From Idea to Design to Product: Why UX Design is Critical to SemTech

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

11:30 AM - 12:15 PM

Level:	Business/Strategic
Location:	Franciscan A

Semantic technologies offer powerful benefits to the design of highly engaging, interactive content and applications. To be truly effective, applications have to respond to the user’s needs and assumptions. It’s art and science. We will offer examples of some design techniques we use, capturing how users articulate and evolve their thinking when problem-solving and seeking/exploring information. We will also talk about ways we interpret what we learn in order to guide the design of more responsive, relevant semantic applications in areas like healthcare and information retrieval.

Participants will gain:
• Awareness of the role played by user mental model discovery as a way to understand users’ vocabulary and its relationship to application data models
• Approaches to identify what is actually useful to users at particular points in the interface
• Iterative design practices that are driven by feedback, both from users and application usage data analysis
• Understanding of where and how design fits into product development practices

Jasmin Phua is a user researcher and interaction designer with over 12 years of experience leading the design of usable and productive user interfaces for complex transactional applications and information-rich big data applications. She has led multi-function teams in the design of user interfaces for complex web applications, mobile/handheld devices, websites, and client-server applications in the federal government, health, insurance, financial, legal, telecommunications, and automotive industries. Jasmin is an active member of the EHR Usability Taskforce for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and co-organized Chicago Health 2.0, with a focus on healthcare user experience. She holds a BA in Cognitive Psychology from Oberlin College, OH.

Duane Degler is a partner in Design for Context, a Washington DC/Baltimore-based usable design consultancy. He has designed numerous web and semantics-based applications and sites, backed by 25 years consulting experience in knowledge management and business performance. He has led software projects for commercial and government clients in the US and Europe his specialty areas include designing for large-scale search capabilities and semantic-driven interactive applications. Along with his client consulting work, Duane curates the www.DesignForSemanticWeb.com resource web site, co-organized the Semantic Web User Interaction workshop series, and is the strategy and technology advisor to the UPA Usability Body of Knowledge project.