Syntagm > Design for Usability | William Hudson

William Hudson, MSc, Mem ACM, Mem UPA

William Hudson consults, writes and teaches in the fields of user-centred design and usability. He has over 30 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.

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 customers include the BBC, Barclay’s Bank, the Department of Trade and Industry, with many regular expert reviews of FTSE 100 companies being conducted on behalf of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum.

(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)

Technologies

• Adobe: Acrobat, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere
• General: Bluetooth, C++, CGI, CSS, DHTML, DNS, Digital Video (DV), DVD, embedded systems, HTML, Java, Javascript, Perl, TCP/IP, wireless LAN (WiFi, WLAN), Unified Modeling Language (UML), use cases
• Macromedia: Dreamweaver Studio
• Microsoft: Exchange Server, Office, SQL Server, Visual C++, Visual Studio .NET, Windows 2003 Server, Windows API, Windows PocketPC, Windows XP
• IBM/Rational: Rose, Rational Unified Process
  

Techniques

• Affinity diagraming
• Card sorting
• 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

Courses Developed or Taught

• Card Sorting for Navigation Design (half 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.