Train Your Team: Usability and User Research Workshops

The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams know the right information, it's easier to design successful and usable designs. When they don't, every little design decision becomes a painful struggle.

At Perfetti Media, we focus on providing design teams with everything they'll need to truly understand their users. Perfetti Media's Founder, Christine Perfetti, is a nationally recognized expert and public speaker on the topics of user research techniques and usability testing best practices.

We offer a variety of full-day workshops to suit your needs. To learn how we can help you, please contact us right away.

Usability Bootcamp: Getting Your Team Onboard (Two day workshops)

Boston dates: August 5-6, 2010 and San Francisco dates: August 19-20, 2010

The most successful design teams gather ongoing and consistent feedback from their users. While many teams come to Perfetti Media for usability testing consulting services, our research shows that the best way to evaluate designs is to conduct the usability tests in-house. That's right – you don't need us! To accomplish this, it's essential to provide your design team with the skills to assess their own designs.

Throughout 2010, Perfetti Media will offer 2-day public courses that provide you and your team with all of the techniques and tools necessary to conduct usability tests without us. We also offer the Usability Testing Bootcamp privately for organizations when requested.

After attending this 2-day Bootcamp, your design team will have all of the skills necessary to conduct their own tests. As part of the Usability Testing Bootcamp, Perfetti Media offers an additional day of follow-up phone coaching.

Field Studies: The Best Technique for Discovering User Needs (One day workshop)

When it comes to your users, do you really know what they want? Many design teams tell us they are missing key information to get into their users' mind. Without this information, the designs fall short of delighting their users.

If you’re unsure whether you’re getting the most from your user research, one of the most powerful tools is the field study. Field studies immerse your team in the users' environment, where they can observe critical details about the users that just isn't possible with other techniques.

In this full-day workshop, you will learn how to plan your field research, recruit participants, conduct interviews, and analyze the data. You will come away from this workshop having the tools to learn amazing things about how your users behave and giving you incredible insight into how to design your products.

Building Your Personas (One day workshop)

Are you designing for too many different users? Do you struggle to create higher quality products? Is your team having difficulty agreeing on the best design to satisfy users? 

Personas are a very powerful tool to help teams vastly improve their designs. In a successful persona project, teams have a firm understanding of their users' needs and can successfully communicate these requirements throughout the organization.

In this workshop, we will walk you through a proven and easy-to-learn method for developing personas. You'll learn how to conduct rigorous field research, analyze the user data, build the personas and scenarios, and communicate the personas throughout your organization.

Usability Testing Basics: Just the Essentials (One day workshop)

To get the most out of every usability test and make the biggest impact on your designs, it's essential to learn the fundamentals of usability testing. Christine Perfetti has helped dozens of companies and agencies bring usability testing into their processes. If you're just starting out with usability tests, you'll learn insightful tips and effective techniques from her years of experience. In this seminar, you'll learn:

• How to set up your usability testing lab, including an overview of a typical test set-up
• How to recruit the right users to get the most accurate test results
• How many users are necessary for a usability test
• The basics of task design, including the different types of tasks: verb-based tasks, scavenger hunt tasks, and interview-based tasks
• How to become a better facilitator including how to communicate with the users and the test observers
• How to collect the test results and evaluate what makes an effective report

Advanced Usability Testing Techniques (One day workshop)

In this seminar, we will show you advanced usability methods techniques only practiced by the most experienced usability professionals. Among the techniques you'll learn about:

• 5-Second tests: A popular low-tech technique to collect quick feedback on whether a screen or page's purpose is clear to the user.
• Inherent value tests: A two-phase test that explores the value loyal customers find in a product or service. In the first phase, loyal customers give guided tours of the design, explaining the value they find within. The second phase has first-time users interact with the design, trying to identify what value they can derive. Perfect for established products and services where new customer adoption is mysteriously low.
• Catalog-based tests: Perfect for organizations migrating offline content to the web, catalog-based tests help determine if key messages were lost during the translation.
• Interview-based tasks: An improvisational approach to task design where the participant and facilitator create the tasks together during the test session. Leads to tasks that are more representative of what real users do, however makes the analysis phase more complex

About the Instructor