Day 1: Planning the perfect user experience by Chui Chui Tan

When you start to plan a user experience – whether it’s a tiny mobile app or a huge international website – you quickly discover there’s far too much to keep track of. Stakeholders have ideas they want you to include. Competitors seem to be launching new features all the time. Users are demanding fixes and improvements. How can you keep everyone happy?

This workshop will, finally, help you make sense of your user experience. You’ll learn simple, powerful techniques to help you to create a UX vision that your stakeholders and users love.

If you’ve ever tried to plan a user experience you’ll have encountered some of these problems:

• Everyone wants their favourite feature delivered right away
• Constantly struggling to keep up with competitors
• Getting into an endless cycle of ‘quick fixes’ rather than a strategic vision
• Conflicts between stakeholders who can’t see the big picture
• Finding ways to differentiate your product in a crowded market
• Not enough resources to get everything done
• Mountains of data that nobody uses

Product managers, designers and solution architects who want to understand how to design compelling product or implement a feature will all benefit from the practical exercises, rules of thumb and design tools that will be covered in this workshop. This workshop offers novice and experienced practitioners alike ways to see problems anew and approach them with a fresh set of rules.

Schedule

09:00 – 09:30 Register and introduction
09:30 – 12:30 Workshop part 1
10:45 – 11:00 Tea break
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
14:00 – 17:00 Workshop part 2
15:30 – 15:45 Tea break

Chui Chui will show you how to bring your data and requirements into a single map so everyone can see what’s important. She’ll give you techniques you can use in meetings and workshops to help teams to set priorities and to ensure that the scope of your projects don’t get out of hand.

• Make sense of conflicting product requirements
• Identify the gaps in your knowledge and know what to do about them
• Prioritise features according to your resources
• Know when you need to match your competitors’ offerings, and when you don’t need to bother
• Understand the relationship between ‘brand’ and ‘user experience’
• Create a user experience roadmap
• Get teams to agree on what really matters

If you attend one workshop this year, it should be this one.

Chui Chui Tan
International Experience Director, cxpartners

Work in user experience (UX) for over 10 years. I help global companies and organisations to improve their businesses by understanding their users and customers, and using that as the core to design their products and services.

Day 2: Advanced simplicity by Giles Colborne

We love simple products – whether it’s the ‘it just works’ focus of DropBox or the timeless design of Dieter Rams.

If you’ve ever sat in a meeting and argued that your product or website needs to be simpler, then chances are you’ve come away from the same meeting with an even longer list of features and content that need to be added.

Anyone trying to create a simple design faces some tough challenges:

• How can I align people around a set of design goals?
• How do I know the difference between ‘simple’ and ‘dumbing down’?
• Should I match the features my competitors are putting out there?
• How do you ‘sell’ simplicity when it’s so much easier to sell features?
• How do I stop my ‘simple’ design from evolving into a mess?
• How do I combine character with simplicity?

UX managers, strategists, product managers and designers will learn simple techniques for meeting, workshops and planning that will help them to create a clear vision and get buy-in from stakeholders. The workshop is full of practical tips and techniques that you can start using right away.

Schedule

09:00 – 09:30 Register and introduction
09:30 – 12:30 Workshop part 1
10:45 – 11:00 Tea break
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
14:00 – 17:00 Workshop part 2
15:30 – 15:45 Tea break

This workshop will answer these questions and apply the answers to your projects. You’ll learn to use UX frameworks to break down user experience into manageable chunks. You’ll learn to apply design rules to real-world challenges by sketching and prototyping user interfaces. And you’ll get tips and advice from past projects to help you solve problems or explain ideas in those tricky design meetings.

Fast-paced and fun, this workshop will give you a chance to try out your ideas with like-minded colleagues.

• • Untangle the wooly thinking around simplicity – learn a universal test for simplicity.
  • Apply the psychology of simplicity – the biases that drive buyers, users and design teams to make choices that favour or disfavour simplicity.
  • Map the benefits of simplicity to your product requirements.
  • Use simplicity as a way to create innovative, compelling designs.
  • Understand when simplicity is not useful.
  • Plan moments of simplicity and complexity into a user experience map for optimal results.
  • Use a variety of strategies for simplicity in design and understand when each strategy is best deployed.

This workshop features new material from Giles’ upcoming book.

Giles Colborne
CEO of cxpartners. Next generation experience design. Author of ‘Simple and Usable’.

Giles co-founded cxpartners in 2004. Since then, it has grown to one of the world’s leading independent experience design consultancies working on next generation experience design and generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue for companies such as Marriott, eBay and AXA.

His book, ‘Simple and Usable’, has sold tens of thousands of copies in Europe and North America and has been translated into Chinese and Korean. Giles is former president of the UPA, co-chair of IA Summit, and UX Awards judge. Additionally, he has worked with the British Standards Institute in developing standards for web accessibility.

16 – 17 January 2014, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM

NTUC CENTRE One Marina Boulevard L8,  No. 1 Marina Boulevard Singapore 018989

Workshop Fees:

Day 1 or 2 Early Bird: $250
Day 1 + 2 Early Bird Bundle: $450
Day 1 or 2 Regular: $300
Day 1 + 2 Early Bird Bundle: $550

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