth in various areas of an organization.

Design maturity frameworks focus more on a human-centered approach in assessing the human motivational factors that create enjoyable and sustainable workplace practices. Identifying factors that improve or inhibit the productivity of processes can help individuals and organizations design better workplace experiences. This tutorial will introduce audience to the theoretical foundations of design maturity frameworks and suggest ways to build a human-centered model that is built around enjoyable and sustainable design processes, customized for individual and organizational growth.

Participants will learn
• Concepts of maturity frameworks and stages of design expertise
• Identify issues with existing design processes at an individual and/or organizational level
• Discuss practical solutions and develop a customized maturity framework for enjoyable and sustainable workplace experiences

The tutorial aims at identifying human factors that motivate individuals and organizations in developing design processes that generate enjoyable and sustainable workplace experiences. The content of the tutorial will benefit novice to experienced professionals and managers to rethink their own professional practices in terms of design expertise development and motivational processes at workplace.

Course Structure:
• This tutorial will include both presentations and practical work
• The presentations introduce concepts of design maturity and expertise development in professional practices
• Presentations will be followed by individual exercises and group discussions to identify motivational factors and productivity inhibiting factors at workplace

Target Audience:
The tutorial is designed for novice to experienced professionals in the academic and professional fields who are interested in learning more about design maturity frameworks and guidelines to apply these structures in their professional practices. The tutorial provides guidelines to adopt design practices and human-centered processes at individual and organizational levels.

Target audience roles: Designers, Managers, Developers, Researchers, Educators

About the Speaker(s) Dr. Nandhini Giri is an Assistant Professor of Human Computer Interaction & Entertainment Graphics at the Department of Computer Graphics Technology, Purdue University. She has more than 15 years of professional work experience in the field of computer graphics, interactive entertainment & information systems involving industry and academic roles in research, education, interactive media development, creative team management, production management and software product maintenance.





Understanding a person’s psychophysiological condition is crucial for different fields of applications, including health monitoring and cognitive stress measurement. Continuous measurement helps us understand the physical and cognitive condition of a person. Heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure and heart rate variability helps to assess the affective nature of a person. This can help study stress level, attention, fatigue, discomfort, delirium, and productivity of a human being including a factory worker, or a driver. But Most of the measurement methods available in practice require instrumentation, which are often intrusive in nature, impossible to use for continuous monitoring and need experts to operate. Remote measurement eases the inconvenience associated with contact-based devices, reduces person hour, and enables safer alternative. The recent pandemic has further demonstrated the importance of contactless measurement methods. One major part of this tutorial will cover remote measurement of vital signs.
The tutorial will also discuss recent advances in ubiquitous health monitoring. Ubiquitous health monitoring refers to the continuous and seamless monitoring of an individual's health and physiological parameters using various interconnected and pervasive technologies. The goal of ubiquitous health monitoring is to provide real-time and non-intrusive data collection, analysis, and feedback to support healthcare and promote wellness. This concept leverages the widespread adoption of wearable devices, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and other smart technologies to monitor a person's health status constantly, regardless of their location or activity.

In this tutorial we would present how the community can take advantage of recent developments in wearables and remote measurement for continuous monitoring of vital signs. With increasing use of cyber physical systems, internet of things across industries including wearables, remote measurement is gaining more attention than ever. Due to the development of artificial intelligence and emergence of big data analysis in last decade, vital sign measurements are now very accurate and can extract different modalities of vital sign. This tutorial aims to provide a comprehensive detail of all such development, underlying technology, and their scope in human factor research.

This tutorial will discuss several important components of remote measurements and summarizes work from last two decades in a half-day session:

1. Scopes: First, we’ll discuss the scopes and promises of remote measurement of vital signs (heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, heart rate variability), and ubiquitous health monitoring across industry and discuss the benefits. This part will further discuss the scope of ubiquitous health monitoring, related challenges, sensors, and technologies. (Dr. Lynn Abbott) - 30 min
2. Application: Next, we’ll discuss the roles of vital sign in psychophysiological measures including arrythmia, cognitive stress, attention, fatigue, discomfort, and drowsiness. (Dr. Abhijit Sarkar) – 30 min
3. Existing Methods: Next, we’ll discuss promises and limitations of existing methods for remote measurement of vital signs. This includes methods that uses conventional cameras, RF cameras, radar, Wifi. This will highlight some of the major accomplishment for each of the methods. (Dr. Lynn Abbott) – 30 min
4. Break – 15 min
5. Ubiquitous health monitoring (UHM): This session will discuss what UHM is, components of UHM, current state of research in wearable technologies, cloud-based computing of health data, and how advanced data analytics techniques are used for UHM (Dr. Sarkar, Dr. Abbott).
6. Camera based method: (Dr. Abhijit Sarkar) – 60 minutes
a. First, we’ll discuss how data from RGB and NIR cameras contains blood volume pulse information from human face.
b. Next, we’ll discuss challenges from motion and ambient illumination and methods to address those challenges.
c. Next, we’ll show how advance computer vision, signal processing, and machine learning methods including deep learning are used to extract blood volume pulse, and respiration rate.
d. Next, we’ll discuss how thermal imaging can be used for the study of human psychophysiology.
e. Finally, we’ll discuss next frontiers in remote measurements, and current states.
7. Discussion: (Dr. Abhijit Sarkar, Dr. Lynn Abbott) – (15 minutes)

About the Speaker(s) Dr. Sarkar is a Senior Research Associate in the Virginia Tech Transportation. He leads the computer vision and machine learning group in the division of Data and Analytics. His current research focuses on application of computer vision, machine learning, biometric, and big data analysis for transportation safety, driver health monitoring, human factors, and affective computing. His current work is supported by Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), National Science Foundation (NSF) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine, National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence (NSTSCE), Safety through Disruption (Safe-D) University Transportation Center (UTC), and numerous proprietary companies. Dr. Sarkar has more than 30 technical publications, proceedings, and book chapters. He has software development experience in both academia and industry for 12 years. Dr. Abbott is a Professor at Virginia Tech, where he is a faculty member in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His primary research interests involve Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Biometrics. In the area of biometrics, he has led efforts involving fingerprint analysis, authentication from cardiovascular signals, and facial expression recognition. His work is currently supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Dr. Abbott has authored or coauthored more than 160 technical publications and has been awarded one U.S. patent. He teaches graduate courses in the area of Computer Vision, and undergraduate courses in software development, microcontroller systems, and Artificial Intelligence.





Human Factors and Cybersecurity: 10 Things you need to know to protect yourself and your company from cyber attacks

Every day the number of ransomware, identity thefts, credit card fraud, email message hacking, etc. grows and costs individuals and institutions both short-term and long-term loss. The press is full of reports of data center breaches that result in loss of intellectual property, trade secrets, and/or customer data and affect the company’s reputation. Successful cyber protection at the individual level or enterprise level is not possible without having well-trained people who are aware of security risks and are knowledgeable enough to make sound judgments when they are confronted with cyber-attacks such as phishing or fraudulent phone calls. The active involvement of employees and their awareness are paramount to a company’s security compliance. The objective of this tutorial is to cover 10 important areas of cybersecurity risks and teach attendees about protective measures. After the completion of this training, session participants will learn practical ways of dealing with cyber-attacks, and a list of actions to take to protect themselves at both the individual and the company level.

About the Speaker(s) Dr. Abbas Moallem is the executive director of UX Experts, LLC, a UX/UI design and cyber security consultancy in Cupertino, California, and an adjunct professor at San Jose State University, where he teaches Human computer Interaction, Human Factors, Data Visualization and Cyber Security. Abbas is the editor of the Human-Computer Interaction and Cyber Security Handbook published in 2018 and Cybersecurity Awareness among College Students and Faculty published in 2019 by CRC Press. His latest books are “Understanding Cybersecurity Technologies” and “Smart and Intelligent System: The Human Elements in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Cybersecurity” published in 2021 by CRC Press. Dr. Moallem has over 20 years of experience in the fields of human factors, ergonomics, human computer interaction (HCI) and usability. He has also served as a senior engineering product manager and usability expert at NETGEAR, a UI Architect at PeopleSoft, Oracle Corporation, Tumbleweed, and Axway for over 11 years. He has consulted in a variety of industries in Europe, Canada, and the US





 Tutorial Group C - 14:30 - 17:30 (HST) Dec 8, 2024



This tutorial will provide all the basics and essential concepts of Python and Data Science.  It is the process of deriving knowledge and insights from a huge and diverse set of data. It extracts the data from the source and applying data visualization techniques. for this purpose, Data science needs a very versatile yet flexible language for highly complex mathematical processing. Python is most suited for general computing as well as scientific computing. This tutorial will increase awareness and understanding of key issues related to the tutorial topic. Further, they will learn;

•       Concepts and issues related to Data Science.
•       How these concepts relate to Python.
•       Principles and techniques that are useful in Data Science and Python libraries.

Content and Benefits:
This tutorial is suitable for non-programmers as well as programmers who don't know Python. It will help how to do data analyses using the Python language and Pandas The exercises will include the design and evaluation

This tutorial will discuss how both Data Science and Python are interrelated and essential for Data visualization.
This tutorial will include both presentations and practical work.
The tutorial will also provide guidelines for future research

Topics Covered:
•       Basic steps in data science
•       Python: basics, variables, data types, objects, loops, conditions
•       Python: functions, string functions, lists, tuples, dictionaries, sets
•       Exploratory Data analysis by using Jupyter Notebooks, Numpy, pandas etc.

You won't become a full-fledged Python programmer, but you'll learn enough to continue your own Python education afterwards.

About the Speaker(s) Dr.Javed Anjum Sheikh, Associate Profesor/Director CS&IT in the University of Minhaj University Lahore – before that, I was the Assistant Professor/Campus Director/Associate Dean of the University of Lahore, Gujrat Campus and was the Assistant Professor (Associate Director) of the faculty of Computing and IT.






Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, computer science and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "ultimate challenge" of the biological sciences. The scope of neuroscience has broadened over time to include different approaches used to study the nervous system at different scales and the techniques used by neuroscientists have expanded enormously, from molecular and cellular studies of individual neurons to imaging of sensory, motor and cognitive tasks in the brain.

About the Speaker(s) Adrian Curtin is a researcher with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Drexel University. His research background focuses on the neuroergonomic application of neuroimaging, particularly in mental health, neurostimulation, and in analysis method development.





Heuristic evaluation is a well-known technique that evaluates a design based on its compliance with recognized usability principles. Heuristic evaluations have the benefit of being very efficient and focused (for example, an accessibility evaluation is focused on accessibility problems.) However, most practitioners prefer user-based testing because they have more confidence in the results. Ideally, teams should use both, as effective heuristic evaluations make user-based testing more productive by focusing on hard-to-find problems.
But a heuristic evaluation is only as good as the set of heuristics used, and the most popular heuristics are well past their “best by” dates. Arguably the most popular usability heuristics were devised by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich—in 1990! Considering how rapidly UI design has changed, the relevance and practical value of even 5-year-old heuristics should be suspect. Less popular heuristics are often vague and hard to apply meaningfully (example: “…check whether the user has enough control…” What does that even mean?)

This tutorial will consist of two parts. In Part 1, we will quickly review the most well-known usability heuristics, plus a summary of the top design principles recommended by the most popular platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac). The class will break into three teams (representing desktop, web, and mobile), and devise their own usability heuristics using a structured process. The focus of the results will be on their practical value. At the end of this part, each team will present their results to the class.
For Part 2, we will review the ground rules for effective heuristic evaluations, then as apply our newly created heuristics to desktop, web, and mobile designs (at least one for each platform). The tutorial will end with a discussion about the effectiveness of the evaluations and how to further improve the process.

About the Speaker(s) Everett McKay is Principal of UX Design Edge and a UX design consultant and trainer with global clientele that includes Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and Africa. Everett's specialty is finding practical, intuitive, simple, highly usable solutions quickly for web, mobile, and desktop applications. Everett has over 30 years' experience in user interface design—and even more programming UIs. (He loves React!)

Everett is author of "Intuitive Design: Eight Steps to an Intuitive UI", the definitive guide to designing intuitive interactions, and "UI Is Communication: How to Design Intuitive, User Centered Interfaces by Focusing on Effective Communication", a groundbreaking approach to UI design using human communication-based principles and techniques. While at Microsoft, Everett wrote the Windows UX Guidelines for Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Everett holds a master's degree in computer science from MIT.







Neuroscience (or neurobiology) is the scientific study of the nervous system. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, computer science and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "ultimate challenge" of the biological sciences. The scope of neuroscience has broadened over time to include different approaches used to study the nervous system at different scales and the techniques used by neuroscientists have expanded enormously, from molecular and cellular studies of individual neurons to imaging of sensory, motor and cognitive tasks in the brain.

About the Speaker(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s): Dr. Adrian Curtin, Drexel University

Neuroscience (or neurobiology) is the scientific study of the nervous system. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, computer science and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "ultimate challenge" of the biological sciences. The scope of neuroscience has broadened over time to include different approaches used to study the nervous system at different scales and the techniques used by neuroscientists have expanded enormously, from molecular and cellular studies of individual neurons to imaging of sensory, motor and cognitive tasks in the brain.

About the Speaker(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s)(s): TBD