| Web Sites that Work: Designing with Your Eyes Open,
is the only research-driven, in-depth training course created to teach
web designers exactly what it takes to build usable web sites. Based on
User Interface Engineering’s research from the last six years, you’ll
learn the latest in how users navigate and interact with world-class sites.
We don’t want you to blindly believe everything we say. We’d
rather show you how to spot the evidence yourself and draw your own conclusions—
that’s designing with your eyes open.
You’ll test several web sites (including your own, if you wish)
to explore our findings for yourself. We’ll show you some things
to look for, and you’ll conduct short usability tests in small teams.
It’s great if you’ve done usability testing before, but it’s
fine if you haven’t.
When you leave the course, you’ll be armed with essential skills
in designing and conducting usability tests, and you’ll know what
to look for when you test your own site.
When we bring this course to you, we enhance the on-site version by tailoring
it specifically to your organization’s structure and products. Through
careful and deliberate selection of examples and case studies, our instructors
ensure that everyone in the class relates completely to the main teaching
points.
Course Description
Introduction
We’ll start the day with hands-on exploration of live web sites.
You’ll gain first-hand experience with:
Usability of Web Sites
When creating a web site, you need to know what kind of site you are
creating, who your audience is, and why users are coming to your site.
Find out:
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How your business model affects your design.
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What we learned from our usability tests of 91 users in 3 days.
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The tasks we used in our usability research (and how to create your
own tasks).
The Scent of Information
Some sites work better than others for finding information. You’ll
discover:
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How human “informavores” behave as they hunt their prey
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How links give off “scent” that guides users to their
goal
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Examples of links that misled users
Honing Your Facilitation Skills
We’ll give you the “quick and dirty” on facilitating
a usability test. By the end of the day, you’ll have facilitated
several mini-usability tests and experienced:
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The three roles of the test facilitator
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Briefing and debriefing users
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When to help users (and when not to)
Page Layout
The way you present content influences its ease of use. You’ll
probe the underlying reasons why:
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Providing more “levels of information” on a single web
page helps users find what they’re looking for
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Requiring less drill-down within a site may lead to more success
than having lots of smaller pages linked together
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Scrolling isn’t necessarily evil
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Users did worse on sites that had more white space
The Scent of a Web Page: The 7 Types of Web Pages
As users traverse through a web site, they encounter different types
of pages, each with unique functions. You will learn:
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The 7 Types of Navigation Pages on Web Sites. As users traverse through
a web site and encounter different types of pages. You'll learn the
secret requirements for each type of page a user can encounter.
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Three ways to predict when users will fail finding the content they
desire.
You may want to attend this course if...
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You’re barraged with a constant stream of other people’s
opinions about how to make your site better
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You’re understaffed and need help figuring out how to set your
priorities
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The development team is being pushed to make the site “cool”
instead of useful
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Developers currently have little or no contact with web users
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There is contention between different departments: content design,
marketing, graphics, or development
Who Should Attend
This course is ideal for designers and developers of Internet and intranet
web sites, including content developers, web authors, marketing professionals,
and managers. Knowledge of HTML is useful but not necessary.
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