IxDA Meetup Seattle | Online

About this event

The Evolution of a Design: The Slow Approach to Usability (w/ Andy Everett)

Join us as General Assembly hosts the IA/UX Meetup and Andy Everett (an Information Architect/Data Librarian), presenting a case study on moving design forward in an organization hesitant to change.

From Andy:

"When I came on board over 12 years ago, we had an in-house designed software package to catalog our data assets. While it met basic requirements it was very hard to use. I couldn’t immediately tell my superiors that it doesn’t work. I first had to educate. Educate about the fundamentals of cataloguing, taxonomy, thesaurus development, usability and customer focused design, After 5+ years of trying to make the original design work, I convinced them that there is a better way. We started with black box testing of current functionality and we conducted a baseline usability study. We scored low on the SUS. This gave us the ammunition to basically start from scratch from the database to the User Interfaces. After the redesign, we ran another usability study and the SUS score jumped 30+. In this presentation I’ll walkthrough what the software does, the initial design, the process of educating my superiors, the testing and study, and the new design with a demo of the software."

SCHEDULE

6:30p | Doors open

6:30 - 7:00p | food & drink & spontaneous conversation

7:00 - 8:00p | presentation & questions

8:00 - 8:30p | more food & drink & spontaneous conversation

8:30p | clean up!

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Andy Everett has been the Metadata Repository Librarian for the past 12 years for Washington State Department of Transportation and has helped to create Metadata Management at WSDOT. Andy manages the software enhancements of the in-house designed metadata repository with a focus on findability and usability. Andy also leads Enterprise metadata and taxonomy efforts for the agency. Andy has a MS in Information Management from University of Washington's Information School. Prior to school, he was with Arthur Andersen's Global Technology Organization in Chicago and Seattle.