User Centred Design: Techniques to improve the user experience

User centred design: Techniques to improve the user experience 

Getting the business benefits
User centred design techniques help you understand your users better and design effective, efficient and satisfying products and systems.  The benefits include:
 

• increased sales
• improved customer satisfaction
• better productivity
• increased sales conversion rates
• projects completed to time and budget
• no expensive last minute revisions.

Who should attend?
If you are involved in specifying how a system or product will look and function this course will make it easier for you to do your job effectively.  Project managers, engineers, designers, developers and analysts from IT, commercial or marketing functions can all benefit from learning about the user centred design process.

What skills and information will you learn?
After successfully completing this user centred design training course, you will be able to:
 

• Appreciate how understanding your customers will make it easier to do your work
• Build pictures of your customers, their environments, and what they want to do with your product
• Incorporate usability principles into your development process for any system or product, even those with very tight deadlines.
• Apply international standards in user centred design (ISO 13407)
• Track projects to ensure they remain user and business focused

Course content
This course can be customised to meet the overall needs of your business, and those of specific project teams, using examples from your own business. It provides theory, case studies and examples as well as hands-on activities for participants to practice their new skills. A comprehensive course manual is provided.
The content of a typical user centred design course includes:
 

• Applying the User Centred Design approach to your business
• Business benefits of a User Centred Design approach
• Guidelines and Standards
• Knowing your target users and capturing their requirements
• Translating requirements to conceptual design and release criteria
• Prototyping techniques
• Measuring and testing usability

Course information and how to book
This two day user centred design training course is offered as either an in-house or a public course.  The in-house course can be customised to include design processes, and examples from your own business. The maximum number of participants per course is 12 and prices start from £275 + VAT per head. Customisation costs £1,500 per course.
 

Public courses 
Our public courses are held at our offices in the Strand and cost £675 + VAT per person.
Please contact us for details or visit our website /training/usability-and-ucd/user-centred-design.html.
What did previous participants think?
"Leslie was extremely flexible (i.e. If more time was needed, more time was taken). Her presentation (slides and orally) was engaging and ensured that interest was kept. The pace of the course was excellent. I was extremely impressed with how the course was tailored to our company - never seen it to this extreme before, and it made the course content much more meaningful. Can I come again?"
"Leslie was friendly, knowledgeable and provided clear instructions. I am starting at the front end of a new project next week and will find this an excellent grounding to get the project going."
"Enthusiastic and informative. A thorough approach to the requirements of the team in training."
"Enthusiastic, made the course interesting. Useful handouts/workbooks which can be used for reference on future projects."
"Thank you for trying your best to customise the course to our requirements - you did really well given the domain and content."
"Was very impressed with preparation and customisation of course materials - particularly with scenarios at end of day 1."
"Very enthusiastic, really liked that it was tailored to our specific needs, very practical in showing how it can be used in work."