Usability in Practice: Three-Day Intensive Camp: Usability Week 2012Conference

After completing this three-day course, you’ll not only understand the fundamental role of usability and the methods for employing it, but also how to develop a sound usability plan for a design project and effectively execute that plan.

This intensive camp gives you the practical skills you need to recruit participants, conduct hands-on testing with real users, and turn your findings into action items for the design team.

Course Outline

Introduction
Usability’s role in design projects
- User-centered design and the dimensions of usability
- The relation between design and usability
- The usability toolbox: Primary usability methods
- The usability life cycle: Stages, and when to use which method
- Discount usability engineering: Faster methods with fewer resources
- The ethics of user testing or conducting other studies with human subjects
Planning and preparatory work
- Composing usability plans for a project and individual studies
- Writing test tasks
- Writing questionnaires
- Identifying and recruiting test participants
- Creating user profiles
- The three dimensions of expertise
- Writing “screeners” to screen potential participants
- Working with recruiting agencies vs. doing your own recruiting
- Offering incentives
- Incentives for employees of your company
- Compensating customers and other external users
- Pilot testing
Facilitating usability tests
- Facilitation basics
- Bad user-testing habits and how to avoid them
- Recording observations and data
- Preparing and managing observers and the design team during test sessions
Analyzing findings
- Analyzing the data from usability studies
- Prioritizing usability problems
- How to write a usability report
- Quick findings vs. formal reports
Presenting usability findings
- Presenting usability recommendations
- Visualizing usability findings: Five ways of torturing a screenshot
- Using video in user experience practice and propaganda
- Using photographs
Additional usability methods
- Analytical usability: Usability inspection methods and heuristic evaluation
- How to combine methods for maximum effect
- Low-fidelity prototyping and other methods for getting user feedback quickly; lo-fi vs. hi-fi
- Iterative and parallel design
- Measurement studies and other quantitative methods, including simplified quantification
Where to conduct usability tests
- When testing in other cities or regions matters, and when it doesn’t
- Usability laboratories: Whether to build one, how to test without a lab, and what’s most important if you do build a lab
- Onsite testing
- Remote usability testing
Promoting and financing usability
- Usability budgets
- Cost-benefit analysis for usability return-on-investment (ROI) calculations
- Evangelizing usability to development teams, management, and customers
- Leveraging small usability teams or individual usability professionals in larger organizations
Specialized types of usability research:
- International studies
- Competitive studies
- Homepage usability and the first impression
- Out-of-the-box studies
- Intranet studies
- Longitudinal studies
- Special audience segments
  - Testing users with disabilities
  - Testing senior citizens
  - Testing children
- Testing content and writing
- Testing early versions and buggy implementations
- Testing big things (such as buildings and cars) and small things (such as mobile phones)
- Testing highly specialized applications that you don’t fully understand

Format

This tutorial is conducted over three full days. We highly recommended that participants attend all three days, because the progression of the material is highly integrated, with subsequent days building tightly on the previous days’ work. The event includes lectures, live user testing, videos of user testing, short exercises, in-depth exercises, and some homework for the first or second evening. (Don’t worry — we’ll leave plenty of time for dinner.) We draw test examples from websites, intranets, and Web-based applications, but you can apply the course methodology to traditional software development and consumer electronics.

Course Materials

Copies of all presentation slides

Who Should Attend

This camp is ideally suited for people who want to conduct usability studies within their own projects or who want to become user experience professionals, but have little prior experience. The course is also suited for people who have some practical usability experience, but no formal education in the field. It is less suited for usability specialists, unless they plan to teach their own course and want to learn how to communicate usability methodologies. The only course prerequisite is a general understanding of and familiarity with the Web, because we draw many of the teaching examples from websites.

A Note on In-House Presentation

Potential participants sometimes ask if we offer this seminar in-house. We designed this three-day camp experience to maximize the benefits and interplay between a diverse group of participants who bring contrasting types of experience and project histories, and hail from different types of companies. Given this, the Intensive Camp is not suited for presentation within a single company. (All of our other courses are available as in-house events.) If you have an entire team that needs to learn about usability, we recommend you instead consider our Three-Day Learning-By-Doing Workshop, which we’ve optimized as an in-house event, using an in-house team’s own project as the case study.

Instructors

Fifty years of combined professional usability experience will be at your disposal.

Jakob Nielsen is a Principal of Nielsen Norman Group. He is the founder of the “discount usability engineering” movement, which emphasizes fast and efficient methods for improving the quality of user interfaces. Nielsen, noted as “the world’s leading expert on Web usability” by U.S. News and World Report and “the next best thing to a true time machine” by USA Today, is the author of the best-selling book Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in 22 languages. His other books include Usability Engineering, Usability Inspection Methods, International User Interfaces, Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, and Prioritizing Web Usability. Nielsen’s Alertbox column on Web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 and currently has about 200,000 readers. From 1994 to 1998, Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. His previous affiliations include Bell Communications Research, the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

Hoa Loranger is a Director at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the San Diego office. Loranger has consulted with many large, well-known companies in such areas as finance, customer support, intranets, e-commerce, entertainment, and technology. She has conducted international usability research worldwide and has given keynote presentations and tutorials on a wide range of topics, including user testing, paper prototyping, and fundamentals of Web usability. She coauthored the book Prioritizing Web Usability (New Riders Press) and has written reports on design for Flash-based applications, investor relations, “about us” pages, B2B websites, location finders, and teens. Before joining NN/g, she served as human factors lead for Intuit’s Consumer Tax and Small Business Division, where her group was responsible for user-interaction and visual design for the TurboTax product line. At TRW (now part of Northrop Grumman), she specialized in both hardware and software systems, including navigational applications and computer configurations in military vehicles. Loranger earned an M.A. in human factors and applied experimental psychology from California State University, Northridge, and a B.A. in psychology from University of California, Irvine.

Amy Schade is a Director based in Nielsen Norman Group’s Chicago office. Schade works with clients internationally in telecommunications, e-commerce, government, travel, automotive, publishing, banking, non-profit and education, including extensive work on corporate intranets. She has conducted user research and performed reviews on a wide variety of websites in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia. She presents tutorials on user testing, intranet usability, writing for the Web, email newsletter usability and mobile usability. She authored the NN/g reports on intranet usability, intranet information architecture, email newsletters, and site map usability, as well as the 2010, 2011, and 2012 Intranet Design Annuals, and conducted many user test sessions for reports on accessibility and usability for senior citizens. Before joining NN/g, Schade was an information architect at Arc eConsultancy, where she created and revised architectures for sites ranging from a family-related content site to a transaction-based sponsorship marketplace. Schade has also held various positions in web production and advertising. She has a Master's degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a B.A. in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania.

Janelle Estes is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. She works with clients in a variety of industries and presents regularly about usability methods, email newsletters, writing for the Web, and the user experience of nonprofit websites. She has been the primary researcher on and co-author of several NN/g reports, including email newsletters, transactional email messages, donation usability for non-profit and charity websites, and social media. Prior to joining NN/g, Estes was a research associate on the Customer Experience team at Forrester Research, where she was involved with many research efforts related to user experience and user centered design. Additionally, Estes has worked as a user experience consultant with companies across many industries, including retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and telecommunications. Most recently, Estes worked at Chordiant Software as a Human Factors Engineer in an agile development environment. Estes holds a BS in Information Design and Corporate Communication, and an MS in Human Factors in Information Design, both from Bentley University.