Category: user experience design and research

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Workshop: 'Lightweight usability testing' workshop at dev8D

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."

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Interview: 'Games at the museum'

I was interviewed for the Microtask crowdsourcing blog.  Their abstract:

Culture heritage technologist Mia Ridge is a champion of crowdsourced museum gaming. Mia has worked as a developer for several world-class museums and is now writing her PhD on crowdsourcing digital heritage. She describes games as the “participation engine” of crowdsourcing.

Taking time out from her busy speaking schedule, Mia told us how and why museums should be raising their game…

'Games at the museum: Mia Ridge interview'.

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Everyone wins: crowdsourcing games and museums

A presentation called 'Everyone wins: crowdsourcing games and museums' for MuseumNext in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 26, 27th. The link to my slides was retweeted so much the slides made it onto the front page of slideshare, which was especially nice as I'd had a lot of fun making the presentation interesting enough to combat the post-lunch slot and to help non-tech/game people stay engaged for the whole talk.

Everyone wins: crowdsourcing games and museums

View more presentations from Mia

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Hack4Europe! UK Winner in the category 'Audience award'

Screenshot of adding an object to a blog post with 'Share What You See'

Owen Stephens and I won the 'Audience Award' for our 'Share What You See' hack at Europeana's Hack4Europe! UK held at the British Library in June 2011. Not bad, considering we'd met for the first time the day before and managed to make a new WordPress plugin in about six hours.

I blogged about the hackday and our project at 'Share What You See' at hack4europe London.

'Share What You See' is a WordPress plugin designed to make a museum and gallery visit more personal, memorable and sociable.  There's always that one object that made you laugh, reminded you of friends or family, or was just really striking.  The plugin lets you search for the object in the Europeana collection (by title, and hopefully by venue or accession number), and instantly create a blog post about it (screenshot below) to share it with others. Once you've found your object, the plugin automatically inserts an image of it, plus the title, description and venue name. You can then add your own text and whatever other media you like.