Human Centered Design Workshop in Seattle, Washington

Workshop Overview

This 2-day workshop introduces participants to the discipline of Human-Centered Design and covers a wide range of methods for designing solutions that measurably improve business performance and that are driven by the needs, desires, and context of the people for whom we design.

Dates: April 11th & 12th, 2012

Video about the Human Centered Design Workshop

Text by itself can bit a bit boring, eh? So I interviewed Pete the other day and we discussed what the workshop is all about, who should attend and the benefits and value in attending. It’s a fairly fast paced 13 minutes. (Yes, my hair is a little crazy looking and I’ve already gotten some snappy comments about that!)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WohtzfunDc

Through a dynamic mix of short lectures and hands-on activities, you will learn methods that:

• Provide teams with a repeatable way to innovate
• Help you get more out of your direct customer research
• Measurably impact your product development efforts
• Promote productive interdisciplinary collaboration
• Tame the complexity of products and services

Who Should Attend?

This workshop is ideal for anyone interested in design thinking or human-centered design, those who want to improve their skills, and those who want a clearer idea of how to use design thinking to affect change in their organization.

Business, government, non-profit, and academic leaders interested in creating value and affecting change through design thinking.

How Recent Attendees Describe Our Workshop

• “The most I’ve learned in two days in the last 10 years.”
• “While I’ve been a Human Factors Engineer for close to 30 years, I still learned new tools to use in my job.”
• “This course has the absolute best information on how to rapidly and effectively improve not just the design process, but nearly every process in your team. I will not only recommend this course, but insist upon it! Thank you so much.”
• “…packed full of useful information. The information will help us make better products.”
• “Having a suite of techniques makes it easier to see how adding them could really improve our products.”
• “This course is essential in giving systems engineers, and all engineers for that matter, a tool-box of methods to approaching problems in the workplace.”
• “Learned several different methods that can be used by themselves or as mash-ups.”
• “This course applies [needed] structure and ‘packages’ the methodology in a way that can be ‘sold’ to stereotypical high-ranking decision makers!”
• “The material was presented in a fresh way and with plenty of new ways to facilitate discussions and create prototypes. I’ve already recommended it.”
• “The skills and methods presented are logical and can be applied to many scenarios. I personally feel educated and the course gives confidence to practice the methods in the future.”
• “A lot of material & methods were crammed into two days but it didn’t feel overwhelming because it was kept simple and we were given lots of examples to help understanding. The hands on exercises made everything really sink in and stick, as well as making it easier to relate the methods to our personal experiences / companies / challenges.”

About The Instructors

The workshop will be led by Pete Maher, Chief Operating Officer at LUMA Institute, and Jay Eskenazi, Co-Founder of Customer Experience Labs, Inc.

What Are some Examples of the Methods That Will be Covered?

• Rough and Ready Prototyping
• Usability Testing
• Stakeholder Mapping
• Interviewing
• Persona Profiles
• Wireframing (Schematic Diagramming)
• Contextual Inquiry
• Experience Diagramming
• Heuristic Review
• Rose, Bud, Thorn
• Affinity Clustering
• Importance/Difficulty Diagramming
• Abstraction Laddering
• Round Robin
• Visualize-the-Vote
• Concept Posters
• Video Scenarios
• Bull’s-eye Diagramming

Take Home Materials for Workshop Attendees

• LUMA Institute’s Catalog of Human-Centered Design Methods, with lots of useful guidance for how best to apply them.
• A deck of LUMA’s Human-Centered Design Planning Cards.

Price:

• $1,900 per person
• $1,750 per person - Discount for 2+ people from the same organization

Cancellation Policy

Registered participants that cancel 30 or more days prior to the start date of the workshop will receive a full refund, less a $75.00 service charge per attendee. If you cancel less than 30 days prior to the start date of the workshop, we will not be able to issue you a refund. However, as a courtesy, we may allow you to apply your payment toward a future workshop scheduled within one year from the date of cancellation. Substitutions will be accepted any time prior to the commencement of the workshop. Refunds or credits will not be issued for no-shows or for those who begin a course but do not complete it. If the event is cancelled, all attendees will be notified via email and issued a refund.

Other Registration Details

After registering, each attendee will be sent information concerning logistics. If you have additional requirements, please call us, and we’ll be happy to help.

Breakfast and lunch are included in your workshop registration fee.

Need to Print the Flyer to Show Your Boss & Get Approved to Attend?

Human Centered Design Workshop Flyer (right click and save to your computer)

Ok, I’m Convinced - How Do I Sign Up?!

Register for the workshop here -  http://lumaworkshopseattle-eorg.eventbrite.com/

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Complexity & Cognitive Friction are BAD for Business

Research shows that complexity is bad for business. Anything that causes “cognitive friction” is almost always part of a recipe for failure.

What is cognitive friction?

Quite simply, it’s anything that causes your users or customers to think or work harder than they need to.

And cognitive friction starts the customer pain cycle that leads to a variety of negative effects for your company’s user experience and financial bottom line.

“Malfunctioning Products” = functioning products with poor user experience?

In 2006 a graduate student published some research on this topic that received a lot of attention. Elke den Ouden (@elkedenouden), a Dutch graduate student at the Technical University of Eindhoven, found that 50% of all “malfunctioning” products returned to stores, are not actually malfunctioning.

Pause on this fact for a minute, it’s quite staggering in its implications.

At the company level, poor usability can show up as poor sales. When products are low quality or have poor user experiences, consumers generally figure it out very quickly these days.

Unhappy, angry consumers are likely to use social media channels and voice their frustration. They may tweet about it, post it on Facebook, write a blog post, post a video on YouTube, and so on.

In our ever connected world, it’s nearly impossible for companies to hide bad products, and the word spreads quickly on the internet.

What is not measured (properly), is not managed

There’s a famous quote from business guru Peter Drucker “what gets measured, gets managed.”

And a more “hidden” way that poor usability occurs is in less visible and less direct channels – ones that are often not measured or monitored and they often go undetected.

For example – poor usability may show up as product complaints in the customer support channels – e.g. call center or online customer support. Unless the company is being open to the feedback and tracking it at the proper level, they will often just fail to see and hear the data, sometimes for years.

Call centers often do not tracking user experience feedback with granularity. Why? Because the primary KPI’s used by call center managers are often different types of metrics. focusing on call times, hold times, etc.

In other words, these issues can go unnoticed for a long time and not be circled back to internal product development and design teams who then do not hear or see the data.

Also, if the company does not integrate their internal forms of customer feedback across products, channels and internal disciplines, the big picture is often lost.

The result – executives often miss this feedback because of a lack of proper tracking of customer experience issues. Ultimately, the customer feedback loop becomes broken.

Even worse, this feedback is sometimes ignored.

Sometimes customer feedback problems or complaints are seen internally as “nuisance calls” – and executives may dismiss them. The result is the same – the issues fail to receive attention within the company, the problems persist, and the products are not improved.

Impatient Consumers = Low Effort + Quick Product Returns!

Sometimes people in high tech have the mindset that customers will “learn how” to use their products.

They imagine the consumer reading the manual.

Or searching for online help and support.

But these scenarios are somewhat infrequent and customers give up more frequently than we in the industry think, as this research points out.

Note: This is why observing for major usability roadblocks in OOBE (out of box experience) usability evaluation research is so critical for project success. OOBE evaluations examine initial setup and usage of a product, app, service, software, hardware, etc. If the initial experience is broken, customers often do not advance in using the product.

Important Take-Aways From This Research

Here’s one of the most important take-aways from Dr. den Ouden’s research:

This frustration level applied to a wide variety of consumer electronics: cell phones, DVD players and mp3 players.

Also, she took some industry professionals – a group of managers from Philips (the well known Dutch electronics company) to take home a handful of products to use over the weekend.

Most of these tech savvy managers failed to get the products to work.

The results were the same – “novice” consumers AND the “expert” industry professionals – both failed!

She put this in clear perspective in a quote from Inside Steve’s Brain (2009):

“Product developers, brought in to witness the struggles of average consumers, were astounded by the havoc they created.” 

How To Apply These Findings to Improve Your Products and Services

Here’s some thoughts on how you can take action on this content.

1. Conduct an OOBE (out-of-box-experience) on your product or service to look at the initial experience of setting up the product or service and initial usage. This should represent an unstructured usability approach where the focus is on natural observation of user behavior.

TIP: Online research is typically the wrong approach for this type of study for a variety of reasons.

2. Identify and prioritize the top usability and user experience issues.

3. Partner with your call center/operations people and see if you can work together to get more precise tracking from email and phone channels. Work together to better quantify the user experience issues across various customer feedback channels and create a more integrated, holistic perspective of the user experience across all feedback channels. Update the tracking metrics and track them over time. Scorecards work well for this.

4. Take the top issues and communicate them within the company to increase awareness of how things actually are and then track improvements over time.

5. Fix those issues and improve your usability and user experience.

6. Make this research effort a continuous process - not a one-time event.

Do you think complex user experiences are behind most product returns – what has your experience been? And if you work in the industry how are you helping to improve user experiences? Please contribute a comment to the discussion below and share your opinion and experience.

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