Category: User Research 45 seminars, 32 instructors, and you

Gather 'Round: Sharing the Stories from UX Research

What You’ll Learn

• Share stories from UX research to present your research data
• Learn people’s stories and understand how to tell them
• Tell those stories in a meaningful way

Accessibility Thinking

What You’ll Learn

• How to set goals by asking the right questions
• How to redefine QA as it relates to accessibility
• How to get new perspectives by expanding your community

Accessibility: Connect to Recruit

What You’ll Learn

• The importance of finding research and usability testing participants with disabilities
• Organizations and places that can help connect you with potential participants
• How to establish respectful relationships

Object-oriented UX: The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up Your UX Process

What You’ll Learn

• Get started with OOUX
• Avoid these four common UX fails
• Examine the four steps of the ORCA process

Creating Research Ambassadors & Co-creators

What You’ll Learn

• How to incorporate cards and tailored workshops into your research delivery
• How to make what you've learned memorable
• How to get started with your new, larger research team

Back to Reality: The Challenges and Joys of Conducting User Research in VR

What You’ll Learn

• Examine the benefits of using VR
• Overcome the challenges that come with using VR
• Map your space effectively to get the most out of VR testing
• Explore the limitations of VR

Quantifying Qualitative Decisions

What You’ll Learn

• What a good decision-making process looks like
• How to keep it simple
• How to improve decision making transparency

Tips & Tools for Continuous Research

What You’ll Learn

• Optimize your recruiting practices and scheduling
• Develop testing plans and scripts
• Conduct on-demand remote and in-person testing efficiently
• Integrate analysis and reporting into your designs

Measuring Change with Surveys

What You’ll Learn

• Create surveys that people are actually willing to take
• Avoid sampling and research bias
• Put your surveys through usability testing
• Target the best respondents for your survey
• Analyze your data

Talk To Me: Involving Non-Researchers in Customer Insights

What You’ll Learn

• Define your research goals
• Choose the right method
• Identify the audience and recruit them
• Develop a research plan

Designing To Learn: Testing Your Minimum Viable Product

What You’ll Learn

• Approach your MVP as an Experiment to test your product hypothesis and learn more about your customers
• Design the most effective product experimentations and MVPs
• Gain support within your organization for using MVPs as a testing method
• Incorporate MVPs into your overall product strategy

Metaphors in Qualitative Research & Analysis: The Force is Strong

What You’ll Learn

• Use games and tricks to identify the important metaphors within a qualitative dataset, particularly ones that surface hypotheses you can test
• Invite stakeholders who may be focused on quantitative research to see the power of the qualitative side of things
• Turn information into useful data by using spreadsheet programs to tackle big qualitative datasets
• Gain deep insights when you categorize and cluster information more rigorously

Infectious Research

As a researcher, you spend your days understanding the customer—who are they? What problems are they solving? How do they behave today? How are they making decisions?  How do you get that knowledge from your head into everyone else's heads? 

You can't be in every meeting, you can't rely on everyone to read research reports, and—to make things even more challenging—you're often the bearer of bad news. Nope, the customer doesn't need this; sorry, the customer acts in totally unexpected ways.

In this talk, I'll share my tactics for spreading customer insights through an organization (even when they're not popular). You'll walk away with templates and some ideas to put into practice ASAP!

Making Sense of Research Findings

What You’ll Learn

• Learn what you can do before, during, and after research activities to make gathering insights more efficient later on
• Gain confidence in breaking down large sets of research data into manageable areas to focus on
• Improve the way you communicate research insights to clients and colleagues

Creating a Virtuous Cycle: The Research and Design Feedback Loop

What You’ll Learn

• Turn research results into design actions
• Make your organization listen to research
• Design your research to answer the right questions

How To Find and Recruit Amazing Participants for User Research

What You’ll Learn

• Recruiting checklist to apply to each new project
• Dynamic vs. static screening definitions
• Targeting vs. screening understanding
• Impact of scheduling on recruiting design
• Incentives—how they change recruiting

The Right Research Method for Any Problem (and Budget)

The mighty user research toolkit is packed with techniques. It can do everything from blue sky innovation research, to need-finding and requirements gathering, to product validation and testing. But many teams don't exploit the full toolkit, sticking instead to one side or the other of the quant versus qual divide, or returning again and again to that tired old workhorse—usability testing. In this session, Leah Buley will share a primer on the range of research methods available, and guide you in determining which is the best technique for what you’re trying to learn now (and for your budget).

Just Enough Research

What You’ll Learn

• You can't solve a design problem in the absence of real-world information
• No matter what type of organization or process you're working with, you can make evidence-based decisions
• Guerrilla research is not a thing, find out why

Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Research

What You’ll Learn

• Using Qualitative and Quantitative Measurement
• Improve Your Onboarding Process

A User-centered Approach to Product Planning and Visioning

What You’ll Learn

• Create an experience brief outlining your product requirements
• Conduct in-depth research to inform your product vision
• Run a product visioning workshop
• Prioritize opportunities to act on your product visions

Practical Empathy for Powerful Decision Making

What You’ll Learn

• Investigate the different kinds of empathy
• Recognize the difference between applying and developing empathy
• Learn tips for deep listening sessions
• Weigh solution-focused versus person-focused research

Better Accessibility through Your User Research

What You’ll Learn

• Push innovation by designing for extremes
• Understand the difference between accessibility and usability
• Open up your recruiting
• Make people comfortable and maximize your learning

Mobile Research Techniques: Beyond the Basics

What You’ll Learn

• Conduct mobile research in the lab
• Do mobile research in the field
• Deepen your research with long-term studies
• Choose and use participants—for optimal results

Doing “Pocket Research” to Learn About Your Users’ Lives

What You’ll Learn

• Choose the right mobile methods to answer deeper UX questions
• Set up a diary study, experience sample, and SMS and voice-based survey
• Identify physical space triggers, and use them to gather more user data
• Build research into your process without breaking the bank

Prototypes: Choosing the “Right” Fidelity for Your Research

What You’ll Learn

• Start with your research questions
• Identify the 5 main dimensions of a prototype
• Choose the level of fidelity you need
• Use your prototypes to divide and conquer

Gaining Design Insights from Your Research Recruiting Process

What You’ll Learn

• Implement a proven methodology for participant recruiting
• Find participants who are invested in your designs
• Focus on behavior first
• Meet users you didn't know you had

Using Metaphors to Create Better Personas

What You’ll Learn

• Discover why you should use metaphors
• Interpret data efficiently
• Create personas so they become memorable to your team
• Analyze real-world examples of using metaphors for personas

Mapping Emotion to Experience

What You’ll Learn

• The unconscious side of the user experience
• How to map emotion to experience—and work it into your team’s daily practice
• Focusing on product design within the context of the customer’s life
• Why contextual research doesn’t need to be so hard

Build a Winning UX Strategy from the Kano Model

What You’ll Learn

• Focus on your users’ expectations
• Spot the Kano Model at work
• Apply the Kano Model to your UX strategy
• Generate excitement with small investments

Designing Usable Categories with Card Sorting

What You’ll Learn

• Decide when to conduct a card sort
• Plan and lead collaborative card sorts
• Analyze data for similarities and differences
• Apply the same method in other contexts

Culture: You’re Soaking In It

What You’ll Learn

• Lead valuable interviews by empathizing with and observing participants.
• Recognize when your perceptions are clouding your analysis of data.
• Create insights in a collaborative process, without jumping straight to solutions.
• Push your brainstorming exercises to consider all possibilities.

Remote Usability Testing

What You’ll Learn

• Decide whether remote testing will work for you
• Design remote studies
• Recruit qualified participants effectively
• Moderate a remote usability study

Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets: Making Sure You Don't Leave Key Information Behind

What You’ll Learn

• Prepare your Field Guide
• Build rapport with your users through listening
• Work with varying levels of experience and expertise
• Identify which techniques to use when any opportunity presents itself

When Search Meets Web Usability

What You’ll Learn

• Provide and maintain a consistent scent of information to help your site rank well
• Understand what makes users click on a search listing
• Determine the effectiveness of your site’s information architecture with simple usability tests

Effectively Moderating Usability Tests

What You’ll Learn

• Balance how much to interact with participants while they’re working on tasks
• Find the right balance between making participants feel comfortable and being too friendly
• Act accordingly when participants get stuck, or even fail a task
• Give assistance without biasing the participants

Recruiting for Usability Testing: Getting the Right People in the Room for User Research and Usability Tests 

What You’ll Learn

• Understand where to source your participants and how to use selection criteria to screen them
• Improve the show rate of participants, learn how to compensate them, and deal with no-shows
• Do the recruiting yourself, but also know how you can work effectively with a recruiting agency
• Do this process the right way, improve your results and get beneficial user research

Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit

What You’ll Learn

• Form a search implementation strategy around your customer's mission (and why that's the fastest way to success)
• Find a hidden resource on your server that shows you exactly how to make search more effective
• Understand why focusing on "searchers" is a design strategy that gets teams into trouble
• Put together your own Search benchmark test, that will give you regular feedback on how well you're doing

The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild

It's not clear when "quick and dirty" became a dirty phrase in the usability world. There are those that believe that testing must be scientific, and that takes time and money — luxuries not often available to many development projects.
However, it doesn't have to be that way. Useful insights can come just by having the chance to talk with and observe participants in the most informal of settings, such as cafés, trade shows, and the company cafeteria. You can get value from a quick test, even if you only have 2 days to pull it off, or don’t have a working design yet. Traditional by-the-book testing has its merits, but you can still get valid, useful results by cutting out the time-consuming and budget-busting expenses.

Usability testing expert Dana Chisnell knows what it means to work by-the-book – she co-wrote “the book” (The Handbook of Usability Testing) with Jeff Rubin. In this seminar, Dana will break down the process of collecting user research data, exploring the must-haves, the nice-to-haves, and the certainly-can-do-withouts. You'll learn how you can answer your essential design questions using methods that would make MacGyver proud.
This presentation is perfect if you have yet to conduct your first usability test. If you’re experienced with testing, Dana will show you some new ways to inject user research into those tight-on-resources projects that keep cropping up.

Don't Panic: Design and Usability Under Impossible Pressure

What You’ll Learn

• Leverage Sample-of-One Testing to increase valuable information from just one user
• Improve your time-boxed project management techniques to conduct design activities faster and push your design team to the limits of agility and ingenuity
• Take advantage of the decision triage, identify your design's most important features and focus resources on those areas
• Pare down your field research efforts while still learning everything you need to create a successful design
• Use tactical modeling techniques to quickly capture insights about users and their needs
• Identify key information about your users and learn not to waste time on unproductive design activities

Field Studies: The Ultimate Tool in Your Usability Toolbox

What You’ll Learn

• Getting started with a field study
• Preparing for user interviews
• Capturing the data
• Analyzing the data

Demystifying Usability Tests: Learning the Basics

What You’ll Learn

• Set up your usability testing lab, including an overview of User Interface Engineering's typical test set-up
• Recruit the right users to get the most accurate test results
• Know how many users are really necessary for a usability test
• The basics of task design, and different types of tasks
• Become a better facilitator and communicate with users and test observers
• Collect test results and evaluate what makes an effective report
• Fundamentals of remote usability testing