Focusing on user experience (UX) can differentiate a company from its competitors. In one day, we give you a thorough overview of the user experience field and its many components. You will learn the importance of a user-centered design process and the benefit of incorporating UX activities at every stage of a project.

This course is ideal for people who are beginning to work in user experience or have some knowledge of the field. It clarifies what UX professionals do, and need to do, to create good, usable designs. 

Benefits

• Understand the purpose and roles of UX professionals throughout a project lifecycle
• Know when to apply which research methods and how to use the data to improve design
• Assess your organization’s commitment to UX
• Learn tips for promoting UX as a competitive advantage

Topics covered

• Business value of UX design
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and usability metrics
  • Budgets for usability
  • Return on Investment (ROI)
  • Making the business case for UX
• Foundation of user experience
  • Defining key terms and understanding the relationships among them, such as: user experience (UX), usability, utility, usefulness, user centered design (UCD), human factors, human-computer interaction (HCI), user interface (UI), graphical user interface (GUI), natural user interface (NUI), eyetracking gaze plot and heat maps, cross-channel design, responsive web design, emotional design, information architecture (IA), visual/graphic design, interaction design (IxD), search engine optimization (SEO), content strategy, accessibility, and more
  • Learning from product design
• Understanding people
  • Age and gender differences
  • Cognitive aspects of user behavior
  • Designing for the initial experience compared to supporting skilled performance
  • Growth in user expertise over time and learning curves
  • People with disabilities
• User research methods and when to use them
  • Conducting studies in usability labs
  • Setting up your own “lab”
  • Remote usability studies
  • Eyetracking costs and benefits
  • Field studies, site visits, and ethnography
  • Surveys and focus groups
  • Customer satisfaction scores
  • A/B and multivariate testing
  • Site analytics
  • Qualitative vs. quantitative methods
  • Outsourcing or doing it yourself
• History, trends, and challenges for UX
  • Adaptive content and responsive web design
  • Evaluating UX research, articles, and blogs
  • User and system control
  • Graphical user interfaces and direct manipulation
  • Touch screen, gestural, and spatial interfaces
• Integrating usability with the project lifecycle
  • Traditional development processes and UX
  • Agile methods and UX
  • Personas and scenarios
  • Cross-platform and transmedia design
  • Design guidance: UI standards, design patterns, usability guidelines, platform conventions, and vendor style guides
  • Durability of usability guidelines
  • Iterative design and prototyping
• UX job roles and titles
  • Who should conduct research: Designers or dedicated experts?
  • How to evaluate consultant quality
  • Building a UX team
  • Fitting UX within your organization
  • Being effective as the sole UX person in a company or group
  • Transitioning into a UX role
  • UX degrees and certifications
• Stages of organizational UX maturity
  • Degree of UX commitment at your organization
  • What to expect as your organization goes through the next step of UX maturity
  • Choosing high-impact projects to drive personal and organizational growth
• Differences in UX emphasis between types of products
  • Websites vs. intranets
  • Mission-critical apps vs. consumer apps
  • Desktop vs. mobile
  • Software vs. physical products

Format

The basis of the course is a lecture format with a couple of group exercises to reinforce the learned principles and guidelines.

The course also includes:

• Findings from our own usability studies
• Videos from usability testing of people's behavior in response to a design
• Screenshots of designs that work and don’t work
• Opportunities to ask questions and get answer