Foundations of Usability Testing for IT Professionals – 2 Days

Students will come away from this training with a user-centered approach for testing the relevance and intuitiveness of desktop and mobile apps. You will learn how to identify usability issues and how to set up a study to explore these issues for redesign. This class covers best practices for analyzing a user interface to pinpoint areas of concern, recruiting methods, moderating techniques, data collection and analysis, involving stakeholders and reporting on a usability study. You will gain exposure to common user experience/UX methods such as personas, “Day in the Life (DILO)” scenario scripting and heuristic review approaches for identifying study objectives. You will learn how to usability test a product at different points at different points in its lifecycle (e.g., concept, early prototype, released product), as well as when to leverage in-person, remote, or automated methods. This class includes extensive hands-on practice. Each student will have the opportunity to develop their own usability study, moderate with a real participant and walk-through the steps of managing observers, data collection, analysis and synthesis. Students will receive a workbook to serve as a reference as well as templates for plans, task lists, test scripts, recruiting screeners, and reports. The course material includes a detailed bibliography with information on where to learn more about this very practical method for improving the success quality of your interactive products.