Programme

Speaker Biographies

Presentation Outlines

Latest programme

Programme may be subject to change at short notice

Saturday 23rd June

Sunday, 24th June:

Speaker Biographies

• Philip M. Ball MA MMAA RMIP Philip is a medical artist working at Addenbrookes, the teaching hospital for Cambridge University. After completing a degree in Information Design in 1983, I went to The Medical School at Manchester University where I undertook a 2 year Postgraduate Course in Medical Art run by the Medical Artists’ Association of Great Britain. Immediately following that I went to work at the King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia from July 1985-86, upon my return I was appointed as Chief Medical Artist to Nottingham University and 18 years ago I moved south to take up the post of Senior Medical Artist of the University of Cambridge based at the Clinical School on the Addenbrooke’s Campus. I have been an active member of the Medical Artists’ Association with 18 years as a member of Council, 11 of those as Honorary Secretary and in that time I have organised 4 Annual Conferences and in October of 2007 I shall take over the position of National Chairman. In the summer of 2006 I was invited to exhibit some of my work in the “Lines of Enquiry” Exhibition held at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.
  
  
• Matthew Ellison Company Director Matthew Ellison has 20 years of experience as a user assistance and eLearning professional in the software industry. Much of this time was spent managing a team of writers and trainers at a UK-based consulting company, before enjoying a period in the U.S. as Director of the WinWriters (now WritersUA) Conference. Matthew has a B.Sc. in Electronic Engineering and a Post-Graduate Certificate of Education from Bristol University in the UK. He is an Adobe Certified Instructor, and is also a Certified Instructor for WebWorks ePublisher Pro.
  
  
• Patrick Hofmann As a trained technical writer and now a visual interaction designer, Patrick Hofmann has turned into ‘a man of few words’. For over thirteen years, this vibrant Canadian has helped clients like Sky, Nokia, Motorola, Philips, FedEx, HP, BASF, and AGFA improve the usability of their products--often by visualising their online, hardcopy, and interface information. His award-winning work and undying passion for visual language have sent him around the world, as he teaches companies how to use pictures to improve communication. He recently developed the post-graduate Information Design curriculum at CPIT in Christchurch, New Zealand, and is currently completing his first book on visual instruction.
  
  
• Caroline Jarrett Caroline Jarrett is an independent usability consultant. After 13 years as a project manager of computer systems integration projects, she founded Effortmark Limited in order to concentrate on 'what systems are for' instead of 'how the system is put together'. Through her work with the United Kingdom tax authorities, she became fascinated with forms and now specialises in evaluation and design of paper and web forms, and effective implementation of business process that includes forms. Caroline is co-author of the textbook "User Interface Design and Evaluation" (2005, Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier) and writes a regular column 'Caroline's Corner' for www.usabilitynews.com. She is a Senior Member of the Society for Technical Communication.
  
  
• Phylise Banner Klein Phylise Klein is an information designer currently working in instructional technology and distance education for the University Without Walls at Skidmore College. She is an STC Associate Fellow and is currently the program manager for the Society for Technical Communication’s 54th annual conference, and presents regularly at regional and national technology and communication conferences on the topics of information design, experience design, creative hypertext, Web 2.0 applications, instructional design and GIS technologies. Her current research focuses on the use of Web 2.0 applications to establish community and visual presence in the online classroom.
  
  
• José de Souza José Marconi Bezerra de Souza is a PhD student in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, he is supported by a doctoral grant from CNPq–Brazil (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development). His research aims to make a contribution to the design of more effective animated demonstrations for graphic software training
  
  
• Conrad Taylor Conrad Taylor is a Freelance writer, designer and illustrator, and has recently moved into audio and video editing. He was an early promoter of “desktop publishing”, and is Chair of the Electronic Publishing Specialist Group of the British Computer Society.
  
  

Presentation Outlines

• Philip Ball— Why draw in the digital age? Philip talks about the continued need for drawing in this digital age and the way that artists interpret information and the techniques used to convey information to differing audiences.
  
  
• Matthew Ellison—All you need to know about capturing screens Would you like to be able to capture UI elements at high quality while still keeping your file sizes to a minimum? This session shows you how! It starts by presenting examples of how screenshots or images of UI objects can really add value to user assistance. You'll then learn the key steps you need to take at capture time: these include guidelines on setting colour depth, sizing UI objects, and capturing drop-down menus. The session concludes with demonstrations of the most widely used screen capture tools and strategies that are available. Along the way, Matthew passes on practical tips for streamlining the capture process and ensuring results of the highest quality.
  
  
• Patrick Hofmann—Profits from Pictures the return-on-investment of visual information design and usability testing Through real and recent case studies, discover how using fewer words and more pictures can improve your product documentation, training, and usability --not only to save costs but to generate revenue for your company. From wordless manuals to visual help, from product decals to packaging, creating usable, visually helpful information can please your users and your company's bottom line. From these entertaining examples, also learn usability testing techniques and customer insight-gathering strategies that are not only affordable, but in some cases, free. From recruiting to rewarding test participants, to conducting and recording usability tests, there are countless proven ways to evaluate your products and services with users from around the world, with little to no investment.
  
  
• Patrick Hofmann, workshop—Intuitive images: creating and evaluating usable graphics for international audiences In our end-user manuals, web pages, portable digital devices, and interface designs, our pictures always seem to play a subordinate role to our words. We find them too hard to illustrate; we encounter too many resolution and incompatibility issues, and we can never seem to make them attractive enough, meaningful enough, and usable enough. In this workshop, we will get very graphic (ha ha) with these challenges. We will spend a fun-filled session sharing common problems, evaluating your existing design challenges, visualising different types of information, and working on some innovative hands-on exercises. In the end, the workshop's goal is to help both information developers and usability professionals evaluate and boost the visual appeal and usability of the information that they produce, and to empower them with simple tips and tricks to become visually and graphically savvy. In the past, this workshop has attracted more managers and information specialists than illustrators and graphic designers, because it reveals that the former group is clearly vital to the development of usable visual information, and offers solutions that benefit both ‘textual’ designers and ‘visual’ designers alike.
  
  
• Caroline Jarrett—The visual design of forms Topics to be covered:
  • Reading forms is different from using them (illustrated example with a bit of audience participation).
  • The narrow focus that people maintain on forms.
  • Thinking about 'page furniture' (the stuff on the page that isn't the form) compared to the form.
  • Placing of labels: should they be left- or right-justified? Why?(audience exercise on thinking about where answers come from).
  • Why colons and asterisks don't matter much to users - but the benefits of making a choice and sticking with it.
  • Why buttons and links really do matter to users.
  • Some rules for labelling buttons (audience exercise: redesign a button and label it).
  • Questions and discussion throughout, plus question time at the end.
  
  
  
• Phylise Klein—Information Visualisation Learn how to gain insight into the exploration of data from a visual design perspective, and to create effective informational graphics and spatial data representations. Incorporating theory in design and cognition, this session will focus on the representation, transformation, presentation and interactive modification of data.
  
  
• José de-Souza— An illustrated review of how motion is presented in instruction manuals This review shows how the depiction of motion in media that is intrinsically motionless (such as paper) is always a creative challenge for information designers. Existing visual language research seems to focus on motion depiction for aesthetic(e.g. photography, painting), entertainment (e.g. comics, optical toys) or scientific(e.g. physics) purposes. José illustrate how basic motion properties of direction, trajectory and displacement are being represented in pictorial instructions. José answers the question “how to do it” in the most unambiguous way. This review uses examples designed by José for his current PhD work and extracted from his collection of illustrated manuals, which concentrate on examples of motion caused by people acting as the agent of the action in various highly dynamic activities: DIY, magic, calligraphy, drawing, golf, embroidery, cooking, dancing, conducting, airplane piloting, juggling, skiing etc. The review also discusses how the designer’s choice of the ‘frozen moment’ of the dynamic action is relevant for instructional purposes (a sequence or a permutation of images of before, during or after the action). Ancillary graphic devices used to evoke the idea of motion (arrows, motion lines and overlapping multiples) are also discussed. Where it is possible, existing evidence on the effectiveness of certain types of visual representation is mentioned. This review can be used to inform technical illustrators and communicators of the application of established or innovative forms of motion depiction in a training and educational context.
  
  
• Conrad Taylor— Two and a half dimensions in illustration The page and the screen are flat; the world and the objects in it that we wish to describe are not. The illustrator manipulates a repertoire of line, tone, colour, contrast and texture to produce an artificial representation of those objects that will hopefully be correctly interpreted by the viewer. Illustration and the world have a more natural correspondence than the world and language, but illustration also has strongly conventional practices: it's a kind of visual language. Conrad Taylor, who has worked across a range of illustration styles from cartooning to diagramming, technical illustration and cartography, will describe what helps illustrations to communicate effectively, share some tips about how to produce them with traditional and digital tools, and reflect on the cognitive and semiotic dimensions of the illustrator's craft. In particular he will explore the role of line thickness variation in suggesting shape, how to separate foreground from background, and how to draw attention selectively to features of an overall image. Some of these principles also adapt well to presentations, interactive systems and multimedia.
  
  

Updated 14th May 2007 by David Farbey, on behalf of the UK Chapter