How do you know if the user experience your team is slaving over is succeeding or failing? How can your team use data to make better decisions? Quantitative measures can help answer these questions and can complement more traditional qualitative research methods like usability testing.

Like many things in life, quantitative measurement relies on good preparation. To effectively measure a user experience it must be divided into discrete pieces that can be measured against their objectives. In this half-day, hands-on workshop, participants will be guided through the steps required to create a Capability Strategy — a technique that defines the objectives and measures for pages within a user experience.

Using examples from their own work, participants will:

• Identify capabilities within their user experiences.
• Define and prioritize the objectives of a capability.
• Establish meaningful measures and success criteria for a capability.

Participants will collaborate in small teams to iterate through each step 3 or 4 times during the workshop, working on each team member’s capabilities in turn.

Upon completion of the workshop each participant will have a solid understanding of the technique, have experienced several practical iterations, and will leave with the beginnings of a Capability Strategy that can bootstrap their own quantitative measurement efforts.

Despite growing evidence that design can make or break a product, designers are still often seen as a cost center. We don’t do ourselves any favors. A lot of us insist on lengthy, expensive, start-from-scratch, research-heavy processes. Some of us are testy perfectionists, loners, or just not real collaborators. And still more spend precious hours creating documentation that is dated before it is completed. Sometimes this is appropriate, but most times it isn’t.

As a leader, how can you transform your team from process followers into nimble design leaders? In this half-day workshop, we will use a diagnostic Sarah has developed to evaluate the state of your current team and develop an action plan for transformation. Through evidence-based criteria, we’ll evaluate six foundational factors – purpose, roles and responsibilities, trust, agreed-upon approach, user involvement, and stakeholder engagement – your team needs to handle whatever comes your way.