UIE Virtual Seminar Presentation
Field Studies: The Ultimate Tool in Your Usability Toolbox
Kate Gomoll, Gomoll Research & Design
Length: 90 Minutes
Price: $129.00 (includes handout)
Would you like to have lifetime access to the most groundbreaking thinking in the world of Experience Design? 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.
Watching a UIE Virtual Seminar couldn't be simpler. You'll view the presentation in your web browser and listen to it with your computer speakers. (We've tested the seminar using Firefox and Internet Explorer on both Macs and PCs with great success.) All you'll need is a web browser equipped with the Macromedia Flash Player (version 6 or newer) and a connection to the Internet.
Seminar Description
Do you really know who your users are and what they want? Are you unsure whether or not you’re getting the most out of your user research? Is your product really as powerful, intuitive, and easy-to-use as you think it is? Many teams tell us they lack the expertise to get into the minds of their users. Without this valuable insight, the designs teams produce fall short of delighting users, and cause frustration for everyone involved.
The best way to truly understand your users' goals, attitudes, and workplaces is to watch people in context. By going into the field, observing and interviewing users in their own environments, and then analyzing the data, you can come back with an incredibly rich understanding of what users really need. With research culled from field studies, you'll always end up making radical improvements to your web sites and software.
While techniques such as focus groups, usability tests, and surveys can lead to valuable insights, none of them immerse design teams in users' natural environments to observe critical details quite like field research. In this presentation, Kate will share some of her most important findings about the field study process, its techniques, and its effectiveness. You’ll learn:
- How to plan, set up, and run a field study, from getting buy-in to communicating results
- How to determine the right user groups to observe through the collection of demographic information, customer lists, data from outside market research firms, surveys, and screeners
- How to efficiently observe and interview your users to gather the most pertinent data
- How to collect and analyze solid user data to paint an accurate picture of “what is” and brainstorm “what could be”
- How to use process storyboards, user data posters, artifacts, photos, and workflow diagrams to create compelling, useful deliverables from the mountains of user data collected from field studies
- How best to sell the field research process within your organization and to convince key stakeholders of the importance of user research
Kate will also tell you how her company creates sets of concise field study deliverables that actually compel design teams to come up with great ideas - through the use of techniques such as illustrated site visit reports, user profiles, workplace descriptions, top-ten tasks lists, storyboards, and more.
Who Should Attend
If you are involved in interface design, as either a designer or a project manager, you’ll benefit from Kate’s expertise.
Web Designers and Interface Designers will find the field techniques in this seminar useful in extending their skill sets. Usability Practitioners will learn a new tool available for delighting their users and learn how to create process storyboards and develop user data posters. Project Managers will learn how to sell the field research process within their organization.
No previous experience in collecting field data is necessary.
Instructor Biography
Kate Gomoll is an expert in the field of interface design and usability and is widely known for her practical, straightforward approach to research and design. She is Principal and founder of Gomoll Research & Design, a consulting firm specializing in user experience design. Gomoll Research & Design has conducted customer research for a broad range of clients, including: Charles Schwab, Compaq, DIRECTV, Hewlett-Packard, GE Healthcare, Onyx Software, Netscape, and MSN TV. Kate’s user observation guidelines have appeared in The Art of Human Computer Interface Design and The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines.
Kate teaches customer research methods at conferences and workshops worldwide. She has been a frequent presenter at UIE’s User Interface conferences, the Usability Professionals Association conferences, as well as at SIGCHI. For seven years, Kate taught field study methods as part of a three-day workshop for UCLA Extension.
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