UIE Virtual Seminars
Get the latest thinking on design without the expense of traveling.
The UIE Virtual Seminars, User Interface Engineering's monthly series of online seminars, gives you the chance to hear the latest perspectives in the world of design from the field's premier experts. Instead of traveling to a training course, you and your colleagues can hear the latest insights on the most important design topics right from your office for only $129. Once you purchase the seminar, you can watch the presentation right on your PC screen.
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See our list of UPCOMING UIE Virtual Seminars
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Virtual Seminar Recordings Catalog
The Power of Ad Hoc Personas: Truly Practical Methods to Get Your Organization On the Same Page
Tamara Adlin
Thursday, February 18, 20101:30pm ET / 12:30pm CT / 11:30am MT / 10:30am PT
Length: 90 Minutes
Price: $ 129.00 (includes handout)
When you kick off a project right, everything is much easier. When that doesn't happen, the team pays the price. We've all seen projects where, part way in, a well-intentioned executive derailed the team by changing the direction. To prevent this, we want to put everyone with the power to take the project off course, on to the same course.
Tamara Adlin has developed a great technique to make that alignment happen, which she calls Ad Hoc Personas. Her method, borrowed from research-based personas, creates characters out of information the organization already has at their fingertips. They're inexpensive and easy to create, ensuring a customer focus from the very start of the project.
Learn more...
Other upcoming webinars:
- Hybrid Approaches to Taxonomy & Folksonomy, with Stephanie Lemieux: week of March 8
- A Practitioners Guide to Prototyping, with Todd Zaki Warfel: March 31
- Your Form Design, with Luke Wroblewski: April 22
- Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers, with Dan Rubin: week of May 10
- Content Strategy, with Kristina Halvorson: June 3
- Search Analytics, with Louis Rosenfeld: June 23
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Virtual Seminar Recordings Catalog
January, 2010: Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets: Making Sure You Don't Leave Key Information Behind, with Steve Portigal
We know that preparation is important, but what's the best way to prepare for meeting someone who could be using your next design? How do you make sure you get into their head, learn what their life is all about, and get the information you need to build something truly innovative and delightful? You don't want to leave important information "on the table"—information that can give you a more complete understanding of how to move your vision forward. You might act on incomplete detail that creates risk when it forces you to guess what the users need. Worse, the partial insight you have may take your design team in the wrong direction.
January, 2010: Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns for Great Online Experiences, with Peter Morville & Mark Burrell
In this seminar, Peter shares new material and shows us the typical user behaviors that emerge when users face a search box or a page of results. Understanding these user behaviors help us craft better search interfaces. Peter will reach into his huge collection of search implementations to show us perfect matches for the typical user behaviors. We'll wrap the seminar up with Mark showing you how to adapt search patterns to your own site. You'll see how patterns get you quickly to high-quality solutions.
December, 2009: When Search Meets Web Usability, with Shari Thurow
Your organization spends lots of energy and money to get people to come to your site. Does your site do what it needs to once they get there? In this UIE Virtual Seminar, world-renown SEO and web-usability expert, Shari Thurow, will show you how to tie together your team's search engine optimization projects with your site's usability efforts.
December, 2009: Effective Use of Icons & Images, with Patrick Hofmann
How can you design and implement icons and images for maximum impact? How do you build them? When should they be used? What characteristics lead to an effective use of icons and images? How do you know you've done a good job? This UIE Virtual Seminar will address Patrick Hofmann's most recent usability research and visual design projects to answer these questions.
November, 2009: The Whys, Whats, and Hows of Prototyping, with Fred Beecher
When you're putting together your own prototyping strategy, you need to make sure everyone on the team knows the basics: why it works, what your options are, and how to make it effective. In this UIE Virtual Seminar, we've recruited Fred Beecher to explore the world of prototyping and give you and your team the full tour.
October, 2009: Effectively Moderating Usability Tests, with Beth Loring
Conducting a usability test can be stressful, but you know how important this effort is. Effectively moderating a usability test is a critical part of your user research. It can put the design team on the path to success or failure in the next steps of a product's design. Relax, you can do this. With a little guidance, and some practice, you can master this art of interacting with you users and get the results your organization needs.
September, 2009: Recruiting for Usability Testing: Getting the Right People in the Room for User Research and Usability Tests with Dana Chisnell
You can spend lots of money on recruiting, lose sleep over how many test participants will show up, and get more results than you know what to do with. Using examples from projects that differ in size and scope, Dana will show you the tricks to use to maximize your time and money on the right participants to get the right results.
September, 2009: Designing Humanity into Your Products with Bill DeRouchey
In this webinar, you'll see examples of how humanity exists in the design of products and services through humor, personality, and emotion. You'll explore how just a little extra design effort and thought beyond functional needs can enrich the experience, reveal the company behind the product, and forge enduring connections with customers.
August, 2009: Faceted Search: Designing Your Content, Navigation, and User Interface with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang
People come to your site to get the information they need, by exploring, discovering, and making comparisons. You want them to successfully sift through all of your content, quickly and effectively. Faceted search delivers on that promise, in spades, but not without good planning and a great strategy.
July, 2009: Comps vs. Code: Case Studies on Collaboration Between Site Designers & Developers with Ethan Marcotte
We’re like ships passing in the night. It’s not me, it’s you. Can’t we still be friends? When the pressure is on, this is how the work relationship between designer and developer can feel. So, whether you’re a designer, a developer, or someone who manages either, consider this: You may want some couples’ therapy to help deliver effective, two-way communication on your projects.
July, 2009: Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit with Jared M. Spool
Nobody wakes up in the morning with a smile on their face, thinking "Oh Boy! Today I'm going to search a huge web site!" Instead, they arrive at your web site with the simple goal to find something on your site that's important to them. If they find it, whether they search or not, they'll be happy. When they don't, frustration follows. Teams often turn to a sophisticated built-in Search capability to help their users find what they seek. However, our research has shown that technological magic isn't going to make the users successful. Instead, it's a simple understanding of what the users are seeking and how they look at it.
June, 2009: Upgrading Your UX Team with Sarah Bloomer
Carrying the User Experience flag through your organization can be a daunting task. Whether you're a UX-Team-of-One or have a 20-person Experience Design team in place, our research shows that organizations are varied in their readiness to accept and act upon this idea of User Experience Design. To pull off successful design, regardless of where your organization is, you need to be sure your team has the right skills, is in the right place, and has champions in the organization to help spread the word about this shared vision.
May, 2009: Web Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks with Robert Hoekman, Jr.
When starting a new design project, whether it's a design-from-scratch or an upgrade beyond existing functionality, much of what we are about to do has been done before. How do you make sure you've got everything the user will expect? This is where Interaction Design Frameworks come into play. A framework is a collection of patterns that make up an entire subsystem of the design. By using these interaction design frameworks, you'll have a ready kit of necessary components so you'll create the best possible design.
Do your users like to search or browse? Everyone does both and a well-constructed taxonomy will greatly improve their success at finding their desired content and enhancing their discovery of the knowledge hidden deep in your site.
April, 2009: Why Designers Fail and What to Do About It with Scott Berkun
How often do you celebrate failures? Yes, you heard that right. Most shun failure, but in the right environment, you can get past the fears and inhibitions, and put the amazing power of studying failures to work for you.
March, 2009: Designing Better Navigation for Web Applications with Hagan Rivers
In this presentation, Hagan Rivers will lead you through the design of global navigation for an imaginary application called Biblio Tech - a tool for librarians. She will show how to go from wireframes to a hub diagram, to the key elements of the navigation system. Then, you will see the same application with Tabs, Menus, and Tree navigation.
March, 2009: An Agile UX Primer with Jeff Patton
Jeff Patton will discuss the essentials of Agile Development, the distinct culture and value system that Agile brings, and the common Agile process you're likely to see. You'll hear about the myths of Agile and common pitfalls organizations tend to encounter. Armed with the foundations, you'll explore some emerging UX practices and how to thrive within an agile process.
February, 2009: Writing Web Content that Works with Ginny Redish
People visit your web site for the content, not for the joy of navigating or searching. The key
to great web content is to think about content as conversation.
January, 2009: The Road to Informed Decisions
In this presentation, Jared M. Spool will share state-of-the-art techniques to get from observation data
to informed decisions.
December, 2008: Designing for Sign-up
Designing for sign-up should be simple, yet it's often the most challenging area of your design. Do it wrong and you'll turn customers away. Do it right and you can build long-lasting relationships with users. Joshua Porter will show you how.
November, 2008: Essentials of Effective Visual Design
In this entertaining 90-minute presentation, Patrick Hofmann will help you make your products easier to use by applying surprising, memorable design techniques. Patrick, an expert in visual instruction and wordless communication, has worked with usability professionals like you to improve the design of digital, online, and hard copy information.
October, 2008: The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild
In this seminar, Dana will break down the process of collecting user research data, exploring the must-haves, the nice-to-haves, and the certainly-can-do-withouts. You'll learn how you can answer your essential design questions using methods that would make MacGyver proud.
September, 2008: Testing Your Critiquing Skills: Site Navigation
Opinions are cheap but insights are priceless. When looking over someone else's design, how do you ensure you're delivering valuable insights that bring new perspectives to the table?
August, 2008: Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site
In this seminar, we take a detailed look at your site's most critical page: the gallery. Galleries are the most used navigational element on any web site and many sites have hundreds of them. And yet, they are often the most difficult pages to design well.
July, 2008: The Scent of a Web Page: The Five Types of Navigation Pages
In this entertaining and informative seminar, UIE’s Founder, Jared M. Spool, will show how designers control whether users find their site’s content or not. As users traverse through a web site, UIE’s latest research shows they encounter five different types of navigation pages. The designers of today’s most successful sites, such as Lands’ End, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, CNN, and the BBC, understand these different types of web pages and make design choices based on each page’s specific purpose.
June, 2008: The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content
Does your site effectively pull users to their content? In this seminar, we're bringing User Interface Engineering's most popular conference presentation right to you. Founding Partner, Jared Spool, will present UIE's groundbreaking research on Information Scent.
May, 2008: Strike Up the Brand: How Smart Design Can Strengthen Your Brand
Jared M. Spool will discuss UIE's recent usability research into how people perceive brands on the internet and how teams can ensure their designs strengthen each user's relationship with the brand.
February, 2008: Mental Models: Getting Into Your Customer's Head
Indi will introduce you to the concept of Mental Models, a method for modeling the attention flow of your users. Mental Models give design teams a solid method for matching functionality and features to the user's motivations, thought processes, emotions, and philosophies.
November, 2007: Building Robust Personas in 30 Days or Less
Based on UIE's research into state-of-the-art development practices of today's most successful teams, you can learn the secrets to building robust personas in 30 days or less. In this presentation, usability and design expert, Jared M. Spool, will walk through an easy-to-accomplish 30 day plan for developing your own persona-based scenarios.
September, 2007: Don't Panic: Design and Usability Under Pressure
One of the most common reasons designs fail users is because the design team didn't have the time or resources to focus on user research. To help designers
and usability professionals deliver usable sites and applications despite the obstacles, we turned to Larry Constantine, author of the landmark book, Software for Use, to share his proven techniques on how to conduct design and usability efforts quickly and efficiently, even when there is barely time to do anything at all.
August, 2007: Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype
In the past year or so, Web 2.0 has been garnering a lot of attention. Web 2.0 isn't a thing, but a collection of approaches, which are all converging on the development world at a rapid pace. These approaches, including APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking, suddenly give application developers a new and effective way to approach hard problems.
June, 2007: The Analysis Toolbox: Making Sense of Usability Test and Field Study Data
Field studies and usability tests produce a vast amount of quality data. However, making sense of what you've learned is often a huge challenge that many teams find difficult to overcome. In this 90-minute presentation, UIE's Jared M. Spool shares some tricks and techniques for organizing your field study or usability test and getting the most out of the immense data you'll collect.
May, 2007: The User is Always Right: Making Personas Work for Your Website
Steve Mulder, author of The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web, put together a comprehensive 90-minute online seminar covering the basics of personas.
April, 2007: Social Design: Designing for the Social Lives of Users
Amid the rise of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, a new discipline of social design is emerging. UIE's Joshua Porter put together a seminar for folks who recognize the incredible value of social features, but aren't sure where to start. He describes 9 principles that will give you a solid foundation for adding social features to improve your user's experiences.
March, 2007: Field Studies: The Ultimate Tool in Your Usability Toolbox
Field Research is the best way to truly understand your users' goals, attitudes, and workplaces. Kate Gomoll explains how to turn the incredibly rich data culled from field studies into powerful, intuitive, and easy-to-use products.
February, 2007: Demystifying Usability Tests: Learning the Basics
UIE's Christine Perfetti has put together a fabulous Virtual Seminar designed explicitly to share the basics of usability testing.
January, 2007: Paper Prototyping: Streamlining the User-Centered Design Process
Paper prototyping is one of the easiest, cheapest and fastest approaches you can use to design, test, and refine user interfaces. In this presentation, Carolyn will share some of her most important findings about paper prototyping, its techniques, and its effectiveness.
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