This week’s assignment was fascinating. We had the opportunity to use Loop 11 in order to create our own remote usability study (cool, just by itself because it seems like, without being students, this could be very expensive to set up). I was even more excited by the project because we were allowed to choose which websites and which tasks we wanted to test and one of the suggestions just happened to by kayak.com.
Kayak.com was co-founded by Paul English, a former Intuit employee, and I heard him speak when, in 2011, he was asked back to speak to Intuit employees about entrepreneurship and what characteristics he looks for in kayak.com employees. It was a very interesting talk and I came away with the idea of being an “energy amplifier” for my team. So that just made using kayak.com as part of my test even more interesting.
I’m coming back from the UXPA conference in Washington D.C., jet lagged and really feeling like I need another few days to recover, but it was a great experience and I got a lot out of it. Interesting that, despite the name change from UPA to UXPA, the focus at the conference was still very strongly on usability (eye tracking was big, research methods, etc.) and not so much on the “x” of experience.
Still a ways to go, in my opinion, before we’re fully ready (as a profession) to include everything we’ve learned from usability, and also to include that X factor – experience.
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