miaridge

I ran a 45 minute workshop on ‘lightweight usability testing’ at dev8D, an event for (IT) developers in the UK’s higher education sector.  From the abstract:

“Usability doesn’t have to be a drag, and user testing doesn’t have to take months and a cast of thousands. Following the principle that ‘any user testing is better than no user testing’, lightweight usability is based on the idea that all you need to produce useful test results to improve your software is a bit of planning and a couple of hours.

In this session you will learn to plan and run a lightweight usability test based on a project you’ve worked on. At the end of the workshop we’ll run a live usability test based on participant’s examples from the workshop.”

My Powerpoint slides are available for download from Lightweight usability testing workshop, dev8D, 2012. I can share my talk notes on request if you get in touch.

Lightweight usability testing workshop by Mia Ridge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I ran a three and a half hour pre-conference workshop (abstract below) at MCN2011 on Hacking and mash-ups for beginners at MCN2011 – slides below, and I’m happy to share the exercises on request.

Have you ever wanted to be able to express your ideas for digital collections more clearly, or thought that a hack day sounds like fun but need a way to get started with basic web scripting? In this hands-on workshop you will learn how to use online tools to create interesting visualisations to explore a cultural dataset and create your own simple ‘mash-up’.

The workshop will be a fun, supportive environment where you will learn by playing with small snippets of code. No scripting knowledge is assumed.

Katy Beale and I ran a workshop on ‘hacking culture’ at the V&A Museum on Friday 15 July. I’ve put the photos for ‘Culture (paper) hack at V&A’s Web Weekend‘ but still haven’t written this workshop up properly.  Briefly – we explained what hack days are, the types of hacks people create, how CultureHack started – then we handed over to the participants to ‘create their perfect museum experience’ with paper, markers, scissors, glue and some printouts of objects from the V&A’s collection online. People came up with some wonderfully creative ideas, and it was interesting to see where they overlapped with the kinds of things you see at hack days, and where they were completely different.

From the V&A Web Weekend Programme:

Katy and Mia explore the idea of museums as objects, stories, experiences, people and places. If you could take objects out of the museum, where would you put them? If you could have access to any part of the museum, what would it be? You’ll hear about recent Culture Hacks and then create your own paper prototypes, bringing to life your own simple solutions or seemingly impossible ideas.