Course Code: bespokeuxexperience
Duration: 35 hours
Overview:
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Course Outline:

Day 1 : Analytics and User Experience

  • Why use analytics and user research?
    • Triangulation
    • Merging who, what, and wherewith the why
  • How can analytics help UX folks?
    • Case studies of success using analytics data from UX teams in various organizations
  • UX Discovery
    • Issue Identification: Find problems to be solved with UX expertise
    • Strategy Guidance: Justifying projects, validating personas, informing customer journeys maps, and collecting background information necessary for design planning
  • UX Optimization
    • Health Monitoring: Identify Goals, Signals, and Metrics to develop an ongoing measurement plan to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that indicate if there are UX issues
    • Experimentation: Running and evaluating A/B and multivariate tests to improve results via different design and content variations
    • Project Metrics: Determining project-specific metrics that can be measured before and after implementation to ensure satisfaction with your deliverables
  • Goals
    • Different types of goals: transaction, engagement, etc.
    • Macro conversions indicating revenue-related or mission-critical transactions
    • Micro conversions indicating process milestones toward a macro conversion or secondary actions that indicate potential future macro conversions
  • Custom variables to track characteristics of users, sessions, and particular pages people interact with to be used for more advanced analysis
  • Event tracking to capture actions users take within web pages such as downloading a document, interacting with a calculator, watching a video, filling out form fields, etc.
  • Metrics terminology and UX value/interpretations
    • Visits/Sessions
    • Unique visitors
    • Pageviews/Unique pageviews
    • Pages/visits
    • Average visit duration
    • Bounce rate
    • % new visits
    • Recency and Frequency
    • Entrances
    • Exit rate
    • Page value
    • Average time on page
  • Storytelling with data (versus reports and dashboards)
  • Report manipulation tools
    • Dimensions
    • Filters
    • Views
    • Segments
    • Navigation Summary
    • In-page analytics

Day 2 :Discoveries: Building the Right Thing

  • What discovery is, and what it is not 
  • Why discoveries are important before solutionizing and jumping straight to development
  • Defining the problem and the design challenge
    • Identifying and reframing poor problem statements
    • Getting to the real problem and root causes using the 5 Whys
    • Writing problem statements that define the problem, and not the solution
    • Identifying desirable outcomes and what success means
    • Constructing a change statement
  • Planning and running effective discoveries
    • Who needs to be involved: roles and responsibilities
    • Setting a goal for the discovery
    • Planning a realistic schedule and timeboxing activities
    • Strategies for aligning the team
    • Identifying unknowns that need uncovering during discovery
    • Analysis and synthesis as a team
    • Common biases that can affect discovery
      • Confirmation bias
      • Anchoring bias
  • Overview of common research activities to understand the problem space
    • Desk research 
    • Stakeholder interviews
    • Field studies
    • User interviews
    • Diary studies
  • Using mapping techniques to facilitate learning and problem solving
    • User journey maps
    • Service blueprints
    • Experience maps
    • Ecosystem maps
    • Process maps
  • Wrapping up a discovery phase
    • Presenting discovery findings
    • Creating effective How-Might-We questions to frame the design challenge
    • Evaluating and presenting potential ideas that solve the problem
    • Calculating the ROI of potential solutions
    • Producing hypotheses for testing in the next stage
    • Understanding when to move forward and when not to
    • Documenting the discovery
    • Reflecting on what was learned

Day 3 :Journey Mapping to Understand Customer Needs

  • Introduction to journey maps: What they are and why they work
    • The power of storytelling
    • The power of the visual format
    • Qualities of successful journey maps
  • Goals of customer journey maps
    • Creating empathy
    • Driving conversation and engagement
    • Building consensus
    • Revealing opportunities
  • The framework: Elements of a customer journey map
    • Personas
    • Scenarios
    • Actions
    • Mindsets
    • Emotions
    • Touchpoints and channels
    • Findings
  • The pitch: Getting buy-in for journey mapping
    • Determining when a customer journey map makes sense
    • Convincing stakeholders
    • Articulating the merits of journey maps
    • Overcoming objections
  • The process: Five steps to effective journey maps
    • Step 1: Determine critical up-front constraints
      • Lens
      • Boundaries
      • Breadth vs. depth
      • Balance and focus of elements
      • Context of use
      • Touchpoints and channels
    • Step 2: Gather research
      • Contextual inquiry
      • Task analysis
      • Diary studies
      • Quantitative support
    • Step 3: Synthesize your findings
      • Creating an actor value chain
      • Documenting personas
      • Identifying scenarios
      • Aligning actions, mindsets and emotions
    • Step 4: Evaluate the experience
      • Transitional volatility
      • Gaps and opportunities
      • Moments of truth
      • Value exchange
    • Step 5: Craft the visual narrative
      • Identifying key components
      • Separating insights from details
      • Highlighting areas of opportunity
      • Using hierarchy to lead viewers through the narrative
      • Confirming your key takeaways are communicated
  • The culmination: Communicating and acting on your findings
    • Who should see it and why they’ll care
    • Communicating your takeaways
    • Prioritizing findings
    • Turning your insights into action
    • Envisioning optimized experiences

Day 4 :Personas: Turn User Data Into User-Centered Design

  • The power of personas: What they are and why they work
    • Personas vs. user profiles, demographics, and customer segmentation
    • Create a common language about user needs, motivations, and behaviors
    • Shift away from opinion-based decisions
  • Understanding the benefits and challenges of personas
    • Why persona efforts succeed and fail
  • How to put personas to work for you
    • Where to fit personas into the product development process
    • Advocating for personas in your organization
    • Encouraging your team to use personas effectively 
  • The persona creation process
    • User research and data collection
    • Turning data into personas: separating the fluff from relevant information
    • Creating personas with limited time and resources
    • Assumption personas
    • How many different personas to define?
  • Communicating personas for widespread acceptance
    • Developing a communication strategy
    • Persona artifacts
  • How to utilize personas throughout the development process
    • Driving feature generation and definition through personas
      • Exploration of user needs
      • Persona-based competitive analysis
    • Using personas to plan and scope your product
      • Extracting and prioritizing feature lists
    • Evaluating design ideas with user scenarios
    • Leveraging personas for user story generation
    • Persona based product evaluation
  • Beyond the project: What comes of your personas after launch
    • Persona evaluation and maintenance: evolving your personas and keeping them relevant
    • Using personas to drive documentation and support teams
    • Personas and website analytics
    • Using personas to guide SEO and content development
    • Measuring the success of your persona effort
    • Reuse or retirement?

Day 5 :Usability Testing

  • Step-by-step instruction on how to conduct your own usability studies
  • Why watching users attempt activities is better than interviewing them about their behavior
  • Differences between quantitative and qualitative studies, and when to conduct them
  • Discount usability testing: Is 4-6 participants enough?
  • Benefit of spreading budget across multiple small studies through iterative design
  • Testing at every stage of the project lifecycle
  • Determining scope of study, what to test and observe
    • Can new users quickly use the system?
    • How fast can users accomplish tasks?
    • Do people have re-learn how to use the system the second time they use it?
    • Where and when do users encounter errors?
  • Targeting and recruiting the right participant for your study
    • Developing recruitment screeners
    • Recruiting methods 
      • Do it yourself
      • Agencies
      • Panels
    • Payment and incentives
    • Recruiting participants anywhere
  • Moderated and unmoderated testing
  • Writing a test plan
  • Testing setup
    • Formal and informal labs
    • Testing mobile devices
  • Online and remote user testing
    • Get same-day user feedback on your design
    • Increase your whole team's understanding about user behavior with your design
    • Setting up unmoderated studies where the participants complete tasks on their own
    • Applying remote testing for Lean UX and rapid prototyping and iterative design
    • Optimizing time for short (15 minutes or less) un-moderated sessions
    • Tools for screen-sharing and recording
  • Recording usability sessions
    • Note taking
    • What observations to look for and record
    • Tools and techniques for video recording and note taking
  • Writing tasks (scenarios) to avoid bias and get the feedback you need
    • Exploratory tasks are open-ended and more research oriented
    • Directed tasks are specific and answer-oriented
    • Presenting tasks at the right time and order
    • Writing guidelines for tasks
  • Running sessions
    • Prepare participant when they arrive
    • Techniques for getting participants to think aloud and provide valuable feedback
    • Practice staying neutral and giving subtle acknowledgments
    • Reading non-verbal cues
    • Managing challenging situations
    • What to capture when taking notes
    • Note-taking tips and tools
  • Don't plan or test in isolation
    • Invite observers to watch sessions and take notes
    • How to debrief observers
  • Reviewing findings