Set up your UX practice

Empower your customer experience with an internal mature UX practice

Human Factors International (HFI) can build, operate and transfer (BOT) an entire UX practice for you. We also provide advisory, methods, standards, training, and staffing support.

When you choose HFI as your strategic UX partner, you will benefit from:

• Our 15+ years of experience in UX institutionalization
• HFI’s time-tested methodology (The HFI Framework ^TM), our customizable user-centered design process
• A seamless suite of UX offerings, including strategy, user research, structural and detailed design, testing, and validation
• Expertise in UX governance, standards, methodologies and training
• Industrial strength tools, i.e., HFI’s UX Enterprise ^TM and UX Marketplace ^TM for process-driven UX
• Tactical support for your immediate project needs

Choosing the Right Vendor

Choosing the right strategic UX vendor to help you institutionalize UX is your first step. While doing that, ask:

• Does the vendor have expertise in setting up a practice?
• Can the UX vendor support:
  • A program of governance
  • A knowledge management program
  • Development of metrics
  • A staffing solution
• Do they have baseline infrastructure or are they starting from scratch?
• Do they offer training consistent with its methods and standards?
• Can they help with tactical needs and showcase projects?
• Can they manage a global footprint?

Here’s how HFI can support you in building your own mature internal UX practice:

Build, Operate and Transfer

HFI helps organizations start up their UX practice as a single unified program. Here’s what we do:

• Take the responsibility
• Coordinate and define the scope of engagements
• Put together the infrastructure
• Provide staffing
• Lead the operation and grow a self-sufficient leadership team
• Hand off the fully formed and operational UX group – a Center of Design Excellence

Showcase Projects

HFI helps you carry out tactical showcase projects that introduce UX into your organization’s ecosystem—demonstrating the value of UX, while you gear up for institutionalization.

Showcasing projects provides:

• Visibility of the UX process
• Highlights the ROI of UX
• Repeatable processes and templates
• Mentoring and training for internal staff

Management Briefing

HFI offers an executive advisory session for customer centricity for your executives.

What we do:

• Interview your key stakeholders
• Often review selected apps and designs
• Present a 90 minute customized discussion focusing on your domain and your stage of maturity in the customer-centric process

What we cover:

• Customer-centric design process
• ROI of user-centered design
• Multi-channel strategy and innovation
• Making usability concrete
• Making persuasion engineering concrete
• Usability testing
• How to institutionalize customer-centricity

How your organization benefits:

• Increased appreciation for customer-centric initiatives
• Clear understanding of the process
• Clear understanding on investment and time
• Consensus on the UX journey ahead

Institutionalization Strategy

HFI offers three different-sized plans to set up mature UX capabilities—to get you a roadmap aligned to your requirements:

• We assess where your organization ranks on the UX Maturity Continuum. This includes:
  • An inward assessment of your UX infrastructure
  • A customer-facing assessment of key user interfaces
  • An assessment of the amount of your exec-level support for UX
• We then understand your challenges
• We work with you draft an Institutionalization Strategy:
  • This is a customized roadmap to advance you from current state to industrial strength UX
  • It proves the immediate ROI of UX
  • You get solid time and budget estimates for the effort required

Methods

HFI’s top-notch user-centered design methodology -- The HFI FrameworkTM – is assembled from best practices for optimizing user experience and can be customized to fit your organizational needs.

How HFI’s design methodology moves you ahead:

• Provides a clear, step-by-step roadmap
• Integrates a single, focused methodology, which clarifies decision-making, eliminates unnecessary functionality, reduces cost and development efforts with reusable templates, and utilizes an iterative design process
• Integrates with and support of different software methods
• Makes institutionalizing usability easy

Deliverables include:

• Summary of stakeholder insights
• Review of findings
• Customized plan
• Training for stakeholders

Standards

HFI helps you create customized interface and ecosystem standards that lead to faster development time, and a consistent and standardized user experience across all channels.

Benefits:

• Experience, with over 200 interface design standards
• Consensus-driven approach
• Fast and efficient process – we can complete in three to four months
• Optimized for your users, their tasks, your development team, and your environment
• Easy-to-use templates that reduce development time and effort
• Universal elements for each type of template – fonts, capitalization, color, interface controls, standard image maps, etc.

How we work:

• Define the types of standards you need.
• Get volunteers for committee membership from your key opinion leaders.
• Gather data, define page types, and draft an actual case for each webpage.
• Draft the standards document, review it with the committee, and iterate.
• Distribute and implement the standard.

Deliverables include:

• Electronic files of each standard screen
• Documentation of when to use it and screen behavior
• Delivery through UX Enterprise^TM is also available

UX Enterprise^TM

HFI offers 2 powerful, industrial-strength UX tools to get your UX projects started, keep you started, avoid rework, and save time and effort.

• UX Enterprise (UXE) – This relational database of UX objects makes UX easy and saves an estimated 30% in UX time and effort
• UX Marketplace (UXM) – the place to buy and sell UX objects

UXE offers an efficient and easy-to-use platform for creating, sharing, and managing your company’s UX memory:

• Methods
• Baseline objects
• User profiles, environments, scenarios, and artifacts
• Standards
• Knowledge management
• UX analytics

UXM is the one-stop shop for all the UX objects you require (you can buy and sell) for your projects. It enables you to build on UX work already done, and benefit from other practitioners' ecosystem research.

The Essentials Courses from HFI

Build a culture of user-centric thinking by providing essential foundational and advanced knowledge to all of your stakeholders—with these Essentials courses from HFI.

• Essentials of Usability - is an overview of the fundamentals of user-centered design, to provide a heightened awareness of usability. You get an introduction to:
  • User-centered analysis
  • User-centered design
  • Structural design
  • Detailed design
  • User validation
• Essentials of User Experience - is designed to teach more advanced skills beyond fundamental principles and techniques of usability. You get an introduction to:
  • How to move beyond usability
  • UX strategy
  • Innovation research
  • Persuasion strategy and techniques
  • Global design
  • Mature UX best practices

Onsite Training

If you have 10 or more employees who wish to attend any of our UX courses, HFI will bring our training to your staff at your location.

Get the onsite advantage with:

• Specific skill sets and instruction relevant to your company
• Real-world insights from our instructors who are also UX consultants
• Savings of 20% or more over public training
• Increased productivity with a shared learning experience

HFI's courses and certification tracks

Choose what you require from our suite of UX design courses:

UX Essentials – An overview of user-centered design

• Essentials of Usability
• Essentials of User Experience

Foundational Knowledge

• User Experience Foundations
• User-centered Analysis and Conceptual Design
• The Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design
• Practical Usability Testing

Advanced UX knowledge

• How to Design for Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust (PET Design ^TM)
• The PET Architect
• Omni-Channel UX Strategy and Innovation: An ecosystem and future modeling approach
• How to Support Institutionalization of a Mature UX Practice

Specialty training

• Designing the Mobile User Experience
• How to Design Usable Physical Products, Devices, Tools, and Cockpits

Organizational Certification

Since 2011, HFI offers certifications for organizations, and also product, application and website designs as the next step to certifying individual practitioners. We offer:

Certified Practice in Usability (CPU) ^TM

• Indicates a validated level of maturity in an organization’s usability practice
• HFI provides 3 levels of certification – at Levels III, IV, and V of our maturity model. Levels I and II do not represent a serious usability engineering capability and therefore can receive no certification.

Certified Usable Design (CUD) ^TM

• Indicates an approved user-centered design process was followed and each deliverable completed
• Verifies the usability of the end design

CPU-designated organizations can apply for application and product certifications