Usability Week 2008
New York
Apr 7-12		 London
May 19-24		 San Francisco
Jun 16-21		 Melbourne
Jul 21-26

Usability In Practice: 3-Day Intensive Camp

  • New York: Monday-Wednesday, April 7-9
  • London: Monday-Wednesday, May 19-21
  • San Francisco: Monday-Wednesday, June 16-18
  • Melbourne: Monday-Wednesday, July 21-23

3-Day Tutorial

After completing this 3-day course, you’ll not only understand usability’s fundamental role and the methods for employing usability, 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
    • Usability inspection methods and heuristic evaluation: analytical usability
    • How to combine methods for maximum effect
    • Low-fidelity prototyping and other fast 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
    • Card sorting
    • 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 3 full days. We highly recommended that participants attend all 3 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.

Handouts:

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.

In-House Presentation:

Potential participants sometimes ask if we offer this seminar in-house. We designed this 3-day camp experience to maximize the benefits and interplay between a diverse group of participants—many with contrasting types of experience and project histories, and hailing from numerous 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 3-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:

50 years of combined professional usability experience at your disposal.

photo of Jakob Nielsen 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.
photo of Kara Pernice Kara Pernice is the Director of Research at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the company’s East Coast operations. She has led many of NN/g’s major intercontinental research studies, generated the resulting design guidelines, and coauthored several reports, including designing corporate intranets, designing for accessibility, designing for people over the age of 65, and designing websites to maximize press relations. She is a leading authority on intranet usability and eyetracking usability (The Wall Street Journal called her “an intranet guru”). She judged the submissions for and coauthored NN/g’s government intranets report and its Intranet Design Annuals in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, and 2007. She has also done extensive research in evaluating emotion and design. has given presentations on a wide range of topics, and has worked with clients in various industries, including publishing, entertainment, technology, finance, pharmaceuticals, and government. She has more than 15 years of experience in evaluating usability, and has established successful usability programs at Lotus Development, Iris Associates (an IBM subsidiary), and Interleaf. She chaired the Usability Professionals’ Association 2000 and 2001 conferences, and served as 2002 conference advisor. She holds an M.B.A. from Northeastern University and a B.A. from Simmons College.
photo of Amy Schade Amy Schade is a User Experience Specialist based in Nielsen Norman Group’s New York office. Schade has worked with clients internationally in music, insurance, travel, banking, education, and e-commerce industries, and has conducted user testing and performed reviews on a wide variety of websites and intranets in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She presents tutorials and workshops on user testing, intranet usability, writing for the Web, and email newsletter usability. She co-authored the NN/g reports on intranet usability, intranet information architecture, email newsletters, and site map usability, and has conducted many of the 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 new media and advertising. She has an M.A. from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.