In-house Training

Available Workshops

Beyond Best Practices | Designing for Interaction | Business Value of Design | Mental Modeling

Beyond Best Practices

This two-day, hands-on workshop will take your user research, information architecture, interaction design practice to the next level.

Company Insight

Your design ideas are doomed unless you are aware of the business context in which it must survive. We will walk you through techniques for engaging with the business in order to ensure later design success.

User Research

It's essential to understand your audience in order to deliver them the best product. How do you achieve that understanding? We'll focus on two key methods: surveys and ethnographic interviews. Surveys provide quantitatively solid insight into the basic issues your product and brand might face. Ethnographic interviews allow you to dig deeper and develop insights that lead to true innovation.

Information Architecture

Information Architecture is not just for "content sites" anymore. Most every web product has content concerns, from the labeling of the features to the data that flows through it, that can be best handled through the application of information architecture techniques.

Interaction Design

This goes beyond interface design to consider the deeper interactions going on between users and a product or service. We'll discuss ways for designing and documenting these interactions, both within a web product and across multiple channels and touchpoints.

Designing for Interaction

Starting with a brief history of interaction design, we will cover the four approaches to interaction design; the elements, principles, and attributes of good interaction design; design research techniques; documentation; designing for multitasking, adaptation, and hacking; and service design.

Designing for Interaction is for new designers and anyone interested in interaction design, as well as more experienced designers who want a deeper view of and new practice methods.

After this workshop, you will be able to:

• Understand what interaction design is and what interactions are
• Learn the history of interaction design
• Use the four approaches to interaction design to create products and services
• Work with the "laws" and principles of interaction design
• Know what to look for and how to record design research
• Interpret design research
• Better document interaction designs
• Employ interaction design techniques while designing services
• Consider designing for multitasking, adaptation, and hackability
• Prepare for the future of interaction design

Business Value of Design

Based on Adaptive Path's research report Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience, this half-day session provides insights on how to make user experience design a tool for delivering business value — so that your Web team can get the resources and attention it deserves.

The impact of ROI extends well beyond its obvious benefits in making resource- allocation decisions. We will discuss how using ROI and other valuation methods helps evolve design competency within organizations. The valuation methods provide tools for developing and measuring a design strategy as a component of a larger business strategy. The ability to "value" user experience design makes it a visible and credible business lever on par with marketing, research and development, and channel strategy. As a result, your website can become a strategic lever for understanding the whole customer, influencing their online and offline behavior, and anticipating their future goals. ROI is a shift in organizational culture as much as it is a mathematical calculation.

This half-day workshop provides frameworks and analysis that will help you:

• Understand how to choose high-value, high-impact web development projects
• Evaluate web investments in the context of the larger corporate budget
• Internally advocate for user experience as a competitive advantage
• Optimize your business processes and organizational structure to better leverage your web site

The field of user experience is at a turning point — organizations that are able to understand the value of user experience will invest in ground-breaking projects, minimize waste on short-term fixes and abandoned projects.

Mental Modeling

Mental modeling allows you to make the leap from user research to the design process. This workshop presents how a mental model of users' tasks leads directly to the derivation of architecture and interaction. We will also show you how to create a map of gaps where your current product doesn't match user needs as well as how to assess your audience from a task perspective, rather than demographic or psychographic perspective.

Topics include:

• Common problems in information architecture
• Creating and adjusting task-based audience segments
• How to conduct effective non-directed interviews
• Distilling words into tasks through task analysis
• Visualizing this research as a mental model diagram
• How to perform gap analysis on your current offerings
• How to derive navigation from the mental model diagram
• Building wireframes that match interactions in the mental model diagram