With a growing number of shows around the world, Cirque du Soleil has recently launched its website Casting. Available in seven languages, this site is a true “cyber-ambassador,” with presence on all continents.

Simon Francès will present how their Internet strategy allows Cirque du Soleil to meet the challenge of recruiting international artists and discuss the ideas and methodologies put forward to:

• reach artists and optimize their artistic journey
• implement innovative techniques to attract talent

Montréal is the first city in the Americas to set up a large-scale public bike system. It’s also the first in the world with such a harsh winter to do so. To make this possible, BIXI’s designers had to invent an exceptionally sturdy system that was totally portable and required no permanent infrastructures.
In addition to allowing system components to be removed during winter months without damaging the landscape, stations can be dropped off and functioning in a matter of minutes.
BIXI was created from a clean sheet with the intention of marrying the practical with the aesthetic. World-renowned industrial designer Michel Dallaire was entrusted with the design of the physical components. Bike design elements are carried over to the technical platforms, bike docks and pay stations, with the intention of fitting in harmoniously with their urban environment.

Traditional usability testing has focused on finding the major usability problems associated with a given prototype or product.   But it’s time to move beyond that.  We now have the tools and techniques to accurately measure the impact of potentially subtle differences in design on the user experience.  This allows us to focus more on identifying aspects of a design that work well rather than just finding the major failures in a design.  To use an analogy to the medical field, this is a shift from a “disease-centered” approach to usability to a “wellness-focused” approach.  But this involves a shift in how we think about usability tests.

There are several features that characterize this approach:

1. It is typically comparative.  You learn much more from a usability test when you can compare alternative designs to each other.  The results of a usability test on a single design solution are hard to interpret in isolation.  It helps if you can compare results across iterations, but that can lead to what Bill Buxton (Sketching User Experiences) calls “getting the design right” (iterating on a single design solution) rather than “getting the right design” (finding a totally different design that is far more effective).
2. It usually involves multiple measures.  Some of the measures commonly used include task completion, task time, multiple subjective ratings (e.g., the System Usability Scale), eye-tracking data, and various kinds of live-site data such as click rates and abandonment rates.
3. It commonly involves larger numbers of participants.  A usability test with 6-8 participants is probably adequate to identify the major usability problems with a design.  But it’s often not enough for getting at potentially subtle differences between several different designs.  One way of cost-effectively collecting data from larger numbers of participants is using online usability testing.

Some of these ways of measuring the user experience begin to merge techniques from traditional usability testing with some of the newer techniques from web analytics.  This presentation will focus on several case studies that illustrate this approach to measuring the user experience, ranging from relatively small-scale lab studies that included eye-tracking to large-scale online and live-site studies with hundreds or even thousands of participants.

Participants will also learn specific techniques where large-scale online studies can be augmented with small-scale lab studies to get a well-rounded view of the user experience.

Users tend to groan with frustration when asked about their experiences with IVR (Interactive Voice Response) interfaces. However, making a good first impression and providing useful customer support is primordial in client-company relations and essential to any front end business. With the latest advances in mobile technology, users are picking up their phones more than ever.

Vocal interfaces involve different cognitive processes and technical constraints from standard graphical interfaces (i.e. a web site).

When organizing and managing a global user research project, there are various interactions among both local and foreign venues. Such cross-cultural projects — where there is a person from one country working in another country for a client from another country whose users are in another country – are complicated!

Thomas Visby Snitker, whose work is often complicated in such a way, defines culture from both a social and psychological perspective. He will reveal the implications of culture to consider throughout the entire project management process:

• Setting up a cross-cultural global user research study
• Conducting global user research
• Compiling the results
• Reporting the findings
• Pitfalls to avoid

This will enable organizations to manage and conduct cross-cultural projects that are more cost-effective, time-efficient and culturally-considerate.

User Research is a major factor of success when it comes to designing products and services that meet the needs of the customer. User Research is also a major factor of success when user experience becomes a competitive advantage on the market.
Learn why user research is important for doing good design, why it is often done improperly, what the secrets of good design are and how to apply these secrets to international projects.

Frederic Gaillard, founder and CEO of Axance – the first UX design company in France for online services – will show concrete examples of work well done by his team of experts. In his presentation, he’ll reveal 3 important tips to successfully run effective user research around the world with a multi-country team.

As a key take-away, you’ll learn:
• How “faster and cheaper” user research can be more effective
• How user research can be embedded in the design flow
• How to drive the focus of the team toward building value for customer

Who should attend this talk?
Anyone involved in large design projects dedicated to customers, especially information based services: project director, marketing director, designer or user researcher…

3 reasons you should attend this presentation:
• You experienced expensive, useless user research in the past
• You prefer practical examples over theory
• You hate pitch talk

Frédéric Gaillard from UXAlliance on Vimeo.

Global user research can be very expensive, especially when the method of choice is qualitative. But there are several more cost-effective alternatives that combine qualitative and quantitative elements:

• Online surveys to collect requirements and to create “quantitative” personas
• Online tests to collect early feedback on prototypes
• Data collected from online panels to understand web behavior

Tim Bosenick, SirValUse from UXAlliance on Vimeo.

When confronted with a decision, people rarely make perfectly logical choices. However, specialists in human decision-making have shown that we are consistently irrational in the same ways due to specific cognitive biases.

This presentation will cover novel ideas on how such trends in our decision-making process are applicable beyond the world of marketing, straight into the heart of UX practice.

The talk will draw from experiences and examples to expose how a series of specific, irrational trends in human decision-making can:
• Affect user actions with respect to their goals with an interface
• Generate good interface design decisions
• Justify the user experience practice to clients
• Help evaluate specific interface elements and design patterns