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/

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.

Seattle, WA (I-Newswire) November 30, 2011 – In the increasingly competitive economic environment caused by the world wide recession, leading companies have stepped up their research efforts. One method they are using is eye tracking to obtain deeper insights into consumers’ unconscious visual behavior.

Assisting clients across all industries, CustomerExperienceLabs.com specializes in all forms of user research, including mobile usability testing, eye tracking and innovative hybrid research that are conducted in its state-of-the-art usability labs in Seattle, Washington and Rochester, New York, as well as in other labs across the country. The company also conducts studies that are aimed at benefiting businesses that thrive in an environment of increasing mobile Internet and application usage.

Providing its expertise in the field of eye tracking, CustomerExperienceLabs.com was a participant in recent international eye tracking study spearheaded by Miratech, a user research agency that is based in France.

According to Dr. Jay Eskenazi, Co-Founder of Customer Experience Labs, the purpose of the international collaborative study was to “measure both the international and gender differences in response to a visual stimuli of an attractive woman.” The results of the study illustrate how subconscious visual processing impacts the way that people visually scan a photo. Eye tracking is often used as part of usability testing to reveal deeper insights than either method can offer alone.

Other participating firms in the Miratech-led study included Eyefact from Denmark, Bunnyfoot from England, Concept7 from the Netherlands, Checon Pesquisa from Brazil, and the Universite Pompeu Fabra from Spain. Some of the partners are members of the International Usability Testing Partnership or IUTP, a network dedicated to user testing and consumer research. The IUTP is supported by Tobii, a leading developer of eye tracking equipment.

Companies interested in improving their online user experience can browse the services ofhttp://www.CustomerExperienceLabs.com and learn more about user research can be used to improve their customers’ user experience as well as their company’s business metrics.

Additional Resources

Customer Experience Labs

About Customer Experience Labs:
Customer Experience Labs is a Seattle based Usability testing and user research company that specializes in all forms of user research, including usability testing, eye tracking and innovative hybrid research.

Company Contact Information
Customer Experience Labs
Jay Eskenazi, Ph.D.
1525 4th Ave. Suite 500 Seattle, WA
98101
Phone : 2064525216

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2. The “Story” Behind The Creation Of Customer Experience Labs, LLC
3. Eyetracking Homepage Study
4. What Are Your Top Questions about Eye Tracking?
5. Is Fun Part of Your Customer Experience?

Herman Cain’s 404 page is getting a lot of attention…perhaps more than a 404 page has ever received before!

It’s quite entertaining and cheeky.

If you have any other examples of entertaining or witty 404 pages, please email them to me and I will compile them for a future blog post.

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1. Good User Experience – HootSuite’s Scheduled Maintenance Page
2. Howie Jacobson’s Advice on Landing Pages

How do men and women around the world look at this model?

Study Overview

Customer Experience Labs recently participated in an international eye tracking study led by Miratech, a user research firm based in France. The purpose of the study was to measure both the international and gender differences to a visual stimuli of an attractive woman, which can be seen below.

We collaborated with six other companies around the world in the first ever international eye tracking study of this nature.

The participating firms were:

Some of these partners are members of the International Usability Testing Partnership - IUTP - a network dedicated to user testing and consumer research. The IUTP is supported by Tobii, a leading developer of eye tracking equipment.

Methodology (aka Test Procedure)

Each firm recruited 15 men and 15 women from a variety of ages and socio-economic backgrounds, for a total of 210 subjects from 7 countries.

After an initial ice breaker, including a brief eye calibration procedure, the participants were then asked to view the visual stimuli. Participants viewed the stimuli for 20 seconds each and no other directions were provided.

Tobii eye trackers captured data throughout the testing period. After the test, subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire about the woman in the picture to see how exposure to her image impacted their perceptions of (and about) her.

The Stimuli

Our Research Findings

One of our findings might not exactly be surprising: Men lingered on the woman’s chest.

You might be wondering, just how much more did men stare at the chest than women?

Quite a bit it turns out - their eyes remained on the chest 37% longer than women.

While the gender difference was negligible for the first 2 seconds of viewing time, the longer the men viewed the prompt, the longer their eyes fixated on the chest.

Video - Men’s viewing behaviors

This video shows a sample of men from around the world viewing the stimuli. As you can see, the visual scan behaviors appear similar across countries.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaFwKqt1Dv4

People have asked us - Were they doing this because that’s what men “naturally do”?

Or because they had nothing else to look at?

We suspect it reflects a legitimate gender difference, and it would be a fertile topic for future research.

Women’s viewing behaviors of the Model’s Ring

Also we noticed that the women dropped their gaze to inspect the model’s ring finger and the ring she was wearing.

It appears they were evaluating whether she was engaged/married or otherwise considered to be “taken.”

One hypothesis is that this may reflect some evolutionary behavior of scanning other women at a subconscious level to quickly determine if they are available and perhaps a “threat” to their relationship.

This represents some interesting evolutionary considerations for sure.

And of course, the tongue-in-cheek title is derived from a sensationalistic take on these two data points.

However,  humor and PR aside, there are many additional findings which we found noteworthy.

How did participants evaluate her face?

For example, across all genders and nationalities subjects spent the most time viewing the face. In fact, male participants spent 12% more time viewing the face than females.

Another interesting finding is where on the face each gender focused their attention; females were drawn to the eyes while males focused on the lips.

What cross-cultural differences were observed?

Well, it turns out that if men are pervs then French and Danish men are the biggest pervs.

French and Danish men alike spent almost double the amount of time on the chest than their male counterparts in other countries!

And it also seems that both French men and women have one thing in common, they both viewed the chest for a nearly equal amount of time.

The disparity of viewing times between men and women was the smallest for French participants.

The Danish, on the other hand, had the largest  disparity in viewing times - Danish men spent 106% more time viewing her chest than Danish women.

Now let’s move on to the ring.

Overall, females viewed the ring 27% more than men.

However, the results were not uniform across international borders.

The extended gaze of the English and Danish women spent much more time viewing the ring than their female counterparts in other countries and this had a big impact on the “average” viewing time.

In fact, English women spent 149% more time on the ring than English men.

The gender difference across countries was almost negligible when it came to the ring with the exception of the UK and Denmark.

In the USA, Brazil and the Netherlands the men actually spent a slightly longer time viewing the ring.

Conclusion

Now back to the title: Men are pervs and women are golddiggers. It sure is provocative and attention grabbing.

And at least if you are reading this far, well it grabbed your attention and hopefully persuaded you to be interested enough to read this far…

…but is it true?

We really can’t say definitively at this point. There are many other factors we need to take into account.

In the case of the ring, perhaps the women wanted to evaluate her accessories (as you can see above the women also checked out her belt)

Or maybe the contrast of the ring on the finger drew female gaze.

Or perhaps the women were evaluating whether she was single (as mentioned above) and considered a “threat” to themselves at a deep, reflexive and largely unconscious level.

Maybe even the women were evaluating if the prompt was single and therefore a “threat”.

There are a lot of possibilities for future research and lots of differences of options.

What do you think of this research?

Please let us know. Contribute to the conversation and leave a comment!

p.s.

The complete 158 page report is available on Miratech’s website here. We appreciate Miratech asking us to participate in this research and for allowing us to share the data with you.

Special thanks to Jen Hruska for her valuable efforts in collecting the data for this project. And thanks to Jared Comis, our Fall 2011 intern, for his assistance with drafting this article.

Related posts:

1. Eye Tracking Research Firm, Customer Experience Labs Partners With French Firm, Miratech, In Study
2. Eyetracking Homepage Study
3. What Are Your Top Questions about Eye Tracking?
4. Psychological Insights Into Twitter

This research methodology blends eye tracking with regular think aloud usability to produce deeper insights than are available with either methodology used by itself. The eyetracking data shows us where your customers are looking and how they are interacting with your website or services at a subconscious level. Add in the conscious level with a standard usability approach (aka “think aloud”) and that layers insights into the thought process into the overall picture.

Subconscious visual attention behavior (eye tracking) + Conscious Thought Process (think aloud usability) = Deeper insights.

And these deeper insights can give your product and design teams a competitive advantage in the innovation process so you can out perform your competitors.

Click here to download this report

Related posts:

1. Eye Tracking Research Firm, Customer Experience Labs Partners With French Firm, Miratech, In Study
2. Controversial Eye tracking study says “Men Are Pervs, Women Are Gold diggers”

Are you a marketing professional who works in the technology sector? Does your company ever partner with technology manufacturers (such as computer or processor companies) to co-market, promote, and/or sell this technology to your end customers?

Does part of your job include helping to organize the actual marketing materials such as logos, white papers, product details, etc.?

If so you may qualify for a unique research interview that will last approximately 1 hour and will take place using online conference software from the comfort of your office or home office. The interview will occur between June 24^th and 28^th. There is limited availability (10 slots left) so contact us soon.

If you qualify you will receive $150 for completing the interview.

Please call  866-236-1754 and ask to speak to Jeff (x312) or email bosrecruiting@schlesingerassociates.com to see if you qualify.

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Charlie Sheen’s incredible week of publicity press is now taking social media channels by storm!

Charlie Sheen (@Charliesheen) has now set a real official Guiness World Record for the fastest time to reach 1 million followers.

As Sheen would say: #winning

Dan Barrett, Guinness community manager, said this morning that Guinness “just reasearched and approved” the record this morning (source: Mashable)

Incredibly, he accomplished this record feat in a little over a day! It took him exactly 25 hours and 17 minutes to build this following and now as of the time of this writing (6pm on 3/3/2011) he is over 1,143,000 followers

Charlie’s outrageous antics this week have included appearing on many media outlets including the Howard Stern Show, 20/20 and ABC shows to tell his side of his story following the cancellation of his TV show, Two and Half Men, for which he has been the highest paid actor in the history of television.

Twitter is an incredible resource for famous celebrities like Sheen. Why? Because celebrities can maintain a direct, unfiltered conversation in nearly real time with their fans so it is the perfect social media outlet for them.

And this is undoubtedly why Sheen has built the fastest following ever – because the public is fascinated with his antics and the “public trainwreck” aspect of his personal saga. Twitter is the perfect storm for this situation.

Wonder what’s next? Perhaps he  will start blowing up YouTube with video monologues?

What do you all think – please comment below.

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1. Psychological Insights Into Twitter

Beyond Website Usability: Creative Uses for Morae

Steve Gissin, Partner and co-founder of Customer Experience Labs, was recently asked to write an article in The Qualitative Research Consultants Association (QRCA) magazine. This article showcases some of Customer Experience Labs’ Creative Uses for Morae, a software suite used by many researchers to assist with usability and other qualitative research.

Specifically, this article highlights ways to use Morae to improve your Focus Group Research and more effectively capture and communicate the findings with your clients and stakeholders.

With the rapid adoption of new internet phones (Android, Iphone) and other innovative devices like the Ipad (and all the upcoming Android tablets), our clients have been increasingly asking us to do more usability and consumer research on their mobile technology products and apps as well.  The second part of this article also showcases how we have been using Morae in our research with mobile devices.

Creative Uses for Morae Note: Please click the download button to save to your own computer.

Related posts:

1. Mobile internet Users 40% Less Likely to Click an Ad

Today’s article in Psy Blog is an excellent summary of psychological insights into Twitter users.

Twitter is still growing rapidly and users send more than 65 million “tweets” per day – a number that represents significant year-over-year growth from 2009.

Here are some of the most succinct, high-level findings from their article.

• People join Twitter mostly to follow their friends. Following celebrities and others is a secondary thing.
• Twitter is much less conversational and more like a game of CB radio where people take turns broadcasting their message and then replying or responding to others’ messages.
• The stereotypes are true – a significant number of tweets are conversational or babble. This may include social pleasantries, public conversations, etc.
• Average Twitter user is 31 year old.
• Gender Differences: Men tend to have 15% more followers than women. Men and women tweet at about the same rate.
• Some researchers classify twitter users are “meformers” (sending out mostly info about themselves) or “informers” (sharing information and replying to other users. According to this typology 80% are “Me-Formers” and 20% are “In-formers.” This reiterates the point above about Twitter not being the “dialogue” that some have made it out to be. It’s more of a public sharing of information than a true dialogue.
• Trends – tend to be short lived and typically news related.

Read the full article at Psy Blog

Related posts:

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