Syntagm > Design for Usability | William Hudson

William Hudson, MSc Software Engineering, Pgd Psych Research Methods

William Hudson is a User Experience Strategist who consults, writes and teaches in the fields of user-centred design, user experience and usability. He has over 45 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 indispensable 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 has developed and presented courses for the Nielsen Norman Group. William is the founder and principal consultant of Syntagm, a consultancy specializing in the design of interactive systems established in 1985.

William is the inventor and developer of a range of card sorting tools and techniques that are described in our Card Sorting pages. These tools and techniques are used by a wide range of design and usability agencies and consultants.

He holds an MSc in Software Engineering and a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychological Research Methods. William is an Associate Lecturer in Computing at the Open University and has acted as an Adjunct Professor in Digital Marketing for Hult International Business School.

Experience

William was the Director of User Experience for the Intranet Benchmarking Forum from 2002 to 2009. In that time he conducted more than 200 expert design reviews for clients ranging from AstraZeneca to Vodafone.

He was the 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.

In 2013 William developed and presented a series of 11 webinars to approximately 500 software engineers across the globe, for Misys Financial Solutions.

(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)
• Card Sorting, including an advanced cluster-analysis tool, SynCaps V3
• Cross-Platform Mobile Development with Cordova, HTML and JavaScript

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

William has written regularly for interactions magazine, the SIGCHI Bulletin and Usability News.

Conferences and Courses (since 2000)

2014	CHI 2014, Toronto (presented 2 courses)
	DevConFu, Latvia (presented workshops and seminar)
2013	CHI 2013, Paris (Courses Co-Chair, presented 2 courses)
	DevConFu, Latvia (presented workshops and seminar)
	University of Minnesota, Introduction to Recommender Systems, Java Programming Track, (attended 3-month MOOC, received a distinction)
2012	CHI 2012, Austin (conference webmaster, presented 2 courses)
2011	CHI 2011, Vancouver (presented 2 courses)
2010	UPA 2010, Munich (presented 2 courses)
2010	CHI 2010, Atlanta (presented 2 courses)
2009	CHI 2009, Boston (presented 3 courses and a short paper)
2008	CADUI 2008, Spain (invited keynote speaker and workshop presenter)
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) 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)

Courses Developed (D) or Taught (T)

• Interaction Design for Usability (16 x video modules for the Interaction Design Foundation, D/T)
• Guerrilla XPM (Cross-Platform Mobile): online and 1-day face-to-face (D)
• Guerrilla UCD (16 x 90-minute webinars, D/T)
• Agile Requirements and UCD (1 day, D/T)
• Agile UX and UCD (1 day, D/T)
• Persona-Driven Development (2 days, D/T)
• Advances in Card Sorting (1 day, D/T)
• Ajax Design and Usability (1 day, D/T)
• Applied Techniques in Card Sorting (half day, D/T)
• Usability and Interaction Design (1 day, D/T)
• Web Design for Usability (1 day, D/T)
• User-Centred Design with Use Case and Agile Methods (1 day, D/T)
• Internet Networking (3 days, D/T)
• Object-Oriented Design using C++ (advanced C++, UML and patterns, 5 days, T)
• Windows Graphical User Interface Design (5 days, T)
• Introduction to Windows Interface Design (2 days, D/T)

Publications

These are listed under articles and books.