User Experience newsletter — May 2020This month I've been converting in-person training courses into live, virtual events. It's difficult to see when — or even if — face-to-face training will happen again. So I'm gradually adapting my courses so they can be delivered as remote workshops. For once, the challenge isn't (just) the technology. It's trying to create the same experience as a face-to-face course. If you've attended one of my courses, you'll know that they are based around practice projects, discussions and interactive activities. But thanks to Google Docs, Mural and Zoom's Breakout Rooms feature, I think I've managed it. We have two courses coming up:
The good news is that, because they are online events, you can attend from anywhere in the world! In other news, here are some articles that I think are worth your attention: I like this approach of balancing conversion rate with the “nag metric”. Word(s) of the day: Gemba Walk. “Gemba walks denote the action of going to see the actual process, understand the work, ask questions, and learn.” I don’t pretend to understand the maths in this paper but, sadly, the overall conclusion has face validity: CEOs that improve customer satisfaction scores get paid less than CEOs that boost sales and productivity. If you’re doing any kind of remote, collaborative work at the moment (design sprints, training) this is gold: how to handle video, whiteboards, voting, facilitation, interviews, and pretty much everything else. I often wondered why the RITE Method of usability testing wasn’t more widely adopted. This article does a good job of explaining why. Sometimes you discover something on YouTube and think wow, what a resource. Such as this: Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky’s entire course on Human Behavioral Biology. 5-minute videos on UX
Want me to answer a UX-related question in a future video? Just reply to this email. Thanks for reading. If you find this newsletter useful and want to support it, forward it to someone who’d like it or, even better, buy them a copy of Think Like a UX Researcher. If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can subscribe here. David Travis. |