Intensive Applied Workshops are for teams seeking customized, expert guidance as they begin applying advanced UX methods to solve their current design challenges. The Intensive format lasts 2 or more days, and provides dedicated time to allow your team to:
- Learn new UX techniques: Through a course led by an NN/g expert, your team learns the concepts and methods together, with opportunities to ask questions and discuss constraints. You will build enabling a shared understanding of best practices, and how techniques can be used in your product and business context.
- Apply techniques to your own designs: Put your new knowledge to work. We lead your team through collaborative group activities that apply the concepts to your real work and domain.
Contact us to learn more about Intensive Applied Workshops:
Choose Your Intensive Topic
Choose Your Intensive Topic
The Intensive Applied Workshop format is available for a range of different UX methods, so you can focus on the techniques and topics that are most relevant for your team.
Choose one of the following topics:
Customer Journey Mapping
Use your existing user research to build a preliminary customer journey map together with key stakeholders. An NN/g expert will help you analyze your customer journey and identify and prioritize opportunities for optimization.
Learn more about the Customer Journey Mapping Intensive Applied Workshop
Customer Journey Mapping is a process used to capture and communicate UX insights across complex interactions. By taking a holistic view of the customer experience, journeymapping uncovers moments of both frustration and delight to reveal opportunities to satisfy customer pain points, alleviate fragmentation, and, ultimately, differentiate your brand by exposing new opportunities to provide additional value to your customers.
We’ll start by learning best practices for the following topics:
- Approaches to Journeymapping
- The 5-step Process
- Conducting Research
- Journey Mapping Workshops
- Visualizing Insights
- Prioritizing Opportunities
Next, using your own customer usage data, you will create your own journey maps, working in small groups to uncover and synthesize insights. You’ll use these artifacts to uncover pain points and prioritize design opportunities for a specific audience. Finally we’ll cover how to use journey maps communicate and engage cross-department team members.
DesignOps
Dive deeper into the DesignOps strategies that will bring the highest ROI to your team. Our consultant will help your team develop a custom DesignOps implementation plan, and prioritize tactics that will help amplify the value of UX within your organization.
Learn more about the DesignOps Intensive Applied Workshop
Topics Covered:
- Design Team Structures and Roles
- PeopleOps
- Communication and Collaboration
- User Research and Design at Scale
- Defining Design Quality
- Getting Started with DesignOps
Format: This course is built around industry examples and case studies. The basis of the course is a lecture format with some group exercises to practice applying the learned concepts and guidelines.
- Defining, sharing, and implementing design and research operations
- Learn frameworks and processes to scale UX design within your organization
- Discover practices and case studies for overcoming common challenges of scaling UX and user research
- Begin planning your concrete next steps for building a DesignOps practice
Design Thinking
Learn the design thinking framework and immediately practice it on your organization’s everyday challenges. Walk away with a shared language, co-created visualizations, and tangible activities to use throughout the design process.
Learn more about the Design Thinking Intensive Applied Workshop
Are you solving the right problem? A great solution to the wrong problem is useless. Despite our best efforts, we make assumptions about user needs. To design useful, transformational products we must understand the perspectives of the people whose experience we are shaping.
Learn how to identify pain points through empathy and as-is scenario mapping. Connect these pain points with existing insights and research to define an actionable problem statement—a needs statement—that focuses on your deliverable’s goal.
Topics Covered:
- Learn how to identify user pain points through empathy and as-is scenario mapping
- Determine the user’s needs and pinpoint opportunities for improvement
- Leverage needs statements to generate transformational design concepts
Personas
Find out how to create the right type of personas for your design goals and how to plan a persona effort that will result in effective and evergreen deliverables. Using your existing user research data, you’ll begin the process of creating personas for your audiences, and learn how to utilize them throughout the UX design process.
Learn more about the Personas Intensive Applied Workshop
Understanding your users is the core principle in user-centered design. Utilizing user personas as a design tool can help you accomplish just that. In this workshop you’ll learn how to turn complex user data into effective user personas. In addition, you will learn time-tested techniques for embedding them into your design process.
Your team will work alongside an expert from NN/g to learn:
- What makes a good persona
- How personas can influence work
- A systematic persona creation process that can be scaled and shared
- How to create a communication plan for widespread success
- Ways to apply persona insights to projects and products
- How to manage and maintain personas over time
Next, working in small groups, your team will begin creating realistic, useful personas by synthesizing your actual user data. You’ll end the workshop with basic outlines for at least 3 personas which can become the basis for effective product decision-making.
Service Blueprinting
Use your existing user research, as well as internal research and expertise, to build a low-fidelity service blueprint together with key stakeholders. An NN/g expert will help you create and analyze your blueprint to identify redundancies, opportunities, and insights.
Learn more about the Service Blueprinting Intensive Applied Workshop
Topics Covered:
- Create a service blueprint that can be used as a single point of truth
- Bridge the gap between the customer's experience and the service provider's experience
- Learn how to holistically approach design decisions, accouting for "frontstage" as well as "backstage" stakeholders
Usability Testing
Learn the techniques for developing and running sound usability tests, and create and run a usability test for your own product or application. An NN/g expert will help you analyze the results. Come out with a shared understanding of how to do user tests, as well as results from a reserach study of your design.
Learn more about the Usability Testing Intensive Applied Workshop
Your team will work side-by-side with an NN/g expert to learn user testing, including how to:
- Decide which method and location to use based on tradeoffs and constraints
- Choose the most effective system aspects to test
- Recruit target users
- Plan usability tests and write probing test scenarios
- Facilitate usability tests and collect data
- Manage stakeholders and observers
- Analyze test data
- Turn analysis into findings and recommendations
After the workshop, your team will have in-depth knowledge and hands-on experience in conducting usability tests, including all the tools and skills to run user research projects on their own in the future. Plus you will have the findings from a real, live, usability study of your website or other product, because we focus on your own project throughout the workshop.
User Interviews
Learn the techniques for conducting effective user interviews to discover user motivations and goals, and conduct your own interviews with guidance from an NN/g expert to design questions and interpret findings.
Learn more about the User Interviews Intensive Applied Workshop
Topics Covered:
- The different kinds of interview and their purpose
- How to prepare a successful interview guide
- Interview techniques for building rapport and getting valid data
- How to analyze data from your user interviews to uncover insights
First, you’ll prepare a semi-structured interview guide for interviews on your chosen topic with your users. On the second day, you’ll be able to observe an interview with your user carried out by an NNg expert, and conduct your own interview with a target user. Following this workshop, you will have all the materials to perform a deeper analysis, as well as an action plan for improving the quality of your interviews going forward. Optional: Add a third day to this workshop to get guidance on how to analyze interview data using thematic analysis, in order to uncover themes.
This workshop can be paired with customer journey mapping or personas to take your insights to the next level.
Writing Compelling Digital Copy
Get hands-on guidance and practice creating copy that effectively informs, persuades, and converts. Improve your own content with guidance from an NN/g expert.
Learn more about the Writing Compelling Digital Copy Intensive Applied Workshop
In this hands-on workshop, your team will receive tailored training to address your biggest problems with content creation. One of our content experts will lead your team through a series of exercises to help them improve the copy, as well as their content-creation skills. Your team will leave the workshop with clear action items and a detailed understanding of how to write effective copy throughout your digital products.
The structure and length of the workshop will vary depending on your team’s needs. We recommend focusing the workshop on 3-5 of your most challenging problems. For example, we’ve helped teams with:
- Redesigning a problematic page or page template
- Learning how to test content with users, and developing a custom content research plan
- Pinpointing, clarifying, and defining tone-of-voice across a product
- Conducting a content audit to identify issues and opportunities
- Providing intensive coaching on one content-creation skill (e.g., avoiding jargon, writing headlines, brevity, or structuring content)
Topics Covered:
- How people read online based on usability testing and eyetracking research
- Optimizing content for users and search engines
- Writing concise, benefits-driven copy to increase conversion
- Increasing usability by following our web writing guidelines
Custom Intensive Applied Workshop
Work with our team to customize any of our in-house training content to create a custom intensive coaching session on the topic of your choice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
- Q: What is the cost?
- A: Typically, an Intensive Applied Training lasts for 2 days and costs $27K plus travel expenses for locations in North America.
- Q: What’s the difference between “In-House” and “Intensive” training?
- A: Our in-house trainings focus on mastering the most important concepts and UX techniques, using example materials we provide. By contrast, in the Intensive Applied format, you will work with your real problems, your real customer data, and your real constraints to begin identifying actionable solution.
- Q: What deliverables will come out of the workshop?
- A: Intensive Applied Training lays the foundation for complex UX strategy work, but it does not result in a polished final deliverable. Rather, the intensive time focuses on the early planning and concept development of a UX strategy. At the conclusion of the Intensive you will have rough drafts of relevant documents (such as empathy maps, journey maps, or service blueprints) which your team can further refine to create formal deliverables; but more importantly, your team will have talked through and developed a shared understanding of the relevant information and the best path forward.
- Q: Is there any followup afterwards?
- A: Each workshop concludes with a wrap up discussion facilitated by your NN/g expert to identify next steps. For teams that seek further guidance beyond the session, our experts may be available for follow-up consultations and ongoing coaching. Talk to us to learn more.
- Q: What do we need to do to prepare?
- A: Since the workshop uses your real product and customer data, this information must be assembled in advance. Most teams take about 3 weeks to identify and collect the necessary information
- Leading up to the workshop, we'll hold a series of 2 to 4 meetings with you to guide you through gathering the necessary product and customer data.
- A point-person on your team will lead the process of gathering internal information (such as market research, sales data, customer service data, etc.).
- 2 weeks before the training, your NN/g facilitator will use the data you've assembled to produce materials for the session.
- Q: Can we do it in one day instead of 2?
- A: A single day does not allow enough time for the intensive format. If only one day is feasible for your team, consider our in-house training courses instead.
- Q: Can we do multiple topics, or a different topic than what is listed here?
- A: Yes, you can combine multiple topics into a single extended workshop; for example you could combine Customer Journey Mapping to understand the current user experience, and Design Thinking to begin working on improvements.
- Q: Is the Intensive Workshop Eligible for UX Certification Credit?
- A: Yes. Participants in the workshop will be eligible to earn 1 UX Certification credit for each workshop topic.
- Q: Is there a limit to how many people can participate in the workshop
- A: A group of between 10 to 30 people is usually best for this intensive experience. If you would like to arrange a workshop for a larger group, contact us to discuss your goals and find out how we may be able to adapt the format.