Usability Training

Real and lasting improvement requires an investment in people. Critical stakeholders include managers, subject matter experts, and web or software developers, as well as your target users. Whatever your project, you and your team can benefit from our usability training.

Each workshop is customized to your needs. And while most clients today need our help with web sites and web applications, our people are equally well-equipped to work with other types of software projects. Just ask.

Usability Best Practices

Users have expectations of web sites - do you know their assumptions for how to navigate, search, get help, and the proper role of graphics? If your site violates their expectations or if your site does not meet and exceed their needs, your users will leave you - and then complain about your organization's professionalism, responsiveness, and ease of "doing business."

Instead of complaints, you want the following outcomes for your users' experience with you:

• Increased effectiveness means users quickly find what they need
• Increased satisfaction leads to increased trust helping to build your organization's image
• Increased user efficiency means a higher percentage of successful operations

Usability Best Practices Workshop: 1 to 2 days

• Usability Fundamentals: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
• Object-Oriented Design: OOGITUs
• Page Design: Screen Real Estate, Browsers, Links
• Content Design: Media, Branding, Writing for the Web
• Site Design: Home, Navigation, Metaphors: Searching, Shopping
• Completing Design: Languages, Operations, Controls, Color and Style
• Putting It Together: And Making Sure It Stays That Way

Usability for Developers

We asked our own developers why they care about usability, why they made the effort to learn about this aspect of engineering. Their comments included:

• Because whatever we develop, people will somehow use. You can develop the most complex, perfect thing in the world, but if people don't understand it they'll never use it, and it's just wasted effort.
• To get you usability people off my back!

It's true - a usability-aware developer can deliver features and products that meet today's higher standards. And accepting this perspective enables a partnership, better communication and team effectiveness, between developers and user advocates.

Developing Usable Applications Workshop: 1 day

• Why usability is important
• Usability in the development cycle
• Characteristics of presentation platforms: Choosing between WIMP and Web
• Features and scenarios
• Patterns of behavior: Reuse
• Keys to success

Creating Usable Information

A contributor to a web site is a subject matter expert who identifies the information users are looking for, and determines how to present that information. To maintain the usability and integrity of the web site, those that contribute to it should understand the underlying design of the site (Why these pages? Why this navigation? Why these colors?) Content contributors should be aware of the goals and messages of the site as well as general usability guidelines.

Creating Usable Information Workshop: 1 to 1 ½ days

• Usability Fundamentals
• Site Design Concepts
• Page Design Concepts
• Identifying Content
• Presenting Content
• Writing for the Web