Convincing UX design

You want to develop efficient, satisfactory and sustainable systems? In order to create interactive systems that are user friendly products it is essential to focus on the user with all his human characteristics. The Human-centered Design approach uses knowledge about biological and social factors, expertise and abilities of the user or special user contexts. It should guide all steps of the development process for interactive systems. This workshop presents backgrounds and correlations, highlights requirements as described in ISO 9241-210 and demonstrates how Fundamentals of „Human-centred Design“ can be used in your own processes.

The deepening second part of the Fundamentals of „Human-centred Design“ training uses selected methods and procedures to describe different activities of the company in order to create a holistic and good user experience. In different exercise the chances and risks of the different methods will be revealed. Topics range from user research, user requirements management, to creative methods and norm accordant deliverables.

The process framework Continuous UX will enable project teams to identify project goals and asses their business benefit from the UX perspective. By applying lean principles like MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) and design methods like personas and scenarios a common understanding for the goal of a UX-driven project can arise. Using structuring procedures like User Stories and assumptions the process can lead different disciplines to the development of a real product. The training contains the building blocks design thinking, project scoping as well as requirements engineering. All modules can be booked separately.

New business models, current technology and new services require an alternative, creative mode of operation in companies. Here design has to be the primary task, not a technical examination of functions and processes. The „Design Thinking“ approach puts humans in the center of this design tasks. We will together build a culture of challenging, creating and understanding your obstacles.

To define the scope of a project is one of the most important steps in order to achieve a good result for the project with the resources available: Without a common understanding of the project goals the team will drift apart; without a strong business case the product can fail in its market.

This training will enable participants to understand the „scoping“ process and its components and to initiate own UX projects with the lean approach. Participants will learn with a hands-on sample project how to write a business statement, how to define their stakeholders, and how to identify and model their key persona. They understand how to develop a key scenario and derive a Minimum Viable Product from it.

Software systems are complex structures. Requirements for UX projects have to be precise and clearly understandable for all team members. However requirements are often phrased without a real user need at their core and their implementation often does not have a real benefit for the product. User Stories have a long tradition in agile software developement (e.g. SCRUM). In the process they are continuously charged throughout the course of the project with Scoped User Research activities up to a definition of done for implementation.

This training will teach you how to derive concrete user needs from scenarios, transfer those into correctly build user stories und by this reduce the project’s complexity into small implementable units.

A common understanding of the project, as it can be reached by project scoping, is the first step to a successful UX project. Now you will learn how to put the agreed target course into action in a way that is operationally correct and connects the areas analysis, conception, design, specification and implementation without loosing information or the required continuity on the way.

You will learn how to verify central assumptions of your project by the means of Scoped User Research, how to generate ideas for interaction concepts and how to implement artifacts like wireframes. Together we will define strategies for the hand-over between different disciplines, so that you can successfully carry your UX project from conception through to implementation.

Every project scheme is based on assumptions. Without testing those you risk your project to fail for example due to a wrong image of the workflow or by overestimating the qualification of the target group. In this training you will learn how to identify those and other risks at an early stage with the help of Scoped User Research. You will also learn how to document what you learned and thus be able to bring your scheme up to reality. Apart from strategies to minimize your project risks this training will present you with the appropriate user research methods.

Design engineering in the UX process. In this second partial module your software engineers learn how to efficiently and quickly transfer interaction concepts and visual designs from specs to live software. The module features the process through which designers and software engineers can collaborate using SCRUM user stories. The process is independent of technologies and programming languages. A successful implementation of the process only requires a separation of layers like in the MVVM architectural pattern.

In this module, you learn

• Hand-off between visual/conceptual design and design engineering
• Which project artifacts and assets should be handed over
• How to read these specs and ask the right questions
• How user stories facilitate the hand-over process

No matter if you are a WPF freshman or are changing over from WinForms: You know that the learning curve for WFP is quite steep. Mixed with exterior influences like timely pressure chaos is lurking around the corner and one or the other workaround stays in the productive code. Be it befuddled Code-Behind, ViewModels with visibility features or multiply nested user controls that hopefully try to grab their DataContext without typification.

In this training you will learn how to avoid typical WPF-Anti-Patterns and misunderstandings as well as their negative effects on your MVVM architectures based on hands-on samples. In practical exercises you will work directly with the code and learn to build well maintainable and aesthetic software.

Playfully reaching more motivation and higher efficiency with Gamification. What is behind this? Gamification benefits from concepts and methods of behavioral and motivational psychology, User Interface Design as well as Game Design. In contrast to „Serious Games“, which transport benefits via a complete game, Gamification focuses on the targeted use of single playful elements in non-playful contexts.

This training explains basic factors of success and mechanics of digital games in order to transfer them to use cases of the real world. The primary focus is on