Spend two days with Adaptive Path and learn the same strategies we’ve successfully practiced for a wide range of organizations, including Fortune 500s, startups, and not-for-profits.

In this workshop, Adaptive Path will teach you how to incorporate user goals, business needs, and organizational awareness into your design process. You will develop a project plan, learn methods for research and design, and get advice on creating clear documentation.

You’ll leave the workshop inspired and equipped with design techniques and a library of documentation templates that you can use right away — so that your Web site will satisfy your users, your management, and you!

This two-day presentation covers the process of user experience design from gathering initial business requirements through developing functional specifications. Along the way we'll explain how to:

• Develop a detailed understanding of your users through task analysis, mental models, personas, and scenarios
• Improve the user experience by actively managing stakeholders and company politics
• Create a user-centered information architecture that meets business needs
• Design more successful interactive tools and user interfaces
• Manage your own usability tests
• Validate and defend important design decisions

Schedule: Wednesday, February 15, 2006

• Internal business goals and objectives
• Identifying metrics and value
• Discussions with stakeholders
• Frameworks for understanding project success
II. Research
• Audience segmentation
• Types of research
• Site intercept surveys
• Deep user research
• Mental model analysis
III. Content and Feature Analysis
• Architecture review
• Content auditing and analysis
• Document genres
• Metadata
• Controlled vocabularies
5:30PM: Adaptive Path Cocktails



Schedule: Thursday, February 16, 2006

IV. Gap Analysis and Product Strategy
• Gap analysis
• user needs and current offerings
• Prioritization
V. Information Architecture
• Top-down, task-based information architecture
• Bottom-up, metadata-driven information architecture
• Interfaces for faceted classification
• Search results design
VI. Interaction and Interface Design
• Interaction flows
• Wireframes
• Principles of interaction design
• Labels and terminology for interfaces
VII. Writing for the Screen
• 8 Suggestions for successful content presentation
VIII. Usability Testing
• Problems with standard usability practice
• Costs of usability practice
• Conducting usability tests
IX. Visual Design
• Colors, typography, branding, imagery
X. The Business Value of User Experience
• Literature review
• The basics of project finance
• Our research into how companies value user experience
XI. The Nine Pillars of Web Teams
• Competencies needed for successful web projects
• User research, site strategy, content strategy, technology strategy, abstract design, content production, technology implementation, concrete design, project management
• Evaluate existing team competencies
• Evaluate project needs
• Career planning