Centigrade has announced that the company will take part in this year’s conference Mensch & Computer in Duisburg. Centigrade will contribute workshops to two of the four conference tracks.

The first workshop will take place on September 12th, 14:00 as part of the Entertainment Interfaces track. The topic will be “Using Game Design and Affective Evaluation to Improve User Experience and User Research”. The goals of this workshop are to provide an overview of available methods and techniques of evaluating game design and to foster a productive discussion on creating guidelines for studying users with affective evaluation methodologies. The „Entertainment Interfaces“ track organizers are Maic Masuch, Matthias Rauterberg and Joerg Niesenhaus.

Thomas Immich, Managing Director Centigrade GmbH: „We are glad to contribute to an event in this year’s European Capital of Culture, a few weeks after opening an office in Mülheim. We are especially happy to see a dedicated track for entertainment user interfaces. With our office located in the Games Factory Ruhr, we are physically close to the games industry, but we also know from our project experiences that there are important synergies between user interface design for business applications and game design. Joy of use, for example, is an important goal in all of our projects, be it in the industrial or in the consumer sector.“

Jörg Niesenhaus, Duisburg-Essen University: “The track Entertainment Interfaces provides a platform for researchers, developers and designers to exchange innovative ideas in the field of interactive entertainment and to discuss challenges for designing and evaluating interfaces of corresponding products.”

The second workshop will take place as part of the GermanUPA track on September 15th, 10:30 to 12:00. GermanUPA, the association of German usability professionals is concerned with the development of user-friendly and attractive interactive products, with the overall goal of making end users’ lives easier. Centigrade’s contribution, the tutorial “User Interface Prototyping Today – Throw Away or Recycle?” will be presented by Thomas Immich and explores the circumstances under which user inthttp://www.centigrade.de/de/news/wp-admin/edit.phperface prototypes should evolve into the final products and how this should be done.

Thomas Immich: Prototyping is one of the fundamental activities in modern user experience design as well as modern software engineering. Tools such as Expression Blend and XML-based languages such as XAML enable the UX designer to create user interface prototypes that are compatible to the technical environment of the final product. The workshop will explore participants’ needs regarding the re-use of prototypes and investigate criteria for answering the question: ‘Re-use or not?’. The workshop will also serve as occasion to discuss real-life examples.

The complete program of the two tracks Entertainment Interfaces and GermanUPA can be found on the official websites.

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