Syntagm Ltd

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 been developing interactive systems since the early 1970s, initially with a background in software engineering. William was the product and user interface designer for the Emmy-award-winning "boujou"; an indispensable tool in early CGI 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 a variety of organizations, including QA Training, the Nielsen Norman Group and extensively for the IxDF. William is the founder and principal consultant of Syntagm, a consultancy specializing in the design of interactive systems established in 1985.

William Hudson

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 has been an Associate Lecturer in Computing at the Open University and 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 software package for the special effects industry which has been praised for its ease of use. Boujou allowed computer special effects to be merged with live film footage with little or no manual intervention, creating some challenging user interface design 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, Unilever and Vicon Motion Systems.

Usability evaluation customers 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

Techniques

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

Conferences and Courses (since 2000)

2020
Open University M811 Information security (with merit)
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)
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)

Publications

These are listed under articles; see also his book Lighting the Road Ahead.

William Hudson on LinkedIn