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UIE Virtual Seminars

Instead of your team traveling to a training course, you can take advantage of these Virtual Seminars on your schedule. 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.

Visit the UIE User Experience Training Library

Upcoming Online Seminars

Give Your Users a Seat at the Table:
The Characteristics of Effective Personas

Designing for Ratings and Reviews

More 2012 Virtual Seminars for Your Calendar

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

A Next Step Series Seminar: Card Sorting

with Donna Spencer

(in cooperation with Rosenfeld Media)

Thursday, June 28, 2012

From Static Pages to Dynamic Pages: Building Your Site Pages Programmatically

with Karen McGrane
Save your team's spot!

The UX Fast Track Series

So you want your team to learn more about some aspect of user experience design? Check out these curriculum-style seminar groupings:

Visual Design, User Research, Scent, Copy & Content, Personas, Interaction Designs Greatest Hits

The UIE User Experience Training Library:
Our list of RECORDED Virtual Seminars

May, 2012: The Design Choices You Make for Information: How to Create Great Data Visualizations with Brian Suda

Designers creating data visualizations typically either prioritize data over graphics, or prioritize graphics over data. No matter your preference, Brian Suda’s got pragmatic tips and techniques to help your data truly sing. Drawing on his experiences in corporate environments, he'll describe specific methods you can use to select, structure, and design your information.

April, 2012: Discussing Design: The Art of Critique with Adam Connor

In this seminar you'll get a reality check on critiques from Adam Connor. He'll describe how to give, receive, and act upon feedback while confidently guiding your projects through beneficial feedback loops. With the right approach to critique and collaboration, your designs will be stronger than ever.

April, 2012, A Next Step Series Virtual Seminar created in cooperation with Rosenfeld Media:
Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization with Steve Portigal

To the delight of UX designers everywhere, organizations today increasingly conduct user-centered research methods like surveys, focus groups, and usability testing. In this Next Step seminar, Steve Portigal will give you the talking points to make it happen in your organization. And once you find out how to quell cultural, budgetary, and process resistance to fieldwork, then you can create more analytical designs that make users jump for joy.

April, 2012: Bringing Order to Your Intranet with James Robertson

Over time, intranets can become beastly things. Yes, the very intranet that was supposed to provide a great one-stop-shop for all information has now become a confusing jumble of pages that lack findability, ownership, and currency. James Robertson will show you the two fundamental questions you’ll need to answer before untangling your unruly intranets. Plus, by seeing loads of successful intranets from around the world, you'll get solid implementation ideas to help your organization get back on-track, fast.

March, 2012, A Next Step Series Virtual Seminar created in cooperation with Rosenfeld Media:
UX Design in the Mobile Frontier with Rachel Hinman

Mobile's untethered technology represents a powerful opportunity to invent new interactive experiences, breaking from nearly 50 years of desktop design conventions. But with so many possibilities for this touch interface, where do we begin? Enter Rachel Hinman, the renowned mobile UX researcher who'll show you the landscape of possibilities and how to capitalize on them. This new frontier is already being explored. The question is: Do you want in?

March, 2012: Writing Content for Usability with Steph Hay

Beyond formal content strategy lies a truth: designers and developers often have to write content that end-users see. And if you don’t consider yourself a wordsmith, then this effort can seem futile. Until now! Under Steph’s spirited lead, you’ll learn the 4 characteristics to compelling content for web and mobile experiences. She’ll arm you with practical techniques you can use to write more effective, engaging copy that makes people do something—like sign up, buy, or just come back for more.

March 2012: Start Full Screen: Organize, Communicate, & Annotate HTML Prototypes with Nathan Curtis
A special online seminar in partnership with EightShapes

If your team is transitioning from static documentation to iterative HTML prototypes, then this seminar is right up your alley. Nathan will talk about how his team at EightShapes brought it's renowned modular philosophy of modular components and libraries for producing PDFs to prototyping using simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You'll hear how to efficiently chunk your own designs into reusable bits, then communicate and annotate the prototype, including all of its variations and flows for stakeholders and teams alike.

You'll walk away knowing how to package your project prototypes, then tailor conversations to be of and around the experiences rather than walking through a document. And with the registration comes both EightShapes' CSS & JavaScript library and a sample HTML prototype that demonstrates all the concepts covered.

February, 2012, A Next Step Series Virtual Seminar created in cooperation with Rosenfeld Media:
Designing Effective Surveys with Caroline Jarrett

Sure, you already know that data-driven decision-making can be a great thing. And a survey can be a great way of getting hold of a lot of data. But if you've ever had to complete a frustrating survey asking seemingly mindless questions, and we all have, then the idea of having to design one yourself might make you shudder. Caroline Jarrett will talk about how to rescue already-in-progress surveys and strengthen their performance, as well as how to approach new surveys from scratch. The next time you need your surveys to obtain useful user data, you'll have some practical ideas on how to get the best from them.

February, 2012: Designing Dashboards: The Do’s, Don’ts, and D’ohs! with Hagan Rivers

Dashboards are a great idea. The problem is, many are useless. In this seminar, Hagan Rivers will show you which elements to include, how to structure them, and what to slash out of your existing dashboard that needs some UX TLC. She’ll show you a bunch of dashboards. And she’ll give you tips for helping stakeholders understand the implementation benefits and drawbacks of seemingly simple components, from graphs to customizable panels. Designing a new UI? Evolving an existing one? You’ll walk away from this session knowing how to make your dashboard what it needs to be.

February, 2012: Telling the Right Story with Data Visualizations with Noah Iliinsky

Visualizations are an increasingly popular way designers use to convey complex, data-driven ideas. But with so much data to choose, how do you decide which story is the most appropriate one to tell? And how do you then tell it? Find out from Noah Iliinsky. He'll provide demo data to teach you how to effectively conceptualize, plan, and ultimately design powerful visualizations that tell the right story. But be advised: you'll never look at data the same way again.

If you've read all the blog posts and still find yourself stumped with how to design visualizations of complex data, then this seminar is right up your alley. Get a step-by-step guide to reviewing, choosing, and designing effective data visualizations.

January, 2012, A Next Step Series Virtual Seminar created in cooperation with Rosenfeld Media:
Designing with Agile with Anders Ramsay

UX design in Agile can be a frustrating experience when teams are more focused on delivery over the quality of the experience. But the thinking underlying major Agile methods such as XP or Scrum can be applied to UX design, too, and Anders is going to show you how.

January, 2012: Buttons Are a Hack: The New Rules of Designing for Touch with Josh Clark

If you’ve ever seen a child pick up and use an iPad, then you already have seen the intuitive power of touch in interface design. And in today’s mobile world, gestures allow us to create experiences for fingers and thumbs rather than mice and cursors. Learn the new rules of touch-screen design from Josh Clark in our first Virtual Seminar of 2012

December, 2011: Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business with Jeff Gothelf

The efforts of UX designers historically have been defined by deliverables like wireframes, sitemaps, diagrams, and inventories. Today, UX designers are creating delightful and intuitive user experiences far beyond “The Spec.” And guiding this movement is the practice of Lean UX, a new way of working that merges Lean Product and Agile development theories.In this course, Jeff describes the positive impacts Lean UX has on existing processes, communications, and team interactions -- and all to the benefit of users, colleagues, and bosses everywhere.

November, 2011: Persuading Your Users through Visualization: The Quest for Emotional Engagement with Stephen P. Anderson

To be effective, our designs must engage our users on an emotional level. Stephen P. Anderson, shows us how to achieve that emotional engagement. You’ll discover the core properties of what it takes to connect with your users. With wonderful, yet common, examples, Stephen will break down the underlying concepts and reconstruct them. Applying core psychological and persuasive concepts, you'll bring out a rewarding experience for every user.After this seminar, you'll present your information in useful and engaging visualizations.

November, 2011: 8 Better Practices for Great Information Architecture: Closing the Findability Gap with Louis Rosenfeld

There are new opportunities for Information Architects to add significant value to projects. There exist new metrics for measuring engagement with your site visitors. These measures will guide you towards design decisions that let your users find what they're after. In this seminar, Lou Rosenfeld shows you how to close the findability gap for your site visitors through 8 better practices from information architecture.

October, 2011: Brainstorming Games for Team Creativity—Gamestorming with Dave Gray

Dave Gray will demonstrate games that engage people and excite them about your design process. You’ll learn how you can overcome team conflict and increase individual engagement by using team-oriented games. Plus, you’ll see how you can improve cross-disciplinary collaboration and communication with visual techniques.

October, 2011: JQuery for UX Designers with Richard Rutter

JQuery facilitates the vital steps of designing and testing complex interactions of today’s modern websites and web applications. Rich will incorporate complex interaction examples along with providing excellent sources of documentation and tutorials for your toolbox. The seminar will keep theory to the bare minimum and focus on getting you started with practical take-aways you can use straight away.

September, 2011: CSS3 Tips & Techniques for Designers with Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis

With the evolution of CSS, there are lots of added features that can completely change not only the way you design for the web, but also the way that your designs are turned into code—making the designer/developer relationship smoother. Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis shows you how to leverage some of the more advanced CSS3 features to streamline page production and maintenance, reduce bandwidth requirements, and deliver more flexible designs.

September, 2011: Story Mapping for UX Practitioners: Tying Agile & UX Together with Jeff Patton

You work in an Agile environment, or are about to, and struggle with knitting UX thinking more closely into the organization’s iterative process. An Agile environment forces UX professionals to think about the delivery of their product in small bite-sized pieces. That’s contrary to holistic thinking of the larger, human-sized pieces that best fit the experience you want to design. Story mapping is a way of organizing Agile user stories that communicate user experience.

August, 2011: Combining Curation with Your Content Strategy with Margot Bloomstein

Go to tackle your organization’s web content, and you'll find chaos. The content is coming from all directions, designed in isolation from and with no consideration of, all those other pieces. Where do you start? Curation puts order to it all, effectively. It's an ongoing approach you can use for all the new content your organization generates, and of course all that existing material too. Successful approaches to curation include a narrative to show where all the pieces fit. The best approaches tell your site visitors what they can and should do with your content. Best of all, the right solution is something you can proactively coordinate and use to determine what key pieces are missing.

July, 2011: UX Design when Time, Money, and Support is Limited with Cennydd Bowles

Most UX designers have to work hard to make an impact in organizations that aren’t yet recognizing design as a competitive advantage.You’ll be able to put UX principles into practice in any organization, and learn how to make the case for user experience design with results, not theory.

June, 2011: CSS3 for Everyone with Dan Rubin

Using practical examples and exercises, Dan will show you how today’s leading sites are using advanced CSS to move some of the visual heavy-lifting to the browsers. We’ll examine live sites, then take them apart to see how their designers are using CSS to implement visual design, and how they degrade in less-than-modern browsers. We’ll also build an example design to see just how easy (and practical) it is to incorporate advanced CSS in your designs, so you’ll leave with the confidence to put these capabilities to use right away.

June, 2011: Plays Well With Others: Survival Skills for Design Teams with Dan Brown
A special online seminar in partnership with EightShapes

You're not going to want to miss what Dan Brown has to share in this new seminar! Team leaders will learn to assess talent and skills available to them for more efficient and effective projects. Designers will understand what they need to best fit on an effective team.

June, 2011: The Truth about Ajax and Accessibility with Derek Featherstone

For years you've heard rumors that Ajax and Accessibility don't mix. Not true! The problem isn’t Ajax—it could be how you’re using Ajax: if there’s not a solid markup foundation in place, then your users will have problems. Or maybe, you’re simply unaware of its capabilities. Accessibility expert Derek Featherstone will show you how to get around the issues of "incompatibility" by using some simple techniques. These techniques will ensure your design is useful to everyone, including people with disabilities.

May, 2011: Designing with Scenarios: Putting Your Personas to Work with Kim Goodwin

Scenarios are the engine we use to drive our designs. A scenario tells us WHY our users need our design, WHAT the users need the design to do, and HOW they need our design to do it. A great set of scenarios captures the essence of the design we’re creating.

April, 2011: Search as a Multi-channel Experience with Pete Bell

Multi-channel no longer just means online and brick and mortar. Even web-only stores need to consider mobile and call center. Each channel brings its own expectations to search. As an experience design discipline, multi-channel search is still in its infancy, and investment in it lags actual user behavior. That means there are still no best practices. However, there are early adopters whose experimentations might point the way towards the future.

April, 2011: From PDFs to HTML Prototypes with Nathan Curtis
A special online seminar in partnership with EightShapes

Wireframes. PDFs. Paper. There you have just a few examples of prototypes. They help your team create, communicate, or test a design idea. Those and others like them surely have a plethora of success stories. They also have their limitations.

The team at EightShapes are thought leaders in design documentation. This story is their journey to where the documentation — in this case, prototypes — has evolved to reflect richer interactions and more dynamic user experiences. Nathan Curtis, a founder and principal at EightShapes, is leading the charge of his team to use integrate HTML prototypes into their process, and in the seminar will show you how and why.

April, 2011: User Research Analysis Techniques: You’ve Done All This Research… Now What? with Steve Portigal

The analysis of what you learn in a study is invaluable. Some of your team’s best design decisions come from these studies. But how do you ensure the plethora of comments, observations, and insight leads you to the right decisions? To the best decisions? Join us for this seminar, where Steve Portigal shows your team how to take the information you’re gathering and take productive steps to moving your design decisions forward.

March, 2011: Mobile Design: Designing Tapworthy Mobile Apps with Josh Clark

With mobile quickly emerging as a viable and practical source of web based content, designers need to know how to adapt and keep up. In this lively, insightful seminar, designer and Tapworthy author Josh Clark walks you through the surprising changes in technique and perspective that mobile design demands. From first concept to polished pixel, you’ll learn to "think mobile". And you’ll be shown how to craft interfaces in tune with the psychology, culture, and ergonomics within the context of an audience on the go.

February, 2011: Information Visualization: Letting Data Tell the Story with Noah Iliinsky

In this seminar, Noah Iliinsky discusses the types of visualizations in common use, why and when they are useful, what types to use in different situations, how to think about different types, and who's doing good work. Of course, he'll also show some bad examples and talk about why they fail. Through the examples Noah shows, you’ll learn how a visualization qualifies as beautiful: it must be aesthetically pleasing, but it must also be novel, informative, and efficient. And then he’ll talk a bit about how to do it.

February, 2011:The Secrets of Great UX Documentation with Dan Brown
A special online seminar in partnership with EightShapes

Documentation is a cornerstone of the web design process. It helps move the design process forward, capturing decisions made or requirements learned. It allows the team to move onto the next set of decisions. Great documentation establishes a comfort level with team members, telling them, “We have the same idea about where this project is going.” Dan Brown will explain the evolving role of formal documentation in a design process that continually reinvents itself.

February, 2011:A Practical Approach to Better Project Kickoffs with Kevin M. Hoffman

Get ready for the most productive kickoff meetings you've ever had! Done right, your team members will leave your kickoff meetings inspired and full of ideas to explore. It’s true! Your kickoff meetings can be engaging, relevant, and productive. Kevin Hoffman, User Experience Director at Happy Cog, has been thinking quite a bit about this challenge. After having one too many expensive and unproductive kickoffs, Happy Cog reinvented its project definition process around full-day, interactive activities and collaborative design exercises.

January, 2011: The How and Why of Responsive Web Design with Ethan Marcotte

By combining flexible, grid-based layouts and media queries, responsive web design is a technique that can help you design beyond the desktop, for an ever-widening range of resolutions, devices, and browsers. Ethan Marcotte will show you these techniques to create more responsive designs. We’ll also look at ways to determine whether or not a responsive approach is the right one for your project, as well as strategies for creating a more responsive design workflow.

December, 2010: 5 Simple Principles to Improve Your Information Architecture with Dan Brown
A special online seminar in partnership with EightShapes

Information architecture deals with all levels of design. It deals with everything from abstract mental models and concrete navigation labels. This breadth yields a range of principles, from those dealing with how to think about content to those that suggest how how to embed navigation into page designs. In this 90-minute seminar, EightShapes principal Dan Brown will take a tour of 5 principles that will shape your design work.

December, 2010: Lean Methods for the UX Team of One with Leah Buley

UX teams of one have unique challenges. Fewer resources. Creative isolation. Organizational resistance. And of course, time. A team of one has 40 hours in a week to build a UX practice. A team of five has 200. Many of the stock methods that UX teams of one use are painstaking and time-intensive. But they don't have to be. In this seminar, Leah Buley takes the next steps from her popular UI Conference talk. She digs deeper into the common situations that UX teams of one face, and she shares an inventory of lean approaches that have big impact and take less time than the standard lineup of UX deliverables.

November, 2010: Visual Design for Web Applications with David Rivers

Web applications live in this strange world, half application, half web site. Something as simple as making a command look like a command, becomes difficult quickly. Do you make it a button? Should it be a link? In this seminar, David Rivers discusses a number of considerations for creating or updating your application’s visual design. He’ll show you how to make it successful and delightful.

November, 2010: Leveraging Seductive Interaction Design with Stephen Anderson

Seductive interactions take us to a new level in design. They leverage the latest advancements in social science, psychology, and behavioral economics. In this seminar, Stephen Anderson will guide you through specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications, especially during the post-sign up period, when it’s so easy to lose people. He’ll demonstrate how to engage your users through a process of playful discovery, which is vital whether you make consumer applications or design for the corporate environment.

October, 2010: Ajax: Tips, Tricks, & Avoiding the Pitfalls with Derek Featherstone

Incorporating Ajax into your design can dramatically impact a user’s experience on your site. You can improve flow, reduce errors, and improve satisfaction. You can also ruin your site’s experience just as easily, causing more harm than good. As with any powerful tool, Ajax needs to be wielded with care. This is the perfect seminar for those designers looking to optimize their Ajax implementations for the best experiences.

September, 2010: Writing Vibrant, Compelling Web Copy with Ginny Redish

Write the engaging, vibrant, compelling content your site visitors are looking for. This seminar will give you lots of ideas, 7 nitty-gritty guidelines, and more to help you create great online conversations with your site visitors. Think of content as conversation. Great copy is like having a great conversation. If you write as if you were on the phone, you'll put people in your writing. You'll write short sentences. You'll write with logical order. And you'll have satisfied site visitors.

September, 2010: Organization Schemes for Web Content with Donna Spencer

You have an abundance of content and need a system for your users to find what they’re after. Got a plan? What you need is an organization scheme. When approaching your information architecture, you’ll realize most sets of content can be organized in more than one way. You need to figure out which works best for your audience, your content, and your project’s goal. There are many approaches to choose from—alphabetic, geographic, format, organizational structure, task, audience, subject/topic—just to name a few. Donna will show you the most popular approaches, as well as offer tips on when and how to use each. She’ll even show you how combinations can work for your content.

August, 2010: Produce a More Persuasive Site: Where Design & Marketing Meet with Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg

You want your users to find exactly what they’re looking for, and for that content to be easily understood. Yet there’s conflict within the organization due to different goals and objectives, such as when Marketing is chasing paid search or other SEO objectives. But what if there was a quantitative measure that all groups can use? Here’s the secret. Google gives us a standard you can employ to get others in your organization all on the same page, doing things you want them to do, to help you improve your site: Google’s Quality Score.

August, 2010: Storytelling for UX with Whitney Quesenbery

We all use stories to communicate, explore, persuade, and inspire. In user experience, stories help us better understand our users, learn about their goals, explain our research, and demonstrate our design ideas. Basing stories on fact (data or knowledge embedded in your organization, or even new information) will help you communicate your own ideas effectively. Tell your story well: you'll get buy-in for the design and you'll have everyone on the same page. Whitney Quesenbery, user experience expert and master storyteller, will teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs.

July, 2010: Remote Usability Testing with Nate Bolt

Usability testing is not new, but remote usability testing absolutely is. It's a unique and useful way to watch people use your design. The more time spent watching people use your design, the better your design will be. Remote testing also happens to be a little scary. We've asked Nate Bolt to clear away some of the misconceptions, the controversy, and the voodoo. When remote usability testing is right for your organization, you'll conduct that research with confidence.

June, 2010: Site Search Analytics with Lou Rosenfeld

Your site's search engine produces all sorts of useful information. Spending time with your site's query data—data that is semantically rich—will help you answer questions about your users' behavior and intent. You're likely to learn some unanticipated lessons about your site. The result? More usable content, improved search engine performance, as well as better navigation and metadata. Your users will achieve more on your site. You’ll sell more, engage more, and reduce frustration.

June, 2010: Content Strategy: Maximizing a Business Asset with Kristina Halvorson

Companies and agencies spend months and millions of dollars on how they'll deliver content online, yet allocate very few resources toward creating and governing the content itself. Our users deserve more than the last-minute content they often get stuck with. And you have the power to change that.

May, 2010: Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers with Dan Rubin

We've all been thrown into situations where we have no idea how or where to begin. For anyone responsible for their site's design, or even those who want to make a difference but don't know how, the process can be daunting. Even the term "web design" implies knowledge and understanding of something visual, creative, even artistic ability.

Thankfully, the skills you need to discover and fix many of the most common design problems do not require that you have an art degree or to be a finalist on Project Runway. Dan Rubin will show you the simple steps you can master to create great visual designs. He'll teach you how to recognize common design mistakes and effective ways to make your site look good, whether you're a natural artist or not.

April, 2010: Answered! Your Top Questions on Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski, Principal, LukeW Interface Designs

How long should your form be? Is it best to break a form into multiple steps? What are the considerations for a two-column design? How do you handle international addresses? These are just a few examples of what countless others have wrestled with in their form design. When it comes to form design, we turn to one of the foremost experts in this area, Luke Wroblewski. Luke will share his treasury of common form challenges and their solutions. He'll divulge 6 important aspects of web form design that everyone wants to know more about.

March, 2010: A Practitioner's Guide to Prototyping with Todd Zaki Warfel, Founder and Principal Designer, Messagefirst

Prototyping is an iterative process. You generate design concepts. You test them. You discover what works, what needs improving, and opportunities for new ideas. Then repeat. The earlier you learn about a design change, the easier it is to implement, and the less costly that change will be.

March, 2010: Tagging with Folksonomies in a Taxonomy World with Stephanie Lemieux of Earley & Associates

Implementing tagging won’t replace your site’s taxonomy. Instead, a well-integrated folksonomy can create a synergy that makes a site’s vast content more findable. Stephanie will walk you through several proven implementation strategies for public-facing web sites, behind-the-firewall enterprise systems, and intranets.

February, 2010: The Power of Ad Hoc Personas: Truly Practical Methods to Get Your Organization On the Same Page with Tamara Adlin

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.

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.

May, 2009: New Ways to Think about Taxonomy: The Role of Taxonomies in Your Organization with Seth Earley and Stephanie Lemieux of Earley & Associates

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.