Making Winning Online Portfolios..my talk at "Freelance Fair Conference" 2011

I was a speaker at "Freelance Fair Conference 2011". My topic of my talk was on "Building Winning Online Portfolios" for designers, writers, bloggers and other freelance professionals. This was held on 7th august 2011 @ Hyderabad.

Freelance fair Conference - 2011

There were many serious freelance professionals attended this event which was organized by "Lectures for Good" organization. My goal for this talk is to showcase the importance of portfolios and make sure every freelancer should have a striking online portfolios. Overall, it was good and happy to see people noting down the notes.

Many people requested my presentation deck and hence i am uploading here so that any one can see it.

Making Winning Online Portfolios

View more presentations from Ranjeet Kumar Tayi

Storytelling for User Experience...Crafting stories for better design

We all tell stories. It's one of the most natural ways to share information, as old as the human race. Stories help us gather and communicate user research, put a human face on analytic data, communicate design ideas, encourage collaboration and innovation, and create a sense of shared history and purpose. 

Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks have written a book on “Storytelling for User Experience … Crafting stories for better design” This book looks across the full spectrum of user experience design to discover when and how to use stories to improve our products. Whether you are a researcher, designer, analyst or manager, you will find ideas and techniques you can put to use in your practice. 

I had personally met Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks at Germany and had a good discussion on this. They have give me a good perspective & how imporant creating peronsas with story telling.  Unfortunately, I was staying in the same hotel where Whitney was staying and got some free time in the mornings to discuss & learn more on Story telling User Experience. I personally thank Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks for sharing knowledge and guiding me. I have taken some notes and made a graphic to share you folks!

Story telling help to share research and design insights in a compelling and effective way. Struggle to communicate the meaning of a large body of data in a way that everyone just "gets" and want to explore a new, innovative idea, and imagine its future.  Storytelling starts with listening. In formal and informal user research, make time for people to tell you their story. You might be surprised at how many great stories (or story fragments) you'll collect if you let them. Just say "Tell me about that" when you hear the start of a juicy story.

Put some stories together and you might have the spark of a design idea. Maybe you call them user stories, or scenarios, but they are all ways of thinking through not just what will happen, but how the characters (users) will react to the experience. And finally, what's a usability test task, except a story for the participant to finish. Make it dramatic or matter-of-fact, but tell a story that launches them into a situation they want to solve or an experience they want to explore.

Get your own copy of Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks book on “Storytelling for User Experience … Crafting stories for better design” and know more insights, this book is worth investing.

Thinking Aloud...!

What is this?
Thinking aloud (Nielsen, 1994), may be the single most valuable usability engineering method. It involves having a end user continuously thinking out loud while using the system.

Purpose
By verbalizing the users thoughts, the test users enable us to understand how they view the system, and this again makes it easier to identify the end users' major misconceptions. By showing how users interpret each individual interface item, THA facilitates a direct understanding of which parts of the dialogue cause the most problems.

Points of Interest
a failure to lend itself well to most types of performance measurement; the different learning style is often perceived as unnatural, distracting and strenuous by the users; non-analytical learners generally feel inhibited; time consuming since briefing the end users is a necessary part of the preparation. Causing users to focus and concentrate is both an advantage and disadvantage since it results in less than natural interactions at times and THA results in being faster due to the users focus.