October 17th: Usable Usability Workshop by Eric Reiss

If people cannot use something you make, you have a serious problem. Usability is the science of ensuring that sites and apps do what they are supposed to do.  Usable Usability ensures your cuatomers can succeed with whatever tasks you have designed to solve.

Eric Reiss has literally written the book on this stuff.  Its called Usable Usability: Simple Steps for Making Stuff Better.  If you are interested in Lean UX, this workshop is where it all begins.  After the workshop, there will be a book signing and social time.

Register today.  We have limited seating in this workshop. It will sellout.

What You Will Learn

In this workshop, you will learn an alternative way to cut the usability cake.  For Eric, usability builds on three E’s – Ease, Elegance, Empathy.

Lean UX begins here.  You will learn about a method for evaluating and improving products and services in a truly lean and agile way.  You will have plenty of hands-on techniques to carry out guerilla-style usability hacks that show the value of usability to the people in charge of the budgets.

If users shouldn’t be expected to think, we, as designers, need to do the thinking for them! We MUST think! Here’s a quick rundown of the topics we’ll be covering, based on Eric’s best-selling book, Usable Usability, from John Wiley & Sons.

Ease of Use

Ease of use – the product does what I want it to do. This deals with physical properties. Hence, the interactive elements should be:

• Functional (the buttons work, the speed is acceptable)
• Responsive (the application reacts to your input, the application provides cognitive feedback)
• Ergonomic (Fitt’s Law, keyboard shortcuts, field tabbing, etc.)
• Convenient (content and interactive objects are there where I need them and elements that are needed simultaneously are visible simultaneously)
• Foolproof (less risk of error through RAF – Remind, Alert, Force. Less reliance on instructions)

Elegance and Clarity

Elegance and clarity – the product does what I expect it to do. This deals with psychological properties. Hence, interactive elements should be:

• Visible (controls that can’t be seen don’t exist. Cut down the visual noise. Think feng shui)
• Understandable (clear and concise, no unexplained icons, colors and physical groupings for related functions and to improve scent)
• Logical (don’t make me think, build sensible flows)
• Consistent (always the same name for the same function, no reuse of icons for different functions, no behavioral changes as objects open or close)
• Predictable (functions and navigation always in same place, elements don’t suddenly change behavior)

Empathy

Empathy – understanding and addressing the needs of the users. After all, you can’t practice user-centered or user-driven design if you don’t care about these folks.

Register today.  We have limited seating in this workshop. It will sellout.

All About Eric Reiss

Eric Reiss has been meddling with service- and product-design projects for longer than he cares to remember. Today, he is CEO of The FatDUX Group, an international user-experience design company headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. Eric has also lectured on design principles at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, is a former Professor of Usability and Design at the IE Business School in Madrid, and serves on the advisory boards of several universities and institutes in both Europe and the United States. His Web Dogma, a design philosophy that transcends both fashion and technology, has been adopted by 1000s of developers and companies around the world.

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