This pack contains:

• An 81-page student workbook packed with design exercises, tutorials on UX methods, templates to record user research observations and stencils for UI prototypes.

• A written transcript of every lecture. Comprising 231 pages and 89,236 words, this document is useful if English isn’t your native language, if you are hard of hearing or if you just want a readable and searchable version of the course.

• A 417 page slide deck containing every slide I show on the course.

Here are two resources for the course that you need to know about.

This is a fun design activity to get us started.

This video demonstrates the products that I want you to evalaute.

Let's look at some user research for these products.

This activity teaches us that it’s not about the product. It’s about the experience of using the product.

In this lecture, we review 6 key principles of user experience.

Did you know that there was an international standard of usability and user experience? Well, you do now.

Here is what we'll be covering in the course in 5 minutes.

Online training is difficult. It’s not like being in a class where you just turn up. You’ve taken a big step in getting this far. I want you to finish the course, so here are three ways you can continue your good work.

If we asked 50 people this question: “What is a browser?”, how many people do you think would give us a correct answer? Does this video challenge your views of how "ordinary" people think about technology?

Copyright belongs to Ji Lee who uploaded it to YouTube. The original file is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

There are many ways of getting an understanding of your users' context. Here we cover one of the more useful techniques: contextual inquiry. This technique lets you penetrate deep into the world of your users and discover what it is that they actually want to do with your system.

Great field researchers demonstrate 5 key behaviours. Let's review each of those behaviours in turn.

Further reading

• The 5 habits of highly effective field researchers by David Travis
• Site visit interviews: from good to great by Gret Higgins
• The Anatomy of an Experience Map by Chris Risdon
• A collection of experience maps on Pinterest by Remko Vermeulen
• 17 types of interviewing questions by Steve Portigal

The user journey map is just one way you can present your results. Let’s quickly look at some other methods.

There are some situations where contextual inquiry might be problematic, so here I talk about some other methods. These aren’t replacements for contextual inquiry, but if you can’t do anything, you can at least do these.

Three myths about this kind of user research that you might hear.

Does your web site suffer from 'elastic user' syndrome, where you give equal value to every possible user doing every possible task? In this lecture, I explain why “Something for Everybody” means “Everything for Nobody”.

Let's review how we might analyse the data from this field visit.

There are four main benefits of personas:

1. Personas make assumptions about users explicit.
2. Personas place the emphasis on specific users rather than “everyone”.
3. In limiting our choices, personas help us make better design decisions.
4. Personas help the design and development team gain a shared understanding of users.

Let's look at some ways that I’ve seen personas publicised within organisations, so that you can decide which approach would work well for you and your organisation.

Here’s a checklist you can use to decide whether or not your persona cuts the mustard. I’ve used the acronym PERSONA to remind you about the things that you should look out for.

Gift Giver, a gift recommendation system based on an extremely accurate product recommendation technology.

Speak with a minimum of 5 users to find out:

• Is there a need for this system?
• If not, how can you change it so that it meets a need?
• Who are are the main user groups?
• What day-to-day activities do they engage in that’s related to the product?
• What is the workflow (the sequence of activities)?

Make sure you actually observe people, don’t just interview them.

Don’t overthink this activity. Just get out and speak to some users!

To do this activity, you'll need a sheet of flip chart paper, some Sharpies and a pack of sticky notes. You will create a persona for ONE of your user groups that will include:

• A sketch: Show the persona’s context, with a quotation stating the main user need.
• Facts: Descriptive demographic information about your persona.
• Behaviours: How is the persona solving their problem now?
• Needs and goals: What does your persona want to accomplish?

Compare your work with what other students have done on these same projects.

A common design mistake is to assume the design should always be made as flexible as possible. Flexibility has costs in terms of decreased efficiency, added complexity, increased time, and money for development. A focus on users tasks can help us enormously.

So how do you go about identifying red routes? One approach is to identify the frequent and critical tasks.

In 5 minutes, brainstorm 5 red routes for ONE of the following:

• An application that lets you back up your computer over the Internet
• A presentation app (like PowerPoint) that runs on a mobile phone
• An application to help you calculate your taxes
• An application that lets you read online magazines on a tablet device, like an iPad

How do you test a user story to see if it’s any good? Here are four questions you can ask of your user story.

How does your company measure the success of its products and services? Are product teams judged on how easy their products are to use or on how fast the products are completed? You might not think that user experience can be measured, but it can. Here's how.

I want to distinguish between two kinds of hypothesis. The first is the “problem hypothesis”. It’s our assumption about the user need. We need to check this.

The second is the “solution hypothesis”. This is our design that we think meets the user need. We need to check this too. Let’s begin with the problem hypothesis.

Usability: The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.

The ISO definition of usability gives us three measures that we can use to assess the usability of our web site. In this lecture we show how to unpack the definition of usability and apply it to usability measurement.

Our second component of usability is efficiency. Let’s look at how we can measure efficiency.

The hardest kind of information to organise is category information as you don’t know the categories that people use. In this case, card sorting is the technique to use. In this lecture, we describe how to run a card sort.

This lecture shows a screencast of an online card sort in progress, so you can see how it works. You can take part in the study via this link: https://demo.optimalworkshop.com/optimalsort/webusability

How do you analyse the data from a card sort?

You analyse card sort data with agglomerative monothetic clustering. It sounds complicated, but conceptually it's quite straightforward. In this lecture, we describe this analysis method. You can play with the analysis tool here: https://demo.optimalworkshop.com/optimalsort/shared-results/webusability

You’d know a spreadsheet anywhere — formula bar at the top, grid below — no matter what company made it. Or an e-mail program, a word processor or a Web browser. I’m going to call these things “idioms” or if you prefer “design patterns”.

Progressive disclosure is a fundamental principle of interaction design that allows you to simplify your user interface. It exploits a basic law of psychology known as Hick’s Law, but I like to think of it as a reverse strip tease. Here's why.

Basic user interface controls like radio buttons, checkboxes, scrollbars etc — are the building blocks of a design's "language". Here's how to use these controls correctly.

One of the problems with small controls is that they fall foul of Fitts’ Law. According to Fitts’ law (named after the psychologist Paul M Fitts), the time required to rapidly move to a target is a function of the distance to and the size of the target.

Why is Afghanistan always top in a country drop down menu?

People have certain expectations about where objects will be in an interface. Let's look at web pages as an example.

Visual design is often dismissed as eye candy. In fact, we can use four key principles of visual design to create more usable interfaces. These principles are Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity.