521 Seminar: Creating Great First Impressions: Designing Out of Box and First Time User Experiences to Delight Your Customers (1/27)

Please join the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) in Winter Quarter for a 10-week seminar on current topics in the HCDE field by industry experts. Each 40-minute talk will be followed by a Q&A session. Members of the UW community and the public are welcome. More information about the series is available online at hcde.uw.edu/521.

Title: Creating Great First Impressions: Designing Out of Box and First Time User Experiences to Delight Your Customers
Date: January 27, 2012
Speaker: Cathy Moya

When: Fridays, 12:30-1:20 PM
Where: Loew Hall, Room 206, UW Seattle campus

Your product never gets a second chance to make a first impression with users. Designing a great first encounter helps get the relationship off to a good start and helps reduce the chance that users will shelve – or return – the product.

This session will present case studies drawn from painful experience with users and user research regarding out of box experience (OOBE) and first time user experience (FTUE). We’ll examine what we can learn from unboxing physical products, but also draw parallels to software and online services.

You will learn:

• How to create a cross-group framework to determine OOBE and FTUE priorities in the design process
• How to define your “out of box experience” even if your product doesn’t ship in a box
• What types of onboarding experiences you can create to help users transition into the most effective learning mode for the product
• Ways to think about product design that might even eliminate the need for directions

Instructor: Professor Judy Ramey
1 Credit (Credit/Non-credit)
Registration for UW students is available by entry code; contact the HCDE advisor by emailing hcde@uw.edu.

About the Speaker
Cathy Moya had a varied career before coming to Microsoft – lighting designer, environmental political organizer, systems administrator, author, network engineer, technical trainer – and a varied career after arriving at Microsoft – instructional designer, technical writer, project manager, program manager, and user experience designer. She spent three years on the team that creates Microsoft Hardware, where she owned all aspects of user assistance design, including “out of box experience” design for Microsoft mice and keyboards, including the Arc Mouse, the Arc Touch Mouse, the Touch Mouse, and the Explorer Touch Mouse. Her passion is “helping people understand things better.”