The Tuesday, January 11th meeting of the Rocky
Mountain Internet Users Group (RMIUG) will discuss
"Designing Usability Into Products: the Engineering,
Art, and Psychology of Prototyping."

Most of us want our products and services to be not
just useful... but usable to our customers. When done
properly, usability studies can help reach that goal.
But formal usability testing often gets the short end
of the stick when budgets and timelines are tight.

This talk will explore some cost-effective tools and
techniques for designing and evaluating the usability
of systems. We'll focus on the benefits of creating
prototypes-- for a hardware device, a web portal, a
web application -- and answer questions:

* Why bother? Prototypes take time, so why can't the
customers tell us what's not usable?

* When is the best time to do prototypes? How can they
fit into an insane development schedule?

* Can an interactive prototype really replace formal
usability testing, or should we do both?

* What are best practices? Things to avoid?


Bill Pawlak is the President of Inovdesigns, a User
Interface (UI) Design and Analysis company focused on
making the world of technology easier for people to
use. Bill has over 10 years of multidisciplinary
experience designing, testing, and developing user
interfaces for software, web-based, and mobile
applications. He has applied his expertise to
everything from very large, complex systems such as
Air Traffic Control to desktop software systems to
rich internet applications. Prior to founding
Inovdesigns, Bill led Customer Experience efforts with
Seurat Company for clients such as RE/MAX
International, Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield,
Microsoft, P&G, and Agilent. Bill's educational
background is in Human-Computer Interaction and
Industrial/Cognitive Engineering.


URL's of interest:
-------------------
Inovdesigns, http://www.inovdesigns.com

Usability resources from the Usability Professionals
Assn
http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/

Usability resources sponsored by the European Union
http://www.usabilitynet.org/

Case studies, techniques, and more for interaction
designers, information architects, and interface
designers
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/

Research and opinions from usability expert Jared
Spool
http://www.uie.com/articles/

Essays from usability expert Scott Berkun, formerly of
Microsoft
http://www.uiweb.com/default.htm

Applications, process, usability ROI and more from
IBM's User Engineering team
http://www-306.ibm.com/ibm/easy/



The meeting is Tuesday, January 11th from 7:00 - 9:00
pm (with optional 6:30 pm start for refreshments and
informal networking). The meeting will be held at The
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at
1850 Table Mesa Drive in Boulder. To get to NCAR from
the Boulder Turnpike (US 36) or Broadway (US 93), take
Table Mesa Drive west towards the mountains for
approximately 2.5 miles into the foothills. NCAR is at
the top of the hill. For door-to-door driving
directions, go to MapQuest (http://www.mapquest.com/),
click on Driving Directions, enter your starting
address, NCAR's address, and voila! Park in the NCAR
lot, go in the main door, and ask the guard to point
you to meeting, which is held in the main auditorium,
right off the lobby. The meeting is free and open to
the public, but we may pass the hat to help defray
expenses.

Our meeting location seats about 120 people. That is
usually enough room to accommodate all attendees, but
it's impossible for us to predict how many people will
show up for any given meeting. Seating is always on a
first-come, first serve basis, and in the event of
more attendees than seats, we won't be able to admit
additional people into the auditorium after all seats
are filled.

The January 11 meeting is a joint effort with the
Rocky Mountain chapter of ACM SIGCHI-- the Special
Interest Group for Computer/Human Interaction, part of
the Association for Computing Machinery professional
group. Learn more about SIGCHI at
http://www.acm.org/sigchi, or contact local
chairperson Laurie Lamar, rm-chi@....

Thanks to our three sponsors who help make RMIUG
meetings happen:
---------------------------------------------------------------
MicroStaff (www.microstaff.com) which provides
Creative and Technical Talent for Web, Interactive
Media, Marketing Communications and Software
Development projects, is the sponsor of food and
beverages for RMIUG meetings.

ONEWARE (http://www.ONEWARE.com) -- a Colorado-based
software company that provides semi-custom web-based
applications, sponsors the RMIUG meeting minutes.

Copy Diva (http://www.copydiva.com) which provides
marketing project management, marketing communications
consulting, and web content development is the AV
sponsor for RMIUG.

Consultants and companies are invited to bring
Internet-related Product information, brochures, and
business cards which will be displayed on an
information table.

There are email mailing lists set up for this group.
To subscribe or unsubscribe, see
http://www.rmiug.org/maillist.html You can also reach
the RMIUG "Executive" Committee at
rmiug-comm@.... Our web site is at
http://www.rmiug.org/


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Please note that RMIUG is hosted at NCAR and we are
their guests. NCAR has security regulations in effect
that we must follow in order to use the facility. If
any RMIUG attendee is unwilling to follow these simple
regulations, I would ask that he or she not attend and
instead read the minutes after the meeting.

Here are the NCAR security policies that must be
followed:

1. No weapons.
2. Must sign in at front desk and provide name.
3. Cooperate with security folks including providing
ID
if requested.
4. We are guests of NCAR so cooperation and courtesy
are expected when dealing with NCAR staff.

If there are any questions or concerns with this
policy, please contact me directly. Thanks, Josh Zapin
(josh@...).
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=====
JZ

Joshua D. Zapin

E: mail@...
W: http://www.jzapin.com
(303) 506-8262