| |
|
Training is
available for your location, and we can customize our training for your
organization's needs.
We have the expertise and a proven track record for our seminars and
presentations (take a look at the feedback
from our seminars). Our training gives you strategies for success in
the three critical areas of user interface design:
- User interface
design methodology
We teach you how to apply Goal-oriented Design--a well-defined,
logical method with clear steps. With expertise in this method, you
will produce user interfaces that delight your customers. Our training
in Goal-oriented Design includes methods for interviewing target users
to define their requirements and then translating those requirements
into successful UI designs. We use role playing and practical exercises
to demonstrate how to gather, organize, and analyze user requirements;
create personas and scenarios based on these requirements;
and design UIs that meet those requirements in ways that will
delight your target users.
- Creation and leadership
of user interface design teams
Whether your company is small or large, the design of a successful
user interface has to be a team effort. It can't be done effectively
by one person, no matter how much design expertise that person has.
Our training gives you a detailed process for deciding what kind of
design teams you need, who should be on those teams, what their level
of expertise needs to be, what their deliverables are, and how to
lead them through their design tasks. We also prepare you for the
challenges of interactive design work and show how you can keep the
design moving forward and on schedule.
- Effective integration
of UI design into the SDLC
Every company follows a software development lifecycle (SDLC) to create
its software products. This process may be well-defined and documented;
it may be required to conform to external SEI or ISO standards; or,
it may be informal and somewhat fluid. Whether you prefer Extreme
Programming, or a Rational UML approach, or something in-between,
the need is the same: Your user interface design methodology has to
integrate seamlessly into your software development process. We teach
your teams how to adapt their development processes to include upfront
UI design. We explain how designing the UI before it's coded enhances
any software development process and makes it more efficient. We show
how to create a detailed design schedule and synchronize it with the
development team's schedule using three strategies: top-down user
interface design, chunking of UI design tasks, and flexible task sequencing.
Focused
Design's training options
The following options are offered for the topics
above:
Seminar
option A. 1-day
seminar (click
here to see a sample seminar outline)
Seminar option B. 2-day
seminar
Presentation option C. 2-hour
presentation
Presentation option D. 90-minute
webinar/phone seminar
Customization option E.
Customized training offers:
- Developing topics around your current
needs
- Focusing our training on a specific project
at your site by addressing specific user interface design needs you
have for that project
- Working with your current teams over a
specific period to help them apply goal-oriented design methods, develop
and lead their design teams, or create design schedules that can be
integrated into your software development process.
Email us at info@focuseddesign.com
for more information or a training quote.
From a user's
perspective, the interface is your product.
That's why a successful product needs a user interface that reflects
the taskflow of your target users, anticipates their actions, and behaves
as they expect. To help you design these capabilities into the interface,
we profile your users and then capture their key needs in a user persona.
Our profiling process focuses on the primary users
you are targeting for your software. We observe 10 or 12 of them in
their work environments, listen to their concerns, and ask intelligent
and focused questions. Then we analyze our information and create the
1 or 2 personas that accurately represent these target users.
How do our user personas
help the project team?
Project teams don't like the risk of creating software for users they
don't understand. If the development team has a user persona to guide
them before they start coding, they won't have to guess what
features to provide and how to emphasize them. They can design for a
single person, rather than a variety of seemingly incompatible users.
A user persona also helps the project team contain
feature-creep. When requests are made in the middle of the project to
include additional features or eliminate features, the persona will
reveal whether a feature belongs in the taskflow of target users. The
team can avoid spending time on features that aren't wanted.
Our services can be limited to creating user profiles
and a persona for your project. Or, additionally, you may want us to
design and prototype the user interface. See how
we work with you on user interface projects for more information.
User interfaces
that work give software products a competitive edge.
If you invest in UI design services, how can you be assured of a winning
result? At Focused Design, we can guarantee a user interface that works
because of the practical process we follow. We don't design for generic
users. Every stage of our process is mapped to the specific needs and
taskflows of your target users.
What do we deliver for a design project?
- Functioning prototype
of the user interface
Dreamweaver is our prototyping tool. The software development team
can either use our prototype directly or recreate it (depending upon
the programming platform for the final software).
- User interface
specification document
The UI specification describes the behavior of every component of
the user interface. It also contains user
scenarios for the software and demonstrates
how the design enables these scenarios.
- Project schedule
We show you the order in which we will prototype the windows and features
of the software. To maximize efficiency, we integrate this schedule
into your product development schedule.
For more information, see how
we work with you on a UI design project with us, including time
estimates.
If the user
interface in a software product doesn't work, we can help you fix it.
First we have to find out why it doesn't work. In some cases, a UI fails
to meet the basic criteria of good design, such as consistency, simplicity,
and logical flow. In other cases, the interface might meet design criteria
for a generic user, yet your target users find it hard to use.
That's because they have specific needs. By understanding
who the target users are, what tasks they are trying to accomplish,
and how they need to use the interface to accomplish them, we can find
the problem areas in the UI.
What do we deliver
for a UI analysis project?
To help you fix the problems with an existing user interface, Focused
Design creates a User Interface Analysis Report.
For more information, see how
we work with you on a UI analysis project, including time estimates.
|
