USER-CENTERED RESEARCH AND EVALUATION (4 CREDITS)

Learning Outcomes:

On successful completion of this course, students will be able to: LO1 – explain the essentials of designing user experience and user research; LO2 – apply techniques for designing good user research in digital environment; LO3 – construct a report based on the user research.

Topics:

1. Introduction to UX;
2. Introduction: why is user research so important?;
3. Best practice in user research: who, what, why and how;
4. Usability testing: observing people doing things;
5. Content testing: what do people think your content means?;
6. Card sorting: understanding how people group and relate things;
7. Surveys: how to gauge a widespread user response;
8. User interviews: understanding people’s experience through talking to them;
9. Diary studies: how to capture user research data over time;
10. Information architecture validation: does the structure of your information work for your users?;
11. Ethnography: observing how people behave in the real world;
12. Contextual inquiry: interviewing people in their own environment;
13. A/B testing: a technique to compare different options;
14. Getting the best out of stakeholder workshops;
15. Guerrilla research: running fast-paced research in the real world;
16. How to combine user research methodologies;
17. Content analysis: a method of coding and making sense of your qualitative data;
18. Affinity diagramming: understand your data through identifying its themes;
19. Prioritizing issues and user needs: what’s important and what to work on next;
20. Creating executive summaries and detailed reports to present results;
21. Using personas to communicate user characteristics and behaviors;
22. Using journey and experience maps to visualize user research data;
23. Using infographics to translate numerical and statistical data;
24. Review;
25. How to recommend changes to visual, interaction and information design.