Training

AM+A provides user-interface design and information visualization training through lectures, tutorials, and workshops at conferences and at corporations/organizations around the world. Our training focuses on critical issues, best practices, and future trends in all development tasks: planning, research, analysis, design, documentation, and evaluation for all major platforms and user communities.

If you are interested in hosting an AM+A training presentation at your event or on-site at your company/organization, or need more information, please contact us.

If you can not find a matching program, please note that new lectures, tutorials, and workshops can be custom-created for your team. We offer the following tutorials and workshops:

AM+A Tutorials and Workshops:

Cross-Cultural Communication in Global User-Interface Design

User interfaces for desktop, Web, mobile, and vehicle platforms reach across culturally diverse user communities, sometimes within a single country/language group, and across the globe. If user interfaces are to be usable, useful, and appealing to such a wide range of users, user-interface/user-experience developers must account for cultural aspects in globalizing/localizing products and services. In this tutorial, participants will learn practical principles and techniques that are immediately useful for both analysis and design tasks. They will have an opportunity to put their understanding into practice through a series of pen-and-paper exercises.

Fun! Fun! Fun! in the Mobile User Experience: A Brainstorming Workshop

Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A), in conjunction with Bernard (Bernie) DeKoven, aka “the Funsmith,” offers a powerful, effective, one-day brainstorming workshop in user-centered, user-interface development for mobile products/services specifically intended to foster innovation in how the user- or customer-experience can be imbued with “fun.”

Mobile User-Interface Design: For Work, Home, and On the Way

User interfaces (UIs) combining computation with communication functions, e.g., phone, video, the internet, and music are enabling mobile products/services to penetrate environments for work, play, and on the way. Consequently, developers must learn techniques to make mobile products/services easier to learn and use, more usable, useful, and appealing to an every wider, more diverse set of users. This tutorial summarizes key principles, techniques, issues, and current trends in products/services. Special attention is given to information design and visualization. Analyzing and designing mobile UIs from an information, visually-oriented design perspective can make product/services easier to produce, sell, learn, use, and maintain. Users will find it easier to find, sort, play, and pay.

User-Centered, User-Interface Development for Software Engineers

Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A), offers a powerfully effective workshop in user-centered, user-interface development specifically intended to foster and/or improve centers of excellence in software development and product/service design. The workshop is superior to conference and touring courses because participants can refer to, review, discuss, and benefit from in-house, non-disclosable materials that they may not wish to share externally. By design, the course is customized to your needs.

AM+A Lectures:

Advanced Developments in User-Interface Design for Web and Mobile Computing

After a brief look at the last 30,000 years of civilization in which human beings have made tools and signs, AM+A presents themes of likely development for user-interface and information-visualization design in the next decades of Web and mobile user interfaces for home, office, and mobile wireless communication. Among other scenarios AM+A explores are the emergence of persuasive communication (advertisements) and branding in the midst of informational communication and the growing importance of cultural diversity, including user-interfaces that differ by country, age, and gender. These commercial success pressures will produce new metaphors and new “hieroglyphics,” giving rise to popular new appearance and interaction paradigms.

“Thanks for coming to talk at NPUC, your lecture was fresh and great! I liked the part of your presentation about reviewing your and your firm’s history. ….”
Ted Selker, IBM Fellow, Senior Manager.

Advanced User-Interface Design Development for Next-Generation Phone/PDA Mobile Devices

For Samsung Electronics, Ltd. (Korea), in late 2000 and early 2001, Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A) researched technology, social-business, and user-interface issues; conducted contextual inquiry, including “shadowing” users; developed personas and user-scenarios; and designed a catalogue of approximately 100 advanced concepts for a wireless, mobile device that combines features of a mobile phone with third-generation functionality and a personal digital assistant intended for the North American market in 2003. AM+A then designed selected use scenarios in a demo that illustrates a subset of the concepts that are particularly visual, animated, and interactive. Among the design concepts are affective icons, contextual awareness, and mixed-modal (vocal-visual) interaction. Articles about the project have been featured in Interactions, 2002, and in the CHI 2002 Proceedings. This lecture details the entire development process, the research issues, the results, then demonstrates and explains many of the design concepts in the demo. AM+A has presented this lecture worldwide since then.

Advanced User-Interface Design for Vehicles: the Rider/Driver Experience

The driver/rider experience is a major development in mobile user-interface design worldwide, similar in scale to the first introduction of personal computers to the desktop. Most automobile manufacturers seeking to develop smart cars have relatively little experience with advanced software-based user-interfaces and information visualization. This constantly updated lecture introduces essential concepts of user-interface design, discusses important human factors issues, based on AM+A’s 100-page analysis for BMW Germany, illustrates prototypes designed by AM+A of radically different information displays, and discusses cross-cultural communication issues in relation to global product and service deployment. AM+A has presented this lecture worldwide.

Best of Breed Culture Dimensions

A survey of 60 experts world-wide was analyzed to discover what these experts thought were the most potent culture dimensions for analyzing artifacts. Approximately 39 dimensions from about 11 culture models were used in the survey. The results produced a new best-of-breed set for analyzing and evaluating user interfaces for the Web, mobile products, and software applications, but which also can be used for other communication media.

Cross-Cultural Communication for Global Computer-based Communication

This lecture centers around Geert Hofstede’s classic cultural anthropological study, Cultures and Organizations (1997), in which he identifies five fundamental dimensions of world cultures:

Power distance: the extent to which people accept great differences in power, powerful bosses, and tall hierarchical societies, or not.
Individualism vs. collectivism: the extent to which a society/group supports an individual from birth to death, or assumes that an individual will care for himself/herself.
Femininity vs. masculinity: the extent to which societies maintain separate traditional roles for men and women, or tend to combine them.
Uncertainty avoidance: the degree to which a society can tolerate ambiguity, uncertainty, and vague threats without anxiety, repression, or strict rules.
Short vs. long-term orientation: the degree to which a society is influenced by Confucian philosophical principles that stress patience and endurance.

These dimensions are evidenced at work, at home, in schools, and in families through symbols, heroes, rituals, and values. The lecture defines and explain these dimensions, discusses their impact on the design of user interfaces and information visualization in desktop, Web, mobile, and vehicle user interfaces for professional/consumer products/services, leads the audience on a tour of Web examples to examine cultural bias on the Web, and concludes with other dimensions that need to be considered with culture in achieving effective communication in user-interface design: persuasion, trust, intelligence, and cognition. This lecture, continually updated, has been presented to audiences worldwide.

Cultural Patterns in Corporate Website Identity Programs

AM+A analyzed several international Websites, both B2B and B2C, including Peoplesoft (Oracle), Siemens, McDonalds, and Coca-Cola. AM+A observed patterns of change that correspond to those predicted by culture-dimensions models coming from anthropology. These dimensions seem to affect metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction, and appearance, and even “survive” the constraints placed on Website by corporate identity standards. AM+A has presented its findings at CHI, HCII, IWIPS, UPA, and Web 2.0 Conferences.

Extreme Design for Mobile Computing: User-Interface Design of Baby Faces

Mobile computing and information appliances offer special challenges to user-interface design, specifically the design of metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction, and appearance for small user-interfaces, even as small as that for a wrist device or “smart pen.” Information visualization techniques must be reconsidered for the display of lists, tables, charts, maps, and diagrams that optimize the use of position, color, sound, and interaction. Many current devices make poor use of existing techniques; new paradigms are required to enable people on the go to make smarter decisions faster. The lecture critiques current and next generation products and offers some conceptual designs of new approaches. AM+A has presented this lecture in the USA, Europe, China, and Japan.

Globalization and User-Interface Design for the Web

Successful Web-based products/services developed for markets in different countries and among different cultures consist of partially universal, or general, solutions and partially unique, or local, solutions to the design of user interfaces. By managing the user’s experience with familiar structures and processes, the user’s surprise at novel approaches, as well as the user’s preferences and expectations, the user-interface and information-visualization (UI+IV) designer can achieve compelling forms that enable the user interface to be more usable, useful, and appealing. Globalization of product and service distribution, as with other manufacturing sectors, requires a strategy and tactics for the design process that enables efficient development, marketing, distribution, and maintenance. This lecture discusses the development of Web-based UI+IV that are intended for users in many different countries with different cultures, languages, and groups in the context of the emerging global information society. AM+A surveys important issues, as well as recommended steps in the development of user interfaces for an international and intercultural user population. With the rise of the Web and application-oriented Web sites, the challenge of designing good user interfaces that are accessible immediately by users around the globe becomes an immediate, practical challenge, not only a theoretical topic. The issues are discussed from a user-perspective, not a technology- and code-perspective. The lecture will introduce fundamental definitions of globalization in user-interface design and demonstrate in recommendations why globalization is vital to the success of computer-based communication products.

LoCoS

This lecture introduces the concepts of universal visible languages, specifically, LoCoS, invented in 1964 by the Japanese graphic designer Yukio Ota. AM+A reviews the fundamentals of the language, which can be learned in only one day, and shows prototype screen designs for the use of LoCoS in mobile phones for global communication which were developed by AM+A in collaboration with Mr. Ota. AM+A has presented this lecture in the USA and Japan.

User-Interface Design Patterns: What, Why, and How?

AM+A presents a summary of where user-interface design patterns came from, who is doing what, and how they can be useful for user-interface development. AM+A organized and chaired a panel on this topic at UPA 2003, as well as presented one of the three panel presentations. AM+A has presented this lecture worldwide since then.