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The Practicum is closed.

Friday, October 14, 2005
Full-Day Practicum, 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m .

Eric Schaffer

Usability Practicum

Rolf Molich, Dialog Design

Pricing: $730

Are you a designer or usability professional who has successfully conducted 10 or more professional usability evaluations? Are you eager to improve your skills even further through thoughtful discussions with other experts? To help improve the advanced usability professionals' skills, we've invited Rolf Molich, an expert usability professional, to create UI10's Usability Practicum.

Rolf has created and coordinated the comparative usability evaluation (CUE) research studies which offer advanced usability practitioners the valuable insights necessary to improve their usability testing practices. In the CUE studies, several usability teams independently test the same interface. Rolf then compares the work of the teams step by step from user screening through task design to testing and reporting.

At UI10, you can have the opportunity to participate in Rolf's latest CUE study. As a Practicum attendee, you will be expected to evaluate a small application on the IKEA web site before the conference, using whatever usability evaluation methods (expert reviews, usability tests, focus groups) you choose.  You will also be asked to submit an anonymous test report with the most important findings and suggestions for improvement no later than September 19, 2005. Experience from previous CUE studies has shown that the usability evaluations take anywhere from two hours for a simple expert review to two hundred person hours for a usability test involving many people

You'll come away from this day with the necessary tools and techniques to substantially improve your usability practices. Rolf Molich will analyze and compare the findings and methods of practicum attendees and present an informative and provocative summary of the usability evaluation results. During the course of the day, Rolf will discuss:

  • Usability Evaluation Methods. Rolf will share the similarities and differences between the evaluation methods used by attendees. Are some methods better than others? What does “better” mean?
  • Scenario design techniques. Rolf and class attendees will compare and discuss the advantages of the various approaches.
  • Usability Test Results Reports. Are the attendee findings similar? Why not? Efficient and effective problem communication. Problems and positive findings.
  • Recommendations. Pros and cons of including recommendations. Characteristics of a useful and usable recommendations.
  • Report format. Highlights from the reports. Elements of a usable report format.
  • Return on investment. A comparative study provides a unique opportunity for comparing the effects of the tradeoffs made by the involved teams. Resources used for an evaluation by experienced professionals. What is ROI for a usability test? Are there quality differences between the reports? How do you measure quality? Do quality and expenses correlate?

You can download more details about the Usability Practicum, including instructions for the usability evaluation here: UI10_Practicum_Instructions.pdf