BOOST YOUR TEAM’S UX SKILLS WITH CUSTOMIZED TRAINING
I offer three signature courses, each fine tuned by over thirty years of teaching and industry expertise as a UX Consultant. My teaching approach emphasizes hands-on engagement, small group discussions, and practical learning. These courses can be combined and customized to suit your organization’s unique needs. They are available in remote, in-person, or on-the-job training formats. Every participant receives a comprehensive workbook for continued learning beyond the training.
No prerequisites are required—just willingness to work hard and a keen interest in learning how to capture insights for understanding your end user’s needs, context, tasks, and journey. Our diverse student base across all our training has included product designers, marketers, product managers, customer support, software engineers, writers and others involved in creating interactive websites and applications.
Students gain confidence by practicing what they learn via simulated role play and through actual sessions with outside participants. Often the workshops are blended with mentoring where I work with your team on a real project with real customers.
Your team will learn a variety of best practices and practical skills to gather human-level data through qualitative research. Specific skills include:
- Identifying research objectives
- How to structure studies and interviews
- Creating unbiased questions and probes
- Moderating interviews and usability studies
- Using projective techniques such as mapping and collage to gain a deeper understanding of the user’s world
- Recruiting techniques
- How to leverage online techniques such as diary studies and bulletin boards
- Developing questionnaires
The training includes
Live, customized and engaging instruction taught by an expert who has over two decades of experience in usability and training. A series of in-class projects that will help the student retain new information as they put their learning into action. We leverage projects from your organization so the learning is relevant. Each student receives a comprehensive workbook with a bibliography of learning materials and resource that will allow them to continue skill building once the class is over. If you intend to apply what you learn to an actual project within your organization, I provide thirty days of phone-based followup as needed.
PRINCIPLES OF USER EXPERIENCE RESEARCH
This three-day activity-based course introduces product teams to key User Experience (UX) research methods for systematically integrating the voice of the customer into product development. Through small group exercises students learn the range of UX/user research options for gathering insights from end users to improve product usability and relevance. UX Research techniques covered include recruiting techniques, how to do in-depth interviews, product walk throughs, task analysis, customer journey mapping and card sorting. Students learn how to work with stakeholders to identify study objectives, select the most appropriate research method to meet the information need, how to plan and design research activities to meet the team’s information need at various points in the product development lifecycle. The course also covers data collection, analysis, and reporting.
Download a detailed course description.
PRINCIPLES OF USABILITY TESTING
Immerse your team in a three-day, hands-on training experience. Acquire the skills to run effective usability studies, identify design frustrations, and enhance user success. Days one and two focus on the key skills for running a successful user study. In day three students apply these skills as they moderate their own study with a real participant. Topics include leveraging the heuristic review to identify usability issues, setting study objectives, task development, recruiting methods that deliver a diverse (but representative) set of participants, usability study moderation techniques, data collection, collaborative analysis, prioritization, and report writing. Applicable to both physical and digital products.
Download a detailed course description.
PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN THINKING
Discover the power of the Design Thinking framework (Research-Define-Ideate-Prototype-Test) to enhance team collaboration in this 12-hour workshop. Through hands-on experience, participants learn problem-solving skills and effective solution ideation. This workshop, spanning three four-hour sessions, covers problem identification, solution brainstorming, user interviews and observations, product and service idea generation, collaborative idea selection, prototyping, feedback gathering, and innovative group meeting facilitation. Ideal for professionals from any industry seeking team-oriented approaches to problem-solving.
Download a detailed workshop description.
Here’s some examples of how Usability Resource’s training was used to enhance team skills.
A young software company created an innovative and very successful product. They wanted to introduce UX/usability into their software development process but were unsure of how to do this without impacting their delivery schedule. They hired Usability Resources to run a series of user interface design workshops with their product management and development teams. Using the feature redesign as our focus, the team learned how to produce wireframes for the new feature, gather end user feedback, and produce a polished version that could go directly to production.
A large non-profit organization was in the process of redesigning their Intranet which would be accessed by employees worldwide. They wanted to make sure the Intranet had all the information staff needed and that it was easy to access information. They hired Usability Resources to deliver a 3-day training to their IT staff that focused on UX techniques that would help them create a site that works for different audiences.
Are you from a company with 100 or fewer Massachusetts employees?
Usability Resources Inc is an approved service provider for the Massachusetts Workforce Training Fund Express Program for the three classes we offer. This program provides 100% reimbursement for our training classes if your company is eligible. The goal of this program is to provide training resources that build employee skills and maintain the economic strength of small and medium-sized Massachusetts businesses. The reimbursement process is pretty straightforward: companies must have a current Certificate of Good Standing (COGS) from the MA Dept of Revenue, file an application and pay for the course in full at least three weeks before it begins. Please get in touch with express@commcorp.org with questions about the program.
“I loved how the instructor kept the class engaged – very powerful presentation due to the common sense approach she took to teaching”
“Kay’s great, very positive, great teacher!”
“Kay facilitates discussion very well, is encouraging while showing practical application”
“Great class and wonderful instructor. Enjoyed the format! Extremely knowledgeable and great to work with.”