Training
UX Design Essentials
User-centered design
Make it intuitive
Make it simple
Evaluating design
Workshop
February special
Enroll two people from the same team and receive 50% off the second (non-discounted) course fee. Enroll a third person from the same team for free. (What a deal!)
This three-day course—targeted specifically at people who aren’t experienced designers—will give you the practical essentials to understand:
- Why user experience matters
- Using an efficient, user-centered design process
- UI design principles and guidelines
- Making a design intuitive, simple, and delightful
- Designing tasks, task flows, and pages
- Design communication techniques: sketches, prototypes, and specs
- Evaluating designs, giving and receiving effective feedback
- Performing informal usability studies
Taking UX Design Essentials will give the essential, practical knowledge you need to make solid decisions quickly and confidently to create a great user experience—while avoiding the arcane stuff you don’t care about.
February special
Enroll two people from the same team and receive 50% off the second course fee. Enroll a third person from the same team for free. (What a deal!)
Register now, pay later. Course cost is $1800, with an “early bird” discount of $200 up to 30 days before the class.
| Burlington, VT February 13 –15, 2012 | Register |
| Seattle, WA March 19 – 21, 2012 | Register |
| Minneapolis, MN April 4 – 6, 2012 | Register |
| Chicago, IL April 9 – 11, 2012 | Register |
| Atlanta, GA May 7 – 9, 2012 | Register |
| Montreal, Quebec June 13 – 15, 2012 | Register |
| London, UK! June 25 – 27, 2012 | Register |
Please contact us for non-profit and student discounts or if you would like to have User Experience Design Essentials presented somewhere else.
While there is no one right way to learn how to design a great user experience, here’s our approach:
Top goals: Learn an efficient, user centered design process to help you make good design decisions quickly and confidently. Learn how to make designs that are intuitive, simple, delightful, and easy to scan. Learn effective design teamwork and how to give and receive effective feedback.
Design process, avoiding the classic mistakes: Understand why smart people who are masters of technology create poor UI designs. Learn to avoid the classic mistakes that everyone tends to make. Having a clear understanding of why design goals are important and when they are worth doing.
Effective communication: Many design decisions ultimately boil down to communicating to your target users effectively. This is true for both interaction and visual design. The heart of the course is learning how to use the language UI to communicate to users in a way that’s concise, natural, and intuitive.
Users are people: We are interacting with people not robots, so it’s important to understand the human emotion and perception side of UX design. Issues like simplicity, personality, delight, trust, and performance must be part of the design equation. Many inexperienced designers overlook these important issues, and design purely from the mechanical point of view.
Software teams are people too: The design process is a human, and therefore political process. Learn how your team’s culture determines what actually gets done. To impact design, you must make sure your effort matches your team’s culture. Learn the different team UX cultures and what they require to affect change.
Practical: UX design is a practice, not a subjective art. UX design isn’t hard if you use the right tool for the job. You can do this! You will learn practical techniques that you can actually use on your project (no exercises use sticky notes!) And you’ll get straight answers to your questions. (No, it doesn’t depend!)
Audience: Software professionals who are inexperienced with UI design. None of our courses require any prior design training or experience, and we strive to achieve the above goals without getting too wonky. (If you can’t use it, we don’t discuss it!)
While there are similar UX design courses, none of them take this same approach. See for yourself:
- Cooper’s Interaction Design Practicum
- Nielsen Norman Group’s Application Usability
- Adaptive Path’s Elements of UX
- Human Factors International’s The Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design
- Infragistics’ Essentials for Software Professionals Training
Day 1 (8:00 am – 5:00 pm)
- Part 1: Why user experience matters
Using an efficient design process
- Part 2: Use a good design process
- Part 3: Design principles
- Part 4: UI guidelines
Using a user-centered design process
- Part 5: Value propositions
- Part 6: Scenarios
Day 2 (8:30 am – 5:00 pm)
- Day 2 Introduction: Who are you really?
Using a user-centered design process (cont)
- Part 7: Personas
- Part 8: Branding
- Part 9: Using data
Making a design “intuitive”
- Part 10: UI is communication
- Part 11: Make it “intuitive”
- Part 12: Use the right controls
Making a design simple and delightful
- Part 13: Make it simple
- Part 14: Make it look great
- Part 15: Make it delightful
Day 3 (8:30 am – 5:00 pm)
- Day 3 Intro: Changing your team’s culture
Putting it all together
- Part 16: Task flows
- Part 17: Modern UX
Communicating design
- Part 18: Design communication techniques: sketches, prototypes, and specs
Evaluating designs and usability
- Part 19: How to evaluate a UI
- Part 20: Informal usability studies
- Part 21: Giving and receiving feedback
- Part 22: Workshop
- Course review and wrap-up
You can host UX Design Essentials at your company, which has these extra benefits:
- Train your entire team for about the same cost as training 5 people with the public course.
- Train your management as well. Getting your management team on board is the first step effecting change within an organization.
- Choose your time and place. You chose the time and place, and avoid the hassles and downtime of traveling.
- Customize the content. Let’s start by defining your goals, reviewing default curriculum, and customizing the content, exercises, and duration to best suit your needs. There’s no better way to satisfy your goals than to apply the course material directly to the problems you need to solve.
- Have a workshop based on your project. Have a workshop to apply what you have learned to your project.
- Choose the duration. The standard course is three days, but for flexibility, a two-day version is available. A one-day bootcamp version is also available which covers the absolute basics.
What is the cost?
$1800 per person, with a $200 “early bird” discount 30 days before the class.
Who is the instructor?
All course material created and presented by Everett McKay.
How large are the classes?
All sessions are limited to a maximum of 20 participants.
What is your cancellation policy?
For public courses, we require a fully refundable $1000 deposit to hold your seat. A full, non-refundable payment is required 30 days before the class. For onsite courses, we require a non-refundable 50% deposit to schedule your course. But don’t worry—if the unexpected strikes, you can reschedule the course for a nominal fee.
What materials are provided?
All participants receive a bound copy of the course materials for their personal use.
