Usability Basics Training
At Stanford, students, faculty, and staff rely on numerous applications and systems to get their work done. The usability of websites and applications impacts people's experience and how they complete their work. This training covers the basics of usability, how to spot usability issues, and incorporating experience design methods into your software development and systems project life cycle.
If your team touches any interface someone else sees, whether it be a website or web application, you should know about usability and learn the principles to follow to ensure that your users’ experience will meet usability standards that result in a better experience.
Format
- This course is virtual and offered over Zoom and consists of 6 hours of instruction, spread over two 3-hour sessions (e.g. Session 1 – 9am-12noon Thursday, and Session 2 – 9am-12noon Friday)
- Individuals or teams can participate
- Interactive activities to practice spotting usability issues
Learning Objectives:
- Learn industry-standard usability principles and how to spot usability issues in system interfaces
- To gain a basic understanding of experience improvement and system usability and why it matters.
Who it’s for
This class can benefit people in many roles, including but not at all limited to:
- Business owners, service managers/owners, product managers/owners of applications/systems - and their teams
- Developers
- Business Analysts
- Project Managers
- QA teams/individuals
- Any individual interested in learning more about usability
Topics covered
- What usability is and why it matters
- The 12 usability principles and how to spot usability issues in an interface
- How to integrate user experience design into a typical project, and resources to do this at Stanford
Course Outline
Session One (3 hours)
- What experience improvement and usability is and why it matters
- Usability principles and how to spot usability issues in an interface
- Optional homework: Look for the usability principles (good and bad examples) in other websites/applications you use
Session Two (3 hours)
- Review
- Share what you found (optional homework)
- Spot the usability issues activity: - spot as many issues as you can! And discuss what you would do differently.
- Learn how a Usability Review is done for a website or web application
- Learn about Experience Research Methods and when to do them (i.e., to build empathy: do user interviews, user surveys, card sorting)
- Learn how and when to integrate user experience design into a typical project, and resources to do this at Stanford
- Wrap up session 2 and review, Q&A
Pre-requisites
None
This Spring's two-part session
- Session 1: April 25, 2023 — 9 a.m. - 12 noon
- Session 2: April 27, 2023 — 9 a.m. - 12 noon
How to sign up
For individuals wanting to take this course
If you are interested in a team training, get in touch with us via our contact form