Syntagm > Design for Usability | William Hudson
William Hudson, MSc, Pgd Psych Research Methods
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William Hudson consults, writes and teaches in the fields of user-centred design and usability. He has over 35 years experience in the development of interactive systems, initially with a background in software engineering. William was the product and user interface designer for the Emmy-award-winning "boujou"; now an indispensible tool in many film studios. He has specialized in interaction design and human-computer interaction since the late 1980's. William has written and taught courses which have been presented to hundreds of software and web developers, designers and managers in the UK, North America and Europe. He is the founder and principal consultant of Syntagm, a consultancy specializing in the design of interactive systems established in 1985.
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He holds an MSc in Software Engineering and a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychological Research Methods.
Experience
William was the product and user interface designer for 2d3's boujou, a revolutionary new software package for the special effects industry which has been praised for its ease of use. Boujou allows computer special effects to be merged with live film footage with little or no manual intervention, creating some challenging user interface deign issues for providing optimal user guidance. Boujou has been used in a number of major films including Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Italian Job, Lara Croft and The Matrix Reloaded. Boujou itself won an Emmy Award in 2002. Other projects have included interaction design and evaluation for Ansbacher Bank, Harcourt Education, Jato Dynamics, Rational Software, Reuters, Smart Card Integrations and Vicon Motion Systems.
Usability evaluation customer have included some of the best known names in industry and government in the UK, Europe and elsewhere.
(Click here for a complete list of clients.)
Processes
- Agile Processes (including eXtreme Programming)
- Informal UML
- Rational Unified Process (contributed material on user-centred design)
- User-Centred Design/Human-Centred Design/User-Centered Design (UCD)
Techniques
- Expert design and usability evaluations
- Card sorting
- Cognitive walkthroughs
- Affinity diagraming
- Expert/heuristic evaluations
- Goal-oriented design
- Paper prototyping
- Personas
- Usability benchmarking
- Usability testing
Professional Bodies
- Association of Computing (ACM)
- ACM Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI)
- British HCI Group
- Usability Professionals Association
William has written regularly for interactions
magazine, the
SIGCHI Bulletin and Usability
News.
Conferences and Courses Attended
| 2009 |
CHI 2009, Boston (presented 3 courses and a short paper) |
| 2008 |
CADUI 2008, Spain (invited keynote speaker and tutor) |
| 2007 |
CHI 2007 San Jose (5 days - presented Ajax tutorial) |
| 2006 |
CHI 2006 Montreal (5 days - presented web usability tutorial) |
| 2004 |
OOPSLA 2004, Vancouver (5 days - presented UCD tutorial) |
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CHI 2004 Vienna, Austria (5 days - presented UCD tutorial) |
| 2003 |
HCI2003 Workshop on Metaphor in HCI (1 day - presented short paper)
HCI2003 Invited speaker on Industry Day (1 day)
Lou Rosenfeld's Enterprise Information Architecture (1 day)
Accessibility Seminar (1 day) |
| 2002 |
Microsoft Mobility Conference (Pocket PC development, 2 days) |
| 2001 |
Easy TV (1 day seminar on the usability of digital television) |
| 2000 |
CHI 2000 (Den Haag, 5 day HCI conference with tutorials and workshops) |
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UI 2001 (Boston, 3 days of talks and tutorials) |
Courses Developed or Taught
- Advances in Card Sorting (1 day)
- Ajax Design and Usability (0.5 days)
- Applied Techniques in Card Sorting (half day)
- Usability and Interaction Design (1 day)
- Web Design for Usability (1 day)
- User-Centred Design with Use Case and Agile Methods (1 day)
- Object-Oriented Design using C++ (advanced C++, UML and patterns - 5 days)
- Windows Graphical User Interface Design (5 days)
- Introduction to Windows Interface Design (2 days)
- Internet Networking (3 days)
Publications
These are listed under articles and books.
