Evaluating User Experiences Masterclass

Evaluating User Experiences – how do we know our projects are any good?

So, you’ve designed or made something – a story, a game, an app, a website, a VR piece – that you think provides a great user experience. But, how do you know that it actually meets your users’ wants and needs? Come along to this masterclass and learn the principles and practices that underpin how we evaluate whether our user experiences are actually any good!

This session is intended for those who are new to the concept of experience evaluation, but are interested in learning how to collect evidence that their experiences are great (or not!), through learning how to formulate questions and find answers through data.

In this masterclass, we will:

• Consider why it is important to carefully design your evaluation strategy
• Look at the differences between correlation and causation, by asking what it means that margarine consumption correlates with the divorce rate in Maine
• Explore why we should care about ethics in evaluations
• Learn about validity by discovering if bubbles or ripples make chocolate bars taste better
• Consider the differences between qualitative and quantitative data

In this interactive session, you will explore various concepts related to experience evaluation methods to help you to choose which might apply to evaluate your own work. This masterclass is designed to give you an introduction to the different approaches that can be used to conduct evaluations of different types of experiences, but does not go into depth on statistical analysis techniques. So, no knowledge of statistics or mathematics is required. If you wish to learn more about the specific data analysis methods, we will signpost you to further resources.

Speakers

Dr Anna Bramwell-Dicks

Silvia Mantilla-Wright

Housekeeping

Light refreshments will be provided on event arrival and at mid afternoon break. A light lunch will also be provided to delegates. Please let us know of any dietary requirements. This event is free of charge.

If you’re able to, we ask that you watch the ‘Playtest’ episode of Black Mirror (available on Netflix – series 3 episode 2) before the session – this is not compulsory and we will be watching a section of the episode together during the masterclass – but as this episode is about an experimental evaluation of an immersive experience, it provides an interesting context for discussion. The episode is horror and includes spiders – so please don’t watch the whole thing unless you want to – and know that we definitely won’t be showing any scary parts during the session itself.