UE Design Workshop
Customer Research Workshop
UE Design Evaluation
UE Design Consulting
UE Leadership Coaching & Interview Help
UE Process Improvement
Partner: Kyrie Robinson
UE Design Workshop - Redwood Shores, Sept 8-9, 2008
UE Design Workshop
Essential Lessons in Interaction Design - A 2 day workshop tailored to your organization’s user experience design needs.
Many people can identify a terrific user interface design when they see it. We are all customer and users, and we interact with products all the time, so it is easy to think therefore that anyone can also create a good design. But designing a product from a “blank sheet of paper” or trying to address a problematic design is a serious challenge, and requires very specific skills and techniques. A great user interface appears effortless, almost invisible, and allows the product functionality to shine through.
This UE Design Workshop will help your product design team learn to create great designs. It is targeted at UI designers, but may include product managers or lead engineers in smaller organizations who are filling the role of UI designer.
Participants will leave the workshop with a deeper understanding of what separates a mediocre design from a great design, and how to achieve designs that customers love. Specifically, participants will learn:
- The role and responsibilities of great UI designers.
- How to create design principles specific to your company or product that serve as your “moral compass.”
- How to analyze the users tasks and needs and keep your designs focused.
- How to work effectively with product managers, engineers, and the executive team.
- Effective techniques and processes for approaching the design in a structured way. We will discuss site maps, workflow diagrams, wireframes,prototypes, product specifications. When are these techniques appropriate, how are they different, and how do you execute them effectively?
- When to enforce consistency, and when not to.
- How to bring personas in to the organization in a lightweight, effective way
- How to be discerning in evaluating potential designs.
- Subtle design mistakes and how to identify avoid them.
What makes this course different is that it is taught by people that have actually done the job and built the teams at some of the leading software companies in the world, including TiVo, Shutterfly, and eBay. Our instructors are proven, professional product organization leaders with a passion for building great products and developing great UI designers.
The course is designed in the form of a customized, on-site workshop prepared for your company's UE team, and may include product managers. It is designed around your company's roles and organizational structure, development process, your specific industry and competitive landscape, and your company culture.
The workshop is 2 days long, and the cost includes an advance day of interviews with staff and course customization. Course delivery is provided at your site, or location of your choice. Public workshops are also available if your organization or team has only 1 or 2 team members involved in the user experience and interaction design, and doesn’t need a custom-tailored approach.
For more information, contact Kyrie Robinson.
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Customer Research Workshop
A 2 day custom workshop tailored to your organization’s research needs.
Getting data from customers about proposed user interface designs and functionality is an extremely important activity for product development teams. Many executives know they should “do usability testing” or “do market research,” but they often lack the research staff who can plan and carry out the testing. This custom workshop teaches concrete skills and techniques that your product managers, lead engineers, and UI designers can use immediately to do customer research on their own. It covers the basics of talking to customers in efficient and unbiased ways, including such topics such as:
- What research techniques most appropriate for the early, mid, and late stages of product development.
- How to ask questions, how to listen, and how to translate what customers say into what it really means for your product.
- How to do lab and field usability tests, cognitive walkthroughs, task analysis, and persona development.
- Effective techniques for getting customer feedback during a beta test.
- How to create rapid online surveys that give you actionable insights.
- When to use focus groups (less often than you might think) and how to do them well when they are appropriate.
- Which questions lead somewhere interesting, and which questions lead nowhere.
- Techniques to quickly summarize your findings for the product team.
- If there is disagreement about a design approach, when should you use testing to choose the right approach?
The workshop emphasizes hands-on exercises, and includes group discussions of the current products and research needs within your organization. After the workshop, participants will be able to immediately proceed to execute effective customer research and get actionable data to accelerate your product development.
The workshop is 2 days long, and the cost includes an advance day of interviews with staff and course customization. Course delivery is provided at your site, or location of your choice.. Course delivery is provided at your site, or location of your choice. Public workshops are also available if your organization or team has only 1 or 2 team members involved in the user experience and interaction design, and doesn’t need a custom-tailored approach.
For more information, contact Kyrie Robinson.
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UE Design Evaluation
A 1-2 week intensive evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of your current user experience designs and recommendations for improvements.
Is your product as easy to use as it should be? Have you structured the product to match the user’s mental model and make it easy to learn? Are you designing the product to suit your target user? A design evaluation by a user experience professional who is outside your organization can bring a fresh perspective to these questions and help you identify barriers to your product’s success and adoption. An evaluation takes from 1-2 weeks, depending on the product, and includes a review of the product and interviews with key stakeholders to understand the vision and objectives. It also includes a written evaluation with recommendations of “quick wins” (highly leveraged, low cost changes) and “big wins” (more substantial, far reaching changes that will have big impact). An evaluation may optionally extend to include interviews with current or potential users, and/or a review of existing user research.
Design evaluations are valuable both for startup companies with new products and for established companies with new offerings. If more work is needed, we also offer more extensive UE Design Consulting (see below).
For more information, contact Kyrie Robinson.
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UE Design Consulting
Direct, hands-on assistance with your User Experience Design.
A good UE design direction in the early stages of product development is one of the most important investments that a product team can make. If your early users love your product (whether they are beta customers or first-at-launch), they are very likely to refer their friends and colleagues. Positive early press reviews can make or break a product. And a strong UE architecture will, in the long run, save development time.
It is often hard to justify a full-time designer for a fledgling company or new product idea within a larger company. UE Design Consulting can help during this phase by providing an overall UE framework, wireframes of key workflows, site maps, product specifications, and a UI Style Guideline. We can also work with prototypers to quickly create prototypes of the wireframes and visual designs, and then conduct (or teach your product managers how to conduct) rapid rounds of user feedback sessions to get critical, early feedback on the designs. If needed, we can source and manage visual designers to create or extend your brand designs.
Unlike other consultants, we work in house, collaborating side-by-side with the product team to make sure that these early designs consolidate ideas from the whole product team, are workable within the technical constraints and staffing constraints, and meet the objectives of the overall product vision.
For more information, contact Kyrie Robinson.
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UE Leadership Coaching & Interview Help
Retained service to make your UE Leaders more effective, and build a stellar team.
User Experience senior leads, managers or directors have unique challenges in an organization. They usually report into the marketing or engineering organization, which means that their direct manager probably does not have hands-on experience creating UI or visual designs, and may not understand their work process or be able to offer advice or guidance in certain domains. UE managers and directors also are often called upon to manage a very diverse set of UI designers, visual designers, user researchers, prototypers and technical writers, each with different skills and needs. It can be awkward for someone who has never done visual design themselves to interview, hire, and manage a visual designer, for example. Finally, User Experience is inherently “political” within an organization – everyone from the CEO on down has an opinion about the designs, and managing this input requires the right approach.
I have been a UE manager, director, and executive for successful companies here in Silicon Valley for 15 years, and have faced these issues. I had the privilege of working for and being mentored by several executives who deeply understood the details of designing powerful user experiences, and advocating for them within an organization. This experience was invaluable to me as I worked in these roles. Now I offer the same coaching and mentorship for User Experience leads, managers and directors, especially those who recently took on more responsibility, are new to an organization, or are facing a particular challenge.
For those organizations that are still looking for their UE leads or management, I also help write effective job descriptions, screen, interview and recruit strong, talented candidates, and then coach them through the first months in the organization.
For more information, contact Kyrie Robinson.
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UE Process Improvement
UE development process and organizational design
Are you struggling with iterative vs waterfall UE development? Trying to define a more structured approach to UE design? What steps should the UE team take, in what order, with what milestones?
We can help you structure your UE development process and come up with something that creates designs quickly and consistently, yet works well in your company culture and utilizes the skills of your staff.
An process roadmap takes from 2-3 weeks, depending on the organization and current processes, and includes a review of the current process, interviews with key stakeholders to understand the vision and objectives, and process design meetings with the team. It also includes a written process workflow with milestones and the deliverables/contributions for each role. Lastly, once we have defined the appropriate UE development process, we will work with you to educate the rest of the product team as to what the process and milestones are, what they can expect at each step, and how they will contribute and interact with the UE group to get the product designed, built, and delivered.
For more information, contact Kyrie Robinson.
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