The UX Playbook: Tools, Tips, & Tricks

Building technology is a practiced skill and indeed an art, but it's not magic. You hire craftsmen and you trust them with the details. But in order to command their respect and sleep well at night, you deserve to have a big-picture understanding of what they're building and why. A little knowledge will go a long way towards confidently leading your technical product team.

This document summarizes the accomplishments of an organization in 2012. It opened its doors to provide skills training to help people succeed, taught over 115 classes attended by a community that grew to over 3,000 members. Experts from local companies volunteered their time and insights to teach classes for free or at low cost, helping the organization educate hundreds on topics like coding, law, and finance. The organization is thankful for the support of its community and looks forward to another successful year ahead.

Starting a new company is hard, but putting in place the right legal framework for your business doesn’t have to be... Dive deep into the most important issues relating to raising capital for your company with insight from Mick Bain and Janene Asgeirsson, two experts on start-up law from WilmerHale. Having worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs and start-ups, Janene and Mick will answer the questions that you haven't even thought to ask. What You'll Learn: Financing structures and terms How to comply with security regulations Types of investors to work with and why

Instructor: Michael Pici If the task you need to complete requires a response how will you coax your reader into replying? As you will find out in this class it is all about content, content, content. Tailoring your email so that it feels personal to the recpient is one sure fire way to elicit a response from them. So get your content creating hats on and let Michael Pici, Sales Specialist at HubSpot, teach you how to develop emails that your recipiant will want to reply to! What You'll Learn: How to research your prospect pre-email and phone call How to craft the perfect email that will always get a response Technology tricks and shortcuts This class is for anyone who wants to get better at outreach. This will be just as effective for a first timer, as a seasoned sales rep. About the Instructor: Michael Pici is an Inbound Marketing and Sales Specialist at HubSpot. He helps organizations develop strategies to attract highly qualified leads by using modern sales techniques to develop a holistic sales and marketing funnel. Michael is a top sales producer, and is the co-author of the Inbound Sales blog: Sell Inbound.

Jeff Bussgang on Product Management and the Search for Product-Market Fit Startup product management is both an art and a science. We're thrilled to host Jeff Bussgang - author, blogger, professor, VC partner, and generally one of the best all round startup minds we know - for an in-depth dive into best practices in product management as well as tactics to achieve product-market fit. You'll Learn: -The skills that characterize great product managers -Tactics and techniques for finding product-market fit About Jeff Bussgang: Jeff Bussgang is a general partner at Flybridge Capital, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and an author/blogger (book: Mastering the VC Game, blog: Seeing Both Sides). He was previously an entrepreneur, cofounding Upromise (acquired by SallieMae) and serving as VP of marketing and products at Open Market (IPO 1996).

No matter your marketing goal, Google Adwords is the quickest and easiest way to grow your business. Period. But what happens after a user clicks on your ad and starts investigating your product? Prospective customers don't automatically become paying customers, and oftentimes it takes a bit of nurturing in order to get them to actually buy, which requires the marketing team passing these leads off to the sales team. That's where things get tricky, and in order to successfully bring a prospect down the sales funnel, there needs to be an orderly process and effective communication. Chad Larson and Elliot Reid will draw upon their experience at WordStream and show you how to implement this sales process in your own company. What You'll Learn PPC best practices to fuel a successful sales funnel The internal infrastructure necessary to close more deals How to create a successful sales process How to make the connection

Instructor: Noah Freeman As a digital marketer, its essential to have a knowledge of all the available advertising channels to choose from. Among the plethora of services currently out there, Facebook has risen as a force to be reckoned with. With over 1 billion users, it's vast knowledge of its users' personal details and interests, and its ability to highly target ads to specific groups, Facebook makes an attractive option for any company. Noah will teach you all you need to know in order to make the most out of your Facebook advertising strategy. What You'll Learn Types of Facebook ad offerings How to target your ad Using page promotion and boosted posts The elements of a great ad

The document discusses using a questionnaire created with Survey Monkey to gather opinions for a documentary. The questionnaire asked about gender and preferred documentary genres. The results showed that interviews and voiceovers were most popular documentary conventions. Peer feedback on drafts was also valuable, helping to improve designs and ensure the final product met audience needs. Focus groups and interviews could provide additional perspectives beyond what a questionnaire captures alone.

The student conducted a survey to understand audience preferences for their documentary. Questions asked about gender, preferred documentary genres, and desired codes and conventions. The majority preferred archive footage and interviews. The student analyzed the results to select a genre and incorporate interviews. They also gathered peer feedback on draft tasks and the documentary through printed materials and interviews. This feedback helped identify improvements and ensure the products met audience needs.

This document discusses various communication and advertising standards and guidelines. It includes 14 codes that cover topics like truthfulness in advertising, protecting children, privacy, and health claims. Code 1 discusses truthfulness, code 2 proper identification of advertising, code 3 avoiding misleading claims, and code 4 avoiding offense or harm. The remaining codes cover children-friendly advertising, privacy, and substantiating health or nutritional claims.

What would a 5% improvement in your website’s conversion rates make to your bottom line? If you’re not doing regular usability testing, then you’re probably leaving at least that value on the table. Join Peter Hughes in this free webinar sponsored by UserZoom and UXPA to find out how you can reduce product failures while boosting conversion rates.

The document outlines various communication and planning methods for developing an advertisement, including mind maps, mood boards, style sheets, layout plans, brainstorming, informal pitches, and formal pitches. It then provides examples of using each method to develop a Coca-Cola advertisement and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of each method, as well as whether the method was found useful. Sketches and a formal proposal are also developed for an "advagame", or advertising video game. The methods aim to help visualize ideas and receive feedback to create an effective final advertisement.

Slides from my Collaborative Research workshop from Webstock 2014. Buy the book: Just Enough Research

This document provides guidance on copywriting best practices. It recommends choosing one customer avatar to speak directly to, conducting customer interviews to understand pain points and desires, and mirroring customers' answers in the copy. It also suggests using contractions, idioms, short words, and reading copy aloud to ensure it sounds natural. Several headline formulas are presented, including questions over statements, problems over solutions, and specifics over generalizations. Online tools for copywriting are listed at the end.

This proposal is for a video documentary titled "The need to get big" that will explore bodybuilding and societal pressures on young men to gain muscle. The target audience is young men ages 16-24 who are interested in fitness. Research will include interviews, information on bigorexia, and examples of similar documentaries. The documentary will include a voiceover, interviews, and footage of the creator working out. It will be 5 minutes or less and aim to raise awareness of body image issues. The creator will evaluate their work by rewatching it and identifying areas for improvement to apply to future projects.

The document is a proposal for a radio documentary aimed at middle-aged people between 45-64 years old about Brexit. It includes details on the target audience such as their demographics, psychographics, and research conducted. The proposal outlines a 10-week schedule for the project that includes research, production experiments, interviews, editing, and evaluation. Production will involve recording interviews, creating a logo in Photoshop, and editing interviews and sound effects in Audition. The bibliography lists 7 sources that will be used for research, including audience surveys, interviews, and existing radio shows and articles on Brexit.

Reasons to use hypotheses for your design research, where hypotheses fit within Design Thinking/Lean UX, a framework to formulate stronger hypotheses and some hypotheses examples.

In the design process we follow, once we have defined the conceptual direction and content strategy for a given design and refined our approach through user research and iterative usability testing, we start applying visual design. Generally, we take a key screen whose structure and functionality we have finalized—for example, a layout for a home page or a dashboard page—and explore three alternatives for visual style. These three alternative visual designs, or comps, include the same content, but reflect different choices for color palette and imagery. The idea is to present business owners and stakeholders with different visual design options from which they can choose. Sometimes there is a clear favorite among stakeholders or an option that makes the most sense from a brand perspective. However, there can often be disagreements among the members of a project team on which direction to choose. If we’ve done our job right, there are rationales for our various design decisions in the different comps, but even so, there may be disagreement about which rationale is most appropriate for the situation. As practitioners of user-centered design, it is natural for us to turn to user research to help inform and guide the process of choosing a visual design. But traditional usability testing and related methods don’t seem particularly well suited for assessing visual design for two reasons: 1. When we reach out to users for feedback on visual design options, stakeholders are generally looking for large sample sizes—larger than are typical for a qualitative usability study. 2. The response we are looking for from users is more emotional—that is, less about users’ ability to accomplish tasks and more about their affective response to a given design. With this in mind, we were very interested in articles we saw on Desirability Testing. In one article, the author posits desirability testing as a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods that allow you to assess users’ attitudes toward aesthetics and visual appeal. Inspired by his overview, we researched desirability studies a bit further and tried a modified version of the techniques on one of our projects. This presentation reviews the variants of desirability testing that we considered and the lessons we learned from a desirability study on visual design options for one of our projects. Interestingly, we found that while desirability testing did help us better understand participant’s self reported emotional response to a visual design, it also helped us identify other key areas of the experience that could be improved.

This document provides an overview of user research for design and development. It discusses why research is important, such as customers not being the same as designers. There are general research goals like being exploratory, descriptive, or evaluative. The research process involves five stages: plan, recruit, conduct, analyze, and communicate. Planning defines the goals and determines the schedule and budget. Recruiting finds appropriate participants. Conducting uses quantitative methods like surveys or qualitative methods like interviews. Analysis finds patterns in the data. Communication shares results through personas, scenarios, and models. The document provides tips for each stage and addresses common objections to research.

The respondent conducted a questionnaire through Survey Monkey to understand audience preferences for documentary genres and conventions. Gender was the first question to avoid bias, and genres were ranked from most to least preferred. Archive footage and interviews were most popular requested elements. The respondent also used Yougov to analyze genre consumption by demographics like age, gender and location. Different research methods were used like questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups, each with advantages and disadvantages. Peer and family feedback on draft tasks and the documentary itself helped improve the products by highlighting needed changes to suit the audience.

Motivation at work can be increased by focusing on autonomy, purpose and competence. Autonomy allows employees to feel in control of their work. Having purpose means employees understand how their work helps others. Competence involves providing training and supporting employees' learning goals. Choice architecture and reducing queues also impact motivation. To stay motivated, individuals should identify the parts of their work they love, or "red threads", and spend 20% of their time on these activities. Regular check-ins with employees help them incorporate red threads into their daily work.

The document discusses feedback received from an audience questionnaire about documentaries. Key findings include: - Respondents preferred archive footage and interviews as codes/conventions. This informed including more interviews in the documentary. - Genre preferences helped decide what genre the documentary would be. - Asking about gender ensured the survey wasn't gender biased and allowed comparing male and female preferences. Peer and family feedback on documentary drafts and ancillary tasks helped improve the products by highlighting ineffective areas and changes needed. The most useful feedback came from reviewing the documentary itself.

The document outlines various communication methods for planning projects including mind maps, mood boards, style sheets, layout plans, brainstorming, pitches, proposals, reactions, and sketches. Each method is described in 1-2 sentences with strengths and weaknesses listed in bullet points. An example mind map for Coca-Cola is also included to demonstrate the method.

The document discusses several ASA codes for communication methods and advertisements. The codes cover requirements for compliance with laws, clearly identifying advertisements as marketing, avoiding misleading claims, preventing offense or harm, restrictions regarding children, obtaining permission for celebrity images, and health or nutrition claims requiring proof.

Looking for feedback? Trying to gauge interest in a new service? "Let's create a survey" is often the default response to these and other questions. Surveys are "easy" to throw together, but they're not always the answer. Let's discuss thinking critically about whether or not a survey is the appropriate methodology to answer your research question. This presentation will also cover essentials around survey design including thinking about what types of questions to use, determining what to ask, and tips for writing questions.

The document provides an overview of 13 ASA advertising codes, outlining their brief descriptions. The codes cover areas such as compliance with laws, recognition as an advertisement, avoiding misleading claims, preventing harm/offence, restrictions regarding children, privacy issues, and food/health claims.

The document provides an overview of 13 ASA advertising codes, outlining their brief descriptions. The codes cover areas such as compliance with laws, recognizing advertising content, avoiding misleading claims, preventing harm/offense, restrictions regarding children, privacy issues, and health/nutritional claims.

Instructor: Jim Henderson Sales--you can't live without making them. And oftentimes you can't move forward in bootstrapping your company or gaining early the traction investors want without them. But what do you do when the odds are stacked against you? What do you do when you’re not that charismatic, polished salesperson? The good news is that the answer to these questions is the same - and it’s not complicated, nor a mysterious process that gets bestowed on only a few people. It’s a simple set of steps that every founder, employee, or salesperson can master and use to win deals that launch or grow your company. What You'll Learn The steps that move you from your vision to a new customer How to prepare for and execute each step Critical do’s and don’ts Tips to manage the process mentally and emotionally

Instructor: Jacquelyn Miller Let's face it, as a marketer, you can't always promote products on the vanguard of hip and cool. In fact, it might even be good to build your marketing career in an unsexy industry - Jacqui Miller will tell you why. As the marketer for PillPack, a new pharmacy focused on creating a better, simpler pharmacy experience, Jacqui knows all about turning on spotlights even when there's no stage. She'll help you (your brand) get sexy and brainstorm marketing plans that actually feel fun. What You'll Learn: Why unsexy industries are where it's at. Spotting marketing opportunity in unexpected places. Borrowing marketing ideas from successful consumer brands. Convincing managers / team members to have more marketing fun.

When it comes to startups, SVB has been around the block. Many times. They've helped countless founders and CEOs negotiate the ups and downs of startup financing. Confused about the how to choose the right funding strategy? Don't be. On November 12th, SVB’s Dan Allred and Smith Anderson will break it down for you. They'll introduce five of the most important and popular avenues for startup funding: Bootstrapping Crowdfunding Angel Investors Venture Capital Debt

There's nothing quite as powerful as an authentic advocate, who shares their opinion about your brand with their friends, family and social networks. Dave Balter spent the last 12 years building BzzAgent, which has energized millions of advocates to influence hundreds of millions of people. He literally wrote the book(s) on advocacy marketing: Grapevine (2005) The Word of Mouth Manual Vol. II (2008) In this hands-on workshop, Dave will share the four key tools to generating advocacy and teach you how to get (just about) anyone to do (just about) anything. 'Nuf said.

The road to launching a new web or mobile application usually starts with the creation of a minimum viable product (MVP). A MVP is more than a prototype but less than a fully-featured app and can help you engage a particular audience, such as potential investors, strategic partners, hires, or test users. Determining what features should be included in or excluded from your MVP is a critical task with major ramifications. Building a bad MVP negatively impacts your time to market, budget, likelihood of getting funding, and probability of success: this class is going to help you get it right. What You'll Learn: How to let go of the features you used to think were a “must have”. How a particular audience can impact the features in a MVP. How to maximize a MVP’s impact while still hitting deadlines and budgets.

This interactive class will give you strategy insight and practical tools to help you structure your own whale hunt. What you'll learn: How to get intros to the right decision makers. How to make the right pitch and close the deal. How to sell ahead of your product (if you're a startup, you're probably gonna have to).

The document discusses alternatives to raising funding for startups, including bootstrapping a business using customers. It recommends focusing on building a minimum viable product, validating the product with customers, and using customer payments to fund further development rather than seeking investors. Specifically, it suggests (1) focusing on a step-by-step process of building features, determining customer value, and setting pricing based on data; (2) outsourcing non-essential tasks; and (3) only raising funding once there is high customer demand, clear milestones are in place, and the business is already seeing traction.

Buying ads on Facebook is easy -- launching a Facebook ad campaign that that actually brings in more customers and generates good ROI get's a little more complicated. Enter Carly Rodgers. Carly's been rocking Facebook ad campaigns for years (see her article on how she generated 1 Million Dollars in Revenue from Facebook Ads) and can help answer any of your questions from how to find your target audience to knowing if CPC or CPM is a better tactic for your company.

The document discusses wireframes and the wireframing process. It begins with defining what a wireframe is and its purpose for focusing on usability and user experience. It then outlines the typical wireframing process which includes sketching ideas, creating wireframes, prototyping, and development. The document provides guidance on when to use wireframes, why they are useful for communicating with stakeholders and allowing for flexibility. It also covers types of wireframes, tools for creating wireframes, what to include and avoid, and resources for learning more about wireframing.

In this class, Jay Acunzo of HubSpot will "demystify content." Learn how to hone in on the right content strategy for your company. (Spoiler alert: it needs to be all about people.) Through workshops and examples, you'll practice blending the art and science of content-creation to make your publishing process easy, simple, and effective.

This presentation will gear you up for finding, acquiring, and retaining the users you need to get your company off the ground and keep it growing. What You'll Learn: - Proven tactics for understanding your potential consumers and how to engage them - How to find and optimize the right channels for consumer acquisition - How to bring in new consumers on a shoestring or a $1M budget

This document summarizes an email marketing strategy presentation. It discusses the importance of email marketing and some key metrics like open rates. It provides best practices for email design like using clear subject lines and calls to action. It also discusses testing different email designs and the rise of mobile email usage. Mobile considerations like touch targets and single column layouts are covered. The presentation emphasizes the need to optimize the email experience across different devices and clients.

In this class, we'll analyze various scenarious in which a traditional 960 pixel view fails users, and how responsive design can help. We'll look at the best-practice principles behind implementing a responsive website or app and then walk through a fail-proof process for overhauling existing designs to make them truly responsive.

Meditation, or mindfulness practice, has become all the rage throughout the tech & business world. In this deck you'll learn all about how to apply the benefits of meditation into your professional life. Slides taken from a class taught by John Bigay, a digital marketing and strategy consultant. Learn more from the experts by visiting http://intelligent.ly/learn

Stepping into the role of manager for the first time has a unique set of challenges. Learn how to manage yourself as well as how to manage others. Slides taken from a class taught by Janet Aronica of Localytics. Learn more from the experts by visiting Intelligent.ly