My name is Shane and I’m a usabilityholic

 

Yes, it’s a bit cheeky to make drugs and addiction the theme of a business presentation, but I think it paid off!

---

 

The Setup

I’ve been at my new job as a Software Engineer for Wall Street Systems (Part of ION Trading) for just over two months now. On the side, I’ve been slowly and steadily asking around and getting a feel for how we approach User Experience. Last week, my persistence paid off and I was asked to make a presentation to the company’s User Experience Community of Practice (CoP) on Usability Testing.

The CoP is a group of a few dozen people who have done some great work recently on the visual design of ION’s products. I wasn’t sure how much expertise already existed in the company with respect to user research, so I started my talk by polling the audience. It turned out that I was the most experienced person in the company on Usability Testing. It was a novel and exhilarating feeling to be “the expert” in the room. I guess I earned that though- over the past few years I’ve read and tried as much as possible in the world of UX, gravitating towards User Research such as Usability Testing.

The Sell

After explaining how easy, valuable, eye-opening, and addictive usability testing can be, I concluded my talk by offering to write a draft on best practices for running usability tests and to pilot a usability test.

I wasn’t sure what to expect going in, but I definitely didn’t expect a C-level to ask me to run a usability test the very next week- and that’s exactly what happened!

Sadly, I was on holiday the next week, but we’ll be doing a pilot hopefully before the end of this month!

The Software Speech

Meanwhile, my favorite London meetup, London Software Craftsmanship Community (LSCC), put out a call for speakers to do lightning talks at Skills Matter‘s beautiful new CodeNode facility. Initially, I shied away because I’ve never spoken publicly about software, but because the talk at work went so well, I decided to jump in and do it.

I had to rush through a little to get it down to 5 minutes but the audience was great and I’m glad I did it!

You can see a video of my talk here on the Skillsmatter website.

Just in case that link doesn’t work, the slides are below.