making life easy!
Daniel Alenquer
Lead User Experience Designer
ASUS Design Singapore

About this presentation
This is a short version of a presentation shared with 2nd year Diploma in
Experience and Product Design students at the Singapore Polytechnic
Design School during the World Usability Day 2008 Singapore.
I hope the slides are a good reference for the students to go back to when
they need to review what was presented and discussed during the lecture.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the students at SP for their thoughtful and enthusiastic
participation on the World Usability Day lecture and workshop. I would also
like to thank Venkatesh Rajamanickam, Thierry Do and Edwin Low - from
Experience and Product Design program for collaborating with us to get this
year’s WUD up and running. Many thanks to my colleagues at ASUS Design
Singapore Ng Wan Lynn, Lionel Wong, and Cindy Liew for everything.

Copyright Info
The copyright of this work belongs to Daniel Alenquer, who is solely
responsible for the content. Please direct content feedback or permissions to
daniel_alenquer@asus.com. This work is licensed under the Creative
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To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-
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from.

asus

2069
awards won in 2008

40
4th
countries
year
225
events

1 what is easy?
2 why should products and services be easy?
3 how can we make things easy?

what is easy?
1 what is easy?

simple objective

simple objective

now what?

call AT&T wireless
2 why should products and services be easy?

observe
learn why
ask around

45” + 50” + USD 35 + missed game + retype 140 contacts = AT&T is awful

B
A
3 how can we make things easy?

how can we make things easy? Jakob
Nielsen
learnability efficiency memorability errors satisfaction
useful easy to find accessible trustworthy easy to use
other
people

how can we make things easy? Usability
Daniel Alenquer, 2008
communicate
problem
identify
problem recommend stakeholders
solutions
analyze problem
provide
evidence
problem

ok, but how?

observe and find out why
communicate
problem
identify
problem recommend stakeholders
solutions
analyze problem
provide
evidence
problem

observe and find out why
grass anthropology coco ball semantics

A
B

B
A

C
B

B
C

B
C

observe

find out
why

observe

find out
why

observe and find out why build your test
grass anthropology coco ball semantics fake joke

methods and practices (ways of observing and finding out)
plan requirement design prototype test benchmark
styleguides heuristic critical incidence
review technique
focus groups
ISO 13407 stakeholder survey
meeting SWAT
wireframing observation
Wizard
afinity diagram of Oz NASA TLX
subjective card sorting
evaluation
storyboard
parallel in-depth
task analysis design interviews
context analysis
use cases digital
requirements ethnography
content
analysis meeting

how NASA finds out

NASA Task Load Index

SWENSEN’S vs. NASA

the secret ingredient

go out and do it
repeat what went right
change what went wrong
do it again
find out

if you want to learn more…
Usability Engineering
Jakob Nielsen
The Usability Engineering Lifecycle
Deborah Mayhew
Handbook of Usability Testing
Jeff Rubin
Observing the User Experience
Mike Kuniavsky

if you want to get involved…
Usability Professionals Association
www.upassoc.com
World Usability Day
www.worldusabilityday.org

if you want to get in touch with me…
Daniel Alenquer
daniel_alenquer@asus.com
www.alenquer.mobi