Usability Workshops

Upon completing this tutorial, you will have an understanding of the range of methods in the usability toolbox and when in the project to apply each method. You will also be able to budget for a usability process and conduct cost-benefit analyses to compute the return on investment for your usability budget. Finally, you will know how to prioritize usability resources and obtain maximum effects from even small budgets for fast projects.

Nielsen Norman Group

Learn how to collect data from user testing of a proposed design before you have written a single line of code or generated a full set of content.

Low-fidelity prototyping is one of the best and most cost-effective methods of gaining design insight and direction early in the design process. This method allows you to identify major navigation and usability problems before your company spends enormous amounts of time and money developing and coding user interfaces. Participants will learn the value, cost benefits, and time savings of paper prototypes, how to introduce paper prototypes into the design cycle, how to create low-fidelity paper prototypes and mock-ups, how to plan and run usability studies with paper prototypes, and how paper prototypes foster teamwork across multidisciplinary teams.

This technique is especially suited for early testing of alternative homepage designs, but any screen-based user interface can benefit from low-fidelity prototyping, including complete websites and intranets.

Nielsen Norman Group

Field studies are the best way to learn about your customers’ goals and needs. Visiting people in their own environment can help you learn very different kinds of information from that collected in usability labs or other methods. So why have so few companies perfected the field studies method? Probably because of one or a combination of the following reasons: 1) not understanding the importance of this method, 2) planning and conducting these studies is new and foreign to them, 3) misconceptions that it is too time-consuming or expensive, or 4) they have tried field research but were unsuccessful in interpreting the piles of data collected. This tutorial will help solve these problems, leading participants through lecture and exercises. After taking this workshop, participants will be able to conduct their own successful field studies.

Nielsen Norman Group

Usability tests are an excellent way to learn about the ease-of-use of your website or product. Watching people work and analyzing their behavior will help you understand how users work with a design. This understanding will help you define ways to improve your designs. In doing these studies, you will learn about defining your target user profile, writing usability test tasks, preparing testers and observers, conducting and observing usability tests, and analyzing the results.

After this workshop, you will be able to conduct your own user tests in the future and you will never have to pay us a dime again.

Nielsen Norman Group