Happy New Year everyone!

Here at Optimal Usability we are currently in the throes of our yearly strategic planning. It’s an important and exciting time of the year. Here’s what we have in store for 2006:

Reports. To date we’ve focused mainly on the consultancy side of our business. This has meant we’ve amassed a sizeable amount of experience in specific industries, with particular technologies. As a result, we tend to see the same mistakes repeated over and over. We are now compiling industry and technology specific reports to outline these common issues, and how to resolve them.

Training. Our training was a hit last year, and this year we are ramping up. We believe that for an organisation to be truly user centred, the skills need to come from within. So we’re working on a number of courses this year, which we will be presenting in public and in-house seminars. The courses are designed to be very practical. For example, a user testing course we ran with the Department of Conservation late last year saw them in training one day, and successfully running their own user tests the next.

IVR design. We are very passionate about the future of automated phone systems. You know that a technology is rich for improvement when it leads to a phenomenon called "phone rage". One of our resolutions is to work more in this area.

Free Presentations. These will continue in 2006. It is very rare that we charge for these hour-long, in-house presentations. We see it as an investment in our own future, and are always happy to preach the usability gospel. Unfortunately, here in New Zealand the awareness of usability isn’t as high as it is overseas. If you’d like for us to speak to your group, please give us a call. (You can see the sort of presentations we give online at http://www.optimalusability.com/presentations.php)