In our first session, we’ll go into some pros and cons of running expert heuristic evaluations. We’ll also teach you how to amplify the positive effects of heuristic evaluation with persona development. Finally, we’ll go over some pitfalls of user research and mistakes to avoid.

At the end of class one, you’ll understand how to conduct a proper expert evaluation in under 60 minutes.

When a user lands on a website, they will ask the question, “is this the right website for me?”

This class will teach you how to answer that question affirmatively. We’ll go over the shopping window analogy and how it relates to landing pages, how to quantitatively and qualitatively measure relevance on your landing pages, and the difference between implicit and explicit communication. We’ll also cover the power of emotional optimization and how to use confirmation bias to reduce your bounce rates.

Forget the 10-second rule: You have 50 milliseconds to nail your first impression.

This class will cover anticipated credibility (and how to use it), how to use cognitive biases if your brand is not very popular, and how to avoid cognitive dead-ends.

This class will dive into implicit user motivations and how to find the buy button in the mind of your users. It will cover value propositions in depth – the difference between different kind of value props and how to analyze and improve your own. We’ll also cover psychological triggers like motivation, urgency, and scarcity.

It’s not all about persuasion triggers. Uses also anticipate easiness and evaluate trust and security when navigating the web. This class will teach you how to analyze these behaviors and improve upon your current state of ease and security. In addition, we’ll cover forms and checkouts, and how to build security and ease measures here.

Users may make emotional or irrational decisions, but they also seek to justify those decisions through confirmation and rational thought. This class will cover that confirmation effect and will teach you how to analyze and optimize for everything that happens after the conversion. The effect of this will be to increase customer lifetime value and repeat purchases.

Your own cognitive biases are the single biggest danger to the validity of evaluation. In this class, we’ll teach you to mitigate those negative effects, improve the validity and objectivity of your results, and how to report the results to different target groups to spark action.

There are many frameworks for prioritization, each with its own pros and cons. This class will include an overview of the common prioritization frameworks, but will also cover the four questions you should ask no matter which framework you use, and how to incorporate expert evaluations with other user research methods.