UX Australia 2009

What does it take to Design with the business and users in mind? How do we know if what we design will succeed in the market? How do we think about compelling User Experiences in the first place? How do we ensure we are constantly improving our designs going forward?

Join Dan and Gerry on a “practical” and fun workshop to show you end to end UX tools you can use in your projects to ensure that Usability (and User Centered Design thinking) is being implemented towards making successful products and services. This includes everything from understanding UX, to research (understanding your customers), to design (designing with and for your customers and business stakeholders) to evaluation (seeing if what you designed actually works well for your customers) and getting constant feedback along the way.

We will share plenty of project stories (successes & failures), arguments (where Dan and Gerry disagree), “Case Studies”, and hands on exercises to practice on the UX tools with plenty of time to ask questions. We will provide tips on selling UX in your organization and how to plan for UX as part of your organizational strategy. Oh, we also want to learn from you too! Finally, there will be a lucky draw where you could win copies of the “Usability Kit“, “Forms that Work” and “Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics“.

What will be covered

Introduction:

• About UX, usability and user-centered design
• Thinking critically about design (rapid hands-on exercise to analyze a website or product)
• Different pathways – how do people get started in this field?

Three components:

• Analysis, design and evaluation
• How these components are traditionally viewed, and how they can be blended
• Stories from real-world projects – how do you approach getting the right mix of components
• How the component mix depends on organizational knowledge and maturity

Analysis:

• What needs to be analyzed (business and user requirements, technical capabilities and constraints)
• Analysis techniques (questionnaires, interviews, site visits, diary studies, competitive analysis, stakeholder workshops)
• Communicating the results of analysis (personas, requirements)

Design:

• Everyone is a designer
• When to involve users, and when to exclude them
• Design Techniques (participatory design, wire-frames, card-sorting)
• Ensuring Analysis gets applied in Design
• Making design a repeatable activity
• Documenting designs so that products can be built

Evaluation:

•  The need to evaluate
• Techniques (review, testing, walkthroughs)
• How to choose a technique

Wrap-up:

• The Usability Kit and how to use it.

How it will be conducted

The workshop will be a mixture of:

• Some lecture (snippets of knowledge to get you thinking and not too much droning on from Dan and Gerry  [;)]
• Practical Exercises (to dive into a tool to practice)
• Creative Discussions (questions and some debate)

What you’ll go away with

You’ll leave with:

• Workbooks
• Questionnaires to use for web site planning meetings & strategy
• Sample “Usability Blueprints” to help when designing specific pages on a site
• Evaluation tools and templates