Application Usability 2: Workflow Design

• Amsterdam: Thursday, April 26

Garrett Goldfield
Full-Day Training Course

When building an application, one rule applies above all others: If users are to succeed, they must be able to effectively navigate your UI. This holds for all applications—whether you’re building a complex business workflow suite or designing a Flash applet to display ecommerce product-configuration options.

Keeping such requirements and challenges in mind, this course uses real-world examples and results from our user testing to show you not only how to develop effective interface components, but how to assemble them into highly usable and coherent designs. When you accomplish both, users can engage in a dialog with the application. They quickly understand what they need to do and how to do it, and can feel confident that they’ve completed their tasks successfully.

This seminar moves beyond understanding UI components (as covered in Application Usability 1), and shows you how to apply UI components to create more effective flows for different tasks.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn:

• Application Development Lifecycle
• Big applications, little applications and everything in-between
• Principles for diagnosing and overcoming usability challenges
• Methods for choosing and integrating the right flows into your applications, drawing on diverse product examples
• How to address internationalization issues and accessibility concerns

Course Outline

• User-centered application design
  • Tasks versus technology
  • Techniques for determining how users work: Users aren’t designers, but they can help
  • What users say vs. what they do
  • Task analysis
  • Turning user tasks into applications
• Four key workflow concepts explained
  • Smart defaults
  • Control vs. being led
  • Progressive disclosure
  • Inductive UI
• Workflow structures: Design considerations for different task types
  • Cyclical tasks
  • Checklists and Forms
  • Answering known questions
  • Iterate/problem solve to find answers
  • Respond to an anomaly event
  • Researching and Buying
• Specific guidelines by application type
  • Wizards
  • Native applications
  • Hosted (client/server and Web) applications
  • Ecommerce applications
  • Collaborative workflow
  • Complex problem solving
  • Mini-applications (applets), ephemeral applications
• Application usability guidance
  • Making the UI seem fast and responsive
  • Archiving, Printing and Saving
  • International and multi-language considerations
  • Accessibility concerns
• Integrating a website and an associated application
  • Maintaining user experience continuity
• Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)
  • Tools, techniques, users: User-comprehension issues/how to teach your visitors what your RIA does
• Customized Applications
  • Catering to novices and experts in one UI
  • How too much information can dilute the effectiveness of the primitives and patterns in your UI
• Designing for user experience
  • Design is everyone’s responsibility

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures, exercises, and discussion.

Course Materials

Copies of all presentation slides

Who Should Attend

Whether you’re designing applets for a website or creating a full-blown enterprise application, the fundamental guidelines described in this full-day session will help you better understand your users’ needs and thus create more efficient and effective applications.

Designers, program managers, usability engineers, and developers can all benefit from this guidance, as the class covers interaction design and task analysis along with guidelines. No prior knowledge of usability methods is assumed, and the day is intended to appeal to all disciplines. The focus is on how users experience applications, so we won’t discuss code samples and you don’t need a programming background.

This tutorial does assume knowledge of the user experience implications of basic design components for applications, such as buttons, scrolling, notification dialogs, and windows. This information is covered in the companion tutorial, Application Usability 1: Page-Level Building Blocks for Feature Design.

See Also:

This tutorial is the sequel to Application Usability 1: Page-Level Building Blocks for Feature Design, which covers the page-level components of dialogue design. Each of the tutorials is a full-day, self-contained seminar that you can take independently. Taken together, however, they’ll cover the full range of usability issues encountered in application design. If you’re designing for mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android, or iPad, consider our specialized seminar on Touchscreen Apps Usability.

Instructor

Garrett Goldfield is a User Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group, where he consults with clients in a broad range of industries, including ecommerce, automotive, health care, finance, media, telecommunications, education, and nonprofits, as well as highly specialized B2B sites. Previously, Garrett managed the User-Centered Design group for Intuit's Tax Division, focusing on incorporating UCD processes within Intuit's development cycle for TurboTax software and its Web applications. Prior to working at Intuit, Goldfield worked at General Electric’s Information Systems Division, where he conducted ground-breaking work in ecommerce interactions for marketplace transactions; and at The Aerospace Corporation, where he pioneered standards for HCI telemetry data presentation for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. Goldfield's research focuses on usability testing, contextual inquiry, and ethnographic user studies. He has also published and presented on cost justification and ROI for usability practices, brainstorming methodologies, analysis, and interpretation of qualitative user data.