Research Workshops
Global Design Research
With globally distributed teams and people working on designs that play into different markets, its becoming critical to have new skills to be able to work effectively and be ready to conduct design research in environments with a range of backgrounds, cultures, working/communication styles and in markets with varying levels of UX maturity.
Lean Ethnography
Success in today’s multi-device world is about connecting in a meaningful way with your end user. Join design ethnographer Kelly Goto for an immersive and hands-on workshop focusing on rapid contextual research methods and integration into lean UX processes. In this half-day workshop, you will explore why-finding techniques — tying practices to underlying needs and desires.
User Experience Metrics
The goal of this workshop is to teach participants how to effectively use a wide variety of user experience (UX) metrics as part of their everyday work. Participants will learn all the common UX metrics, as well as lesser known, but equally effective metrics. Participants will learn the strengths and limitations of each metric, when to use (and not use) each metric, and how to present UX data in a simple yet compelling way.
User Interviewing Techniques
For all the focus on “user research,” the term may be a misnomer. In designing products and services, the designer’s role is just as central as the user’s. People have insights that can inform your product or service, but as designers, if you don’t plan to hear them, you’ll miss feedback from the people you’re designing for. Whether formal or informal, on a shoestring or a big budget, you can do research. This workshop offers approaches to conducting research with results you can use.
Who is this for?
In this workshops you'll learn how to collect, interpret and analyse information about clients, the business and the end users of products.
Design Workshops
Advanced Simplicity
If you’ve ever sat in a meeting and argued that your product or website needs to be simpler, then chances are you’ve come away from the same meeting with an even longer list of features and content that need to be added. In this workshop you’ll learn to use UX frameworks to break down user experience into manageable chunks. You’ll learn to apply design rules to real-world challenges by sketching and prototyping user interfaces. And you’ll get tips and advice from past projects to help you solve problems or explain ideas in those tricky design meetings.
Designing for Emotion
Although it’s never been easier to create and launch an app, it’s still incredibly hard to stand out from the competition. Usable apps are the norm today, but apps that make customers feel like they’re interacting with a human, not a computer, are a rare breed. In this workshop you’ll see real world examples of brands that use personality and emotional design to make their products feel human. We’ll explore key business benefits of emotional design, and learn how to create a design persona, the foundation of brand personality. You’ll also learn how to shape the voice of your brand, considering how your product would speak in moments of triumph and crisis, resulting in a human experience.
Design Synthesis Methods
This workshop will introduce various methods of Synthesis as ways to translate research into meaningful insights. Workshop participants will learn about how to manage the complexity of gathered data, and through hands-on exercises, they will apply various synthesis methods to elicit hidden meaning in gathered data. This hands-on approach is critical for building both confidence and ability with the various synthesis methods that are discussed.
From UX to Service Design
This half-day, hands-on workshop into service blueprinting will dive straight into the heart of service design’s methods and mindset. Blueprinting is a flexible and powerful approach useful for everything from mapping out and making sense of insights research, through brainstorming and ideation to design specification and measurement.
Learning from Sci-Fi Interfaces
Sci-Fi and other speculative interfaces can unlock possibilities for new interactions in any product or service. This workshop will quickly share lessons culled from imaginative interfaces unconstrained from traditional constraints, with examples, and prompts attendees to brainstorm around these lessons to unlock new aspects of their existing projects. Then, attendees will develop their own projects using these inspirations.
Organizing Mobile Web Experiences
The things that make mobile devices unique have a big impact on how we can organize and guide people through the content of our Web experiences. See what the web is uniquely good at and how to adjust your site’s content accordingly. You’ll explore the best way to place navigational elements, to ensure your design has great clarity and retains your users’ focus on their tasks. Luke will explore new techniques, such as responsive web design, for handling multi-device layout.
Planning Adaptive Interfaces
In this workshop, Aaron Gustafson will explain the ins and outs of crafting rich web experiences that adapt to the capabilities and peculiarities of our customers and their devices, while maintaining your sanity in the proces.
Transform Your Work Through Visual Thinking
The languages we use shape our thinking and our work. Beyond words and numbers, fluency in visual thinking can help us all make better sense of our increasingly interconnected, complex and non-linear world. As individual practitioners and as members of a team, we can use simple and quick visualization methods to create a dramatic impact on our work and how we do it. Give yourself an opportunity to explore it- for designers, strategists, technologist and anyone else who thinks for a living!
Who is this for?
Here you'll learn how to translate the findings from Research into real interfaces by using several techniques to deveolp the design further and to document it for production.
Strategy Workshops
Better Meetings by Design
What is an effective meeting? Empathy, trust, and positive collaboration contribute to effective design meetings from kick-offs through post-mortems. But the most effective meetings are the ones where we allow ourselves to explore and iteratively fail into the smartest design ideas. Facilitation is critical in order to integrate the disparate and sometimes conflicting goals of your team and/or client groups. Good facilitation of meetings helps teams understand the problems they’re solving early enough in the process to act upon that understanding.
Lean UX
The days of heavy specifications and documentation are numbered. The new currency of web and software development is shared understanding within nimble, small, dedicated teams. In this workshop, Jeff Gothelf will teach you the collaborative, cross-functional ideals behind Lean UX and demonstrate the power of highly cooperative teams.
UX Management: Developing and Growing a Team of UX Professionals
Many people, who move into Management roles within a User Experience (UX) group, are left to work out by themselves ways to lead, manage and develop both their team and their practice. This course helps provide managers, at whatever stage of their career, the ability to put in place procedures and environments for development. The course will also help managers to work out Personal Development Plans with team members; identify the correct skills mix for a team; and talk through common problems as a group.
Content Strategy for Mobile
It’s time to think about developing your content strategy for mobile. This workshop explores the challenges and constraints of presenting content in mobile interfaces and contexts. It will include a mix of hands-on exercises, discussion, and review of themes, problems, and real-world examples. We’ll analyze content from desktop websites and mobile websites and apps to uncover what works (and what doesn’t) when publishing on mobile.
Who is this for?
But even if you didn't got that far in your career yet, you will still benefit from learning the management and leadership skills provided by these workshops.