User Experience (UX) Basic Training: Usability Week 2012 Conference

This is the one UX training course to rule them all: in one day, we give you a full overview of user experience and its many components. Best of all, we teach you how the pieces go together.

What You’ll Learn

The lingo — stop being mystified or alienated by UX terminology
The benefits of User Centered Design (UCD)
The main usability research methods — why and when to use them
The planning process — how to establish and scale UX activities for your project

Course Outline

Definition of User Experience
- Defining key terms, such as: user experience (UX), usability, utility, usefulness, user centered design (UCD), usability engineering (UE), human factors, ergonomics, human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-human interaction (CHI), user interface (UI), graphical user interface (GUI), natural user interface (NUI), emotional design, information architecture (IA), visual/graphic design, interaction design (IxD), industrial design (ID), search engine optimization (SEO), content strategy, and accessibility
- The relationships among these concepts
Why Care about UX?
Understanding People: User Characteristics
- Age differences, gender differences
- Degrees and dimensions of user experience and skill
  - Designing for initial experience vs. supporting skilled performance
  - Growth in user expertise over time and learning curves
- International users
- Users with disabilities
History, Trends, and Challenges for User Experience
- User control vs. system control
- Commands and dialog design
- Full-screen design
- Graphical user interface and direct manipulation
- 1990s to now: software design to Web design
- Touch screens
- Gestural and spatial UIs, agents, and ambient UIs
- Future user interfaces
- Learning from the design of everyday things
Emotion and Design
- Don Norman’s 3-level model:
  - Visceral
  - Reflective
  - Behavioral
Business Value of User Experience
- Key performance indicators (KPI) — usability metrics
- Budgets for usability — how to assess UX risk management needs
- Return-on-Investment (ROI) — cost-benefit analysis
- Making the business case for UX — bottom-up and top-down approaches
User Research Methods and When to Use Them
- User testing: in a usability lab vs. simplified studies
- Where to do the research
- Remote studies
- Eyetracking: worth the cost?
- Field studies, site visits, and ethnography
- Surveys and focus groups
- Customer satisfaction scores
- A/B testing and multivariate testing
- Analytics
- Qualitative vs. quantitative methods — how many users?
- When to use which methods
- Outsourcing vs. doing it yourself
Integrating Usability with the Project Lifecycle
- Traditional development processes and UX
- Agile methods and UX
- Personas and scenarios
- Incorporating user research data into actual design
- Cross-platform and transmedia design
- Design guidance: UI standards, design patterns, usability guidelines, platform conventions, and vendor style guides
- Iterative design and prototyping
- Combining usability methods: triangulation and the relationship between empirical studies and design guidance
- Introducing and promoting new features and product releases
UX Job Roles and Titles
- Who can/should do user research: the designers themselves or a dedicated expert?
- How to evaluate consultant quality
- Building a UX team
- Being effective as the sole UX person in a company or development group
- Transitioning into a UX role
- Do UX practitioners need degrees or certifications?
Stages of Organizational UX Maturity
- Strategic vs. tactical user experience initiatives
- 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
Judging UX Research, Articles, and Blogs
- How to determine what to believe
- Durability of usability guidelines: what changes, what stays the same?

Format

This full-day training course includes lectures, video highlights from user testing, and some exercises.

Course Materials

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend

Anybody who works on a project that has a user interface: websites, intranets, applications, mobile sites/apps/devices, consumer electronics, and so forth. Executives, managers, program managers, project managers, developers and engineers, marketers, technical writers, copywriters, educators, courseware designers, etc.
People who are just getting into the user experience field, because the course clarifies what UX professionals do (and need to do) to attain good, usable designs. After this broad-based training s eminar, you’ll better understand what you read on the Web, because you can place the various bloggers’ isolated thoughts into a broader context.
This course is not targeted at experienced usability specialists, interaction designers, information architects, visual designers, or other user experience professionals who already know the foundations of the UX discipline. Even they may find the seminar useful, however, because it places concepts that they already know in a broader context.
Managers and mid-career UX staff will benefit from seeing how our experienced speakers present and structure the material: this tutorial will make it easier to explain user experience to non-UX people back at the office.

What This Course is — and is Not

This course aims to teach you how to think about user experience and to provide the conceptual foundation to facilitate further learning. This course does not teach the detailed steps to design your product or to do user research, however. Our additional seminars delve into those topics in more detail and are recommended additions to your user experience training. For specific guidance, see the Related Courses section below.

Related Courses

Virtually any of the bullet items in the course outline could be a full-day course of its own. In fact, many such in-depth courses are offered at this very conference, so please check the agenda for your preferred city. The following offer more-detailed, but still basic, training in key user experience topics:

Instructors

Kara Pernice is the Managing Director at Nielsen Norman Group. She has more than 20 years of experience in UX design and research, 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 has led many of NN/g’s intercontinental research studies and generated the resulting design guidelines. She coauthored the book Eyetracking Web Usability as well as many other research reports, including Designing Corporate Intranets, Designing for Accessibility, Designing for People Over the Age of 65, and Designing Websites to Maximize Press Relations. She judged the submissions for and coauthored NN/g’s its Intranet Design Annuals since 2001 (2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, and Government Intranets Report). She is a leading authority on intranet usability and eyetracking usability (The Wall Street Journal called her “an intranet guru”). She has also done extensive research in evaluating emotion and design, given presentations on a wide range of topics, and worked with clients in various industries, including publishing, entertainment, technology, finance, pharmaceuticals, and government. She has more than 20 years of experience in UX design and research, 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. Presenting in Amsterdam.

Marieke McCloskey is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. She works with clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials about user experience, usability research methods, writing for the Web, Intranet design, and the psychology of users. McCloskey has conducted usability studies, including eyetracking, in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. She has been a researcher and co-author of several NN/g reports, including College Students on the Web and Intranet Usability Guidelines Before joining NN/g, McCloskey was an Information Architect in the Digital Media Group at the National Football League, where she worked on several large-scale website redesign projects. She has also worked as a psychometrician at Massachusetts General Hospital. McCloskey holds an M.A. in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University, where she explored the use of neuroimaging to study human behavior and cognition, and a B.S. from University College Utrecht, in The Netherlands. McCloskey is based in Los Angeles, California. Presenting in Amsterdam and Chicago.