Usability Resources offers customized courses in user research, user interface design, and usability testing. Our classes focus on teaching the main principles and providing pointers to where your staff can learn more to expand their skills. We also love to work with your team to help them put their new skills into action by mentoring them through a user interface design or usability testing project following this training.

We are continually updating and refining our modules, to keep them fresh and to match the ever-changing needs of our students. For over ten years we have taught these skills to busy IT professionals at Northeastern University, the Interactive Factory, and the New England Institute of Art, and in private industry.

User Research and Analysis
Understanding user groups and their goals is the bedrock of designing a usable online product. This first class will cover practical ways of learning about users, segmenting them, and developing robust user profiles (or personas). User profiling is a simple concept, but a critical one, because you need to make sure everyone on the development team agrees on who the end users are and on what their specific backgrounds, needs, goals, and tasks are.
We will use the profiles we develop as a jumping-off point for brainstorming and evaluating feature sets and content. We will take the profiles to learn how to construct a scenario in order to expose the most critical tasks each type of user will perform with the product. We will also look at other methods of understanding user goals and tasks, such as contextual inquiry and cognitive walkthrough. We use profiles and scenarios as a means to develop an information architecture for the product.
Depending on our client's desires, we also teach courses focused on specific qualitative research areas such as discussion-guide preparation and interviewing, organizing and executing a site visit, and user-research study design.

User Interface Design
In our modules on interface design we dig into the nitty-gritty of how to create useable and relevant online products. You’ll learn the fundamentals of user interface design, you’ll learn how to design online products for distinct roles, how to identify and organize and integrate application components so the user can perform a process beginning to end.
Depending on the client's needs, this class covers basic principles of Web, application, and portal page design. We’ll cover techniques for page design that facilitate ease of use (e.g., designing a page for scannability, presenting a hierarchy of information on a page). This class will introduce a method of documenting a design with Visio that uses hierarchy charts, individual screen designs, and behavior tables. The group exercise will involve designing role-based pages for an application.

Form Design and Usable Search
The final section of the user interface design series focuses on effective form and search design. We will start by learning the various form elements and when it is appropriate to use each. We will cover how to design forms that allow users to be productive and make fewer mistakes.
You’ll learn how to help people stay oriented as they complete a multi-step process. We’ll talk about how to design self-documenting forms through well-thought out field clustering, labels, and sections. We will discuss the need for confirmations, effective feedback, and error messages. The final section of this class examines how users search, and how search can be set up to work best with your content management system to meet the specific needs of your audience.

Usability Testing 1 - Planning the test
We start by defining a usability test and describing its benefits and limitations. You'll learn about the different types of usability tests, and when in the development cycle you might apply each. The first part of this course focuses on the tasks involved in planning for a test suite: defining the areas of concern, user groups. We cover both in-person and remote  (i.e., over the Internet using an application-sharing product) methods of usability testing.
We'll talk about user profiles, recruiting techniques, and surveys. You'll learn about metrics and the need to pinpoint how you will report your findings early in the testing cycle. We'll cover how to identify resources needed for the testing, creating the task list for the testing, and finally, how to put together a usability test plan. We teach pragmatic usability testing skills that your staff will be able to put in to practice immediately.

Usability Testing 2 - Administering and Reporting on a Test
This class will focus on gathering resources for the test, administering the test, and reporting results. You’ll learn about how to keep track of all the details involved in running tests. We’ll cover how to administer a test, collect data and interact with the participant.
You’ll learn straightforward techniques for including all stakeholders in the process. We will cover effective reporting, looking at different formats. Remote and live testing techniques will be covered.

Students receive a bibliography and handouts for all of the above courses.