usability testing

This full day workshop will provide you with a thorough overview and understanding of user experience design. It will cover a range of fundamental UX skills that can be applied to all types of project – websites, web applications, traditional applications and mobile. It will be theoretical and practical and allow you to immediately apply ideas to your projects.

This workshop will cover:

• What user experience design is and why it is important to do it in a deliberate way (i.e. people will have an experience no matter what – you want them to have a particular type of experience)
• Understanding people: conducting user research and usability testing
• Communicating about people (personas and other methods)
• Deciding what to design (scenarios, business needs, mental modelling)
• Sketching and iterative design
• Creating prototypes to communicate design
• Making sure what gets built is right

The workshop will be at the level of an ‘advanced intro’, covering the basics and also allowing exploration of key challenges and issues. The format is a combination of short lectures, group discussion and hands-on activities. Extensive notes and resources will be provided for further personal exploration.

Learning objectives

After the workshop, the participants will have:

• An understanding of how to learn about people and communicate about them to others
• Core design principles that can be used for any project and any technology
• Understanding of how to apply principles to a real project
• Hands‐on experience with key techniques
• Shared skills with other practitioners

This full-day workshop teaches a set of fundamental principles about humans, useful for all types of design work – information architecture, interaction design, visual design and even industrial design.

In the workshop we’ll look at:

• How our visual system works
• Visual and cognitive attention, and how to grab them
• Limitations of memory and how it affects our designs
• Types of errors that people will make, why they make them, and how we can design for them
• How people make decisions, and how we can design for more informed decisions
• Socialness and how to design social interfaces
• Learning about people via user research
• Checking what we’ve designed to make sure it works (usability testing)

This will be a very practical workshop. To learn about the human attributes we’ll play games, look at fun examples of human behaviour, discuss the implications for design and sketch example interfaces. For user research and usability testing, we’ll discuss the principles and run a mini research session and usability test. You’ll leave with tons of practical skills to use on your next project.

You’ll also leave with a detailed workshop booklet, containing slides, additional explanation and follow-up reading.

This two-day interactive workshop will provide a thorough overview and understanding about how to effectively use information architecture to make your intranet or website as effective as possible. It will cover a wide range of information architecture issues such as the following:

• What information architecture is and how it can facilitate user experience
• Analysing and sorting content
• Carrying out user research: surveys, focus groups and card sorting
• Classifying, sorting and labelling within your information system
• Using wireframes and site maps: the ‘bread and butter’ tools of IA
• Navigating, indexing and designing page layouts
• Effectively carrying out your IA project: tips, tools, techniques and processes

In this keynote talk I talked about 3 things:

1. my take on where the practitioner user-centred design field is currently up to
2. a look at some of the neat apps practitioners are interested in (and I didn’t say web 2.0 once)
3. what I think we need to do to move forward

Presentation files

This presentation was for a software testing conference and discussed how to identify usability issues while undertaking software testing.

This article provides five techniques to identify likely usability problems in your intranet. Some techniques provide indications about where the main problems lie, others provide concrete evidence. Each technique can be used alone, or in combination to give you a rich picture of usability issues.

Published by Step Two Designs:  Five ways to identify intranet usability issues

Card-based classification evaluation is a technique for assessing the usability of a hierarchical classification or a set of categories.Originally published on Boxes and Arrows: Card-based classification evaluation