Design for Usability - User-Centred Design Courses

User-Centred Software Design

We provide a one-day tutorial on the user-centred design of interactive systems using eXtreme Programming and other Agile methods. It covers both fundamental design principles as well as practical issues of usability.

The tutorial is presented on site, for between 4 and 15 participants. We do run public courses from time to time. Contact us to express an interest in a particular course and location.

User-Centred Design with Personas and Agile Methods

Block diagram showing user-centred design activities

Benefits

You will learn how “just-in-time” design presents challenges to the development of usable systems and how to overcome them. The tutorial describes the case for early conceptual design of interactive systems and an approach to user interface development based on Personas.

Origins

The tutorial draws from the instructor’s articles in interactions magazine and the SIGCHI Bulletin, plus talks and papers presented to the UK UPA and at HCI 2003. It was presented at CHI 2004 in Vienna and in half-day form at OOPSLA 2004 in Vancouver.

The in-depth use of personas is drawn from John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin's Persona Life Cycle approach (their book is available at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk).

Features

On completion of this tutorial you will be able to:

Identify the central UCD issues
Justify UCD activities
Provide guidance on user involvement
Create appropriate personas and use them throughout development
Explain the importance of conceptual design, paper prototyping and usability testing
Work with lightweight design tools such as feature matrices and reality maps
Design a simple user interface from personas through to paper prototypes

Audience

You should have experience of user interface design within a development environment.

Presentation

Lectures, short case studies, interactive discussions and brief user interface design projects are used to provide a broad learning experience.

Instructor Background

William Hudson has over 30 years experience in the development of interactive systems. He has contributed material on user-centred design and user interface design to the Rational Unified Process and to Object Modeling and User Interface Design (van Harmelen, 2001). He has written frequently for the ACM's SIGCHI Bulletin and interactions magazine.

Costs

This one-day course costs £1600 (plus traveling expenses) for a maximum of 15 participants. This makes it very cost-effective for groups from about 5 participants. (Note that the charge is for the course, not per participant). VAT will be added at the prevailing rate.

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Int'l +44 1235 522859

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