San Diego User Experience Special Interest Group
At a UX SIG meeting, a company presents its product for a free Expert Review, a participatory user experience evaluation much like a usability focus group. The group reviews products in terms of business goals and user characteristics. The end result is a list of ways to improve the design to increase revenue and reduce cost.
The UX SIG meets at 5:30 PM on the fourth Tuesday of each month at Intuit Inc., 7535 Torrey Santa Fe Road, San Diego, CA 92129.
If you would like to know more about presenting your company or participating in the meeting, please send us an e-mail at info@uxsig.org.
Join us on Tuesday, May 27, at Intuit to review Suddenly Smart’s SmartBuilder, an e-learning authoring platform, and provide feedback to design a more effective, efficient, and delightful user experience.
Company Overview
Suddenly Smart has been providing e-learning solutions since 1999. In the e-learning industry, the measure of efficacy of content is usually tied to how engaging, interactive, and thought-provoking lesson content is. For this reason, Flash is the most popular e-learning development platform, but it requires knowledge of programming to achieve such quality levels. Suddenly Smart’s goal is to increase the ease of building highly effective e-learning content by providing an innovative e-learning authoring platform, SmartBuilder. Their customers include Google, AT&T, IBM, Bristol Myers Squibb, and numerous small and medium-sized enterprises.
The Product
SmartBuilder is an e-learning authoring platform which enables flash content development without the need to know ActionScript. It empowers less technical people to develop effective e-learning content by using a WYSIWYG, contextual menu paradigm.
Business Objectives
SmartBuilder is more powerful and flexible than most competing products, many of which are template based. As a result, it will take a trial user longer to produce a finished sample piece than is possible with competing products. However, once basic features are understood, and assuming the trial user has some knowledge of e-learning design, they can quickly exceed what they can produce with competing products. The business objective is to get the initial user quickly up the learning curve so that they realize the unique benefits of the tool and convert to paid customers.
Target User
Our target user is someone who does e-learning as a profession. The majority of these have experience with existing e-learning tools and technologies. Most are not programmers.
Meeting Details
The UX SIG meets at 5:30 p.m. on the fourth Tuesday of the month at Intuit (7535 Torrey Santa Fe Road, San Diego, CA 92129). For more information, please contact Sean Van Tyne.
Benefits of Attending
By attending, you will gain some design skills training. For those not familiar with this SIG, typical meetings amount to a participatory user interface evaluation, much like a usability test/focus group. This gives us the opportunity to practice our evaluation skills and enhance our design heuristics knowledge. It also gives the presenter valuable feedback about their design.
