Usability Testing and Prototyping
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Learn how to run usability testing on existing digital products and services and create clickable prototypes for concepts still in the design stage. This practical course gives you everything you need to make sure the design, implementation and analysis of your tests gives you reliable and usable insights.
Course description
User testing designs through prototyping helps us to safely explore risky ideas, get a feel for how real people will respond to our designs and, most importantly, lets us fail cheaply and privately instead of expensively and publicly. This course covers everything you need to run a full usability test including identifying what to test, who to test with, and how to design, run and analyse usability tests to make sure you get valid and usable results. The course also includes hands-on experience creating a clickable prototype for products and services that are still in a concept or design stage.
The course covers:
- Identifying if usability testing is required
- What design questions usability testing can and cannot answer
- Identifying what to test
- Identifying your required test participants for a valid test
- Recruiting your test participants
- Designing a valid usability test
- Technical set-up requirements for a usability test
- Best practice for remote testing
- Facilitating a usability test
- Analysing your test results
- Presenting and documenting test results
- Creating a clickable prototype
During the course you will:
- Identify test areas
- Write a usability testing script
- Facilitate a usability test using a paper prototype
- Analyse your testing results
- Create a clickable prototype
- Facilitate a usability test on your clickable prototype
Course description
User testing designs through prototyping helps us to safely explore risky ideas, get a feel for how real people will respond to our designs and, most importantly, lets us fail cheaply and privately instead of expensively and publicly. This course covers everything you need to run a full usability test including identifying what to test, who to test with, and how to design, run and analyse usability tests to make sure you get valid and usable results. The course also includes hands-on experience creating a clickable prototype for products and services that are still in a concept or design stage.
Schedule
Course outcomes
On completing the course you will:
- Be able to identify if testing is required
- Be able to identify areas of a design to test
- Be able to design, facilitate and analyse a usability test
- Be able to create a clickable prototype
In addition you receive:
- A certificate of completion if you attend the whole course and complete all the practical and theory portions of the course.
- Access to full online notes for the course and access to our community Slack channel to tap into the expertise and experience of our course alumni and facilitators.
What do you need?
You will need a laptop with the Chrome web browser installed. We provide all other necessary materials for this course.
On the day
We start at 9:30am and wrap up at 4:30pm with an hour for lunch at 12:30pm. Lunch is not provided, but we do provide coffee and healthy snacks.
Who is it for?
All are welcome and no prior knowledge is required to do this course. However, the course is primarily aimed at:
Digital designers and design graduates
Web, interaction, and UX designers who want to be able to run usability tests to validate their designs.
Strategists and analysts
Senior practitioners who want to better understand where and how usability testing can support a design effort.
Developers
Developers who want to be able to validate the interfaces they are creating.
Product owners and project managers
Product owners and project managers who want a better understanding of how usability testing can get them better outcomes on their products and projects.
Schedule
User Research
We start at the start – learning about the people we are designing for. Most of us aren’t designing for ourselves. No other area of design has more impact on how successful your initial design decisions are going to be than user research. On Day 1, you will learn some fundamental research methods and the principles behind them. You will conduct some first-hand user research, then use common design thinking methods to create a design concept for the week based on the research findings.
You will learn how to identify if a project needs user research
You will learn how to analyse a project to identify if formative user research is needed in order to achieve project goals.
You will learn how to identify the kind of research you need
You will learn the different types of user research available and how to identify which one is the most likely to get you valid results given the time and resources available to you.
You will experience putting user research into practice
You will work in a team to design and execute a research project.
You will experience analysing and making sense of user research results
You will learn about common analysis techniques to make sense of the data you have collected, and you will get to use one of those techniques with your own data.
You will learn how to present research findings
You will learn how to present your research in a way that is meaningful and compelling.
Information Architecture
On Day 2, we dive into information architecture (IA), one of the fundamental skills that make up UX design. We will go through the basics of designing solid information architecture, taking a user-centred approach to identifying the language, taxonomy, navigation and categorisation that enable users to effectively use your product or service. We then put what we’ve learnt into practice by developing the information architecture that will support the design concept you created on Day 1.
You will learn what makes up IA
We look into the components of information architecture and how to identify them. These form the basic terms and concepts you need to consider when designing IA.
You will experience designing IA
We look into the process of how modern information architecture is created, covering common tasks and activities used to create an IA that will work for your users and business. You will put these into practice on your own project.
You will learn how to communicate your IA
We cover how to communicate basic IA design concepts in order to create cohesive specifications that third parties are able to communicate, implement and test, such as wireframes, content models, sitemaps and task flow diagrams.
Design Part I – Designing for People
On Day 3, we cover designing for human behaviour. We look at how our design choices influence the decisions people make and how we can use language, layout, colour, images and type to communicate clearly and persuasively. You will learn the basics of interaction design and how to help users make sense of complex systems and make good decisions. On this day, you start to flesh out your high-level design and begin to take your first steps to creating a rough clickable prototype.
You will learn the basics of usability and interaction design
We cover user behaviour and decision making for screen-based designs and interfaces and how to design interactions to accommodate common user strategies.
You will learn the basics of graphic design for screens
How to use layout, type, colour and images to communicate and persuade.
We’ll share strategies for solving common UI design problems
This includes best practice for selecting user interface (UI) controls and solving common UI design problems.
We’ll cover the basics of behaviour design
We introduce the foundations of designing to positively influence people’s behaviour.
We will look at making designs accessible
We cover how you can make sure your design is accessible to users with different physical and mental abilities.
Emerging interaction design trends
We cover emerging design trends such as collaborative design methods and non-visual interfaces including bots, conversational interfaces and AI.
Design Part II – Designing for Systems
On Day 4, we extend our design exploration to the nuts and bolts of designing for systems and screens. We look at the implications of different devices and screen types, how your design will be implemented and how technical realities affect user experience. On this day, you will tighten up and add more detail to your design and refine your clickable prototype.
You will learn approaches to different device types and variable screen sizes
We look at making layout and design decisions for responsive layouts, various screen sizes and touch devices.
You will get a high-level introduction to how your design is implemented
We cover what designers need to know about how design is implemented organisationally, on the web and in native apps.
You will get an introduction to user interface (UI) libraries
We look at the pros and cons of using a standardised UI library.
You will get an introduction to design software for UX
We cover the most popular design software used by both broad UX designers and UX designs with a UI focus.
We cover best practice for documenting and managing design
We look at the various methods used to document and communicate design decisions such as service design blueprints, Wikis, style guides and wireframes.
Prototyping & Usability Testing
On Day 5, we cover using prototypes to test emerging designs and best practice for validating existing designs. User testing designs through prototyping helps us to safely explore risky ideas, get a feel for how real people will respond to our designs and – most importantly – lets us fail cheaply and privately instead of expensively and publicly. This is our last day. You finish your design and complete your prototype. We then test your design using observational time on task testing and iterate the design based on what we’ve learnt.
We cover best practice testing techniques
We look at how to identify what needs testing and how to design a test that will get you valid results.
We go over the practicalities of running usability tests
We cover how many users you need, how to recruit them and how to prepare for and facilitate an effective usability test.
You will learn best practice for conducting a heuristic review
We look at the pros and cons of heuristic reviews (expert reviews) and how to conduct one.
You will get an introduction to common prototyping tools
We cover the most popular prototyping tools in use at the moment.
You will learn how to interpret and communicate test results
We look at how to interpret what you see during a test and how to communicate that to your clients or stakeholders.