Support Your Mature UX Practice

HFI provides ongoing support to maintain and grow your internal UX operation, and also offers supplemental support to advanced UX activities in mature organizations.

• Augment your UX staff on longterm projects, with HFI’s Centers of Excellence—usability experts, graphics and prototyping staff. Our senior consulting staff offer specialized service if required.
• Design across geographies, economies and cultures, utilizing the specialized ecosystem research skills of HFI’s Institute for Customer Experience
• Get the industry-recognized HFI certification, enhancing your brand value and highlighting your commitment to customer-centricity. We certify practitioners, organizations and products.
• Make UX design routine with HFI’s industrial-strength UX tools – UX EnterpriseTM and UX Marketplace. Enable your practitioners to design based on your organization’s cloud of UX data

Choosing the Right Vendor

Choosing the right strategic UX vendor to support the management and growth of your internal UX practice is a critical decision.

While making that decision, you must ensure if the vendor can provide:

• Enough staff for all your varied project requirements
• Staffing and budget solutions that adapt to your optimal geographic footprint
• High-level design and management support
• A consistent level of high quality training and certification (in both fundamental and advanced UX skills)
• Ongoing mentoring and personnel management
• An enterprise framework that makes UX work easier
• A way to validate accomplishment
• A seamless blending into your UX practice, following your methods and standards
• Innovative solutions to manage turnover and quality issues

And finally, is the vendor easy to do business with?

Advanced Consulting

Human Factors International (HFI) offers the following consulting services for advanced user experience (UX) activities:

Strategies

• Motivation strategy uncovers users' motivations using our PET (Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust) Design methods and creates the focus for seamless UX.
• Cross-channel solution strategy stops the creation of misaligned solutions allowing the organization to "speak" to customers with a single voice.
• PET strategy includes a design process and structure that ensures creating key components and pages that are relatable, prominent and inviting.

Research

Ecosystem research identifies the set of actors (user types), scenarios, environments, artifacts, and opportunities in the target space. This is a 2 step process:

• Scope definition and preparation
• Data gathering and ecosystem documentation

PET research probes the customers’ emotional schema around a concept or design. It provides insights into the most likely motivational approach and provides the opportunity to assess a design concept and see if it resonates as expected.

Innovation

HFI's new product and business ideation process helps you to manage the complexity of going from deep research to actionable insights to breakthrough concepts and design.

Design

• Pet design takes the information about your users’ emotions and conceptual model—derived from the PET research—and translates it into the motivation to get users to take action.
• Cross-cultural design is managed by the specialized institute—the Institute for Customer Experience (ICE)—within HFI Laboratories that focuses on global customer experience design.
• Design for emerging markets requires a significant shift in thinking to understand the ecosystems, needs, and limitations of that environment. The ICE team uses specialized research skills to do just that and incorporate that understanding into design.

Industrial design capabilities

HFI has extensive experience in managing complete product design life cycle projects for industries such as automotive, consumer products, electronics, healthcare and electrical equipment. Our Industrial Design expertise includes:

• Understanding "Product-User-Environment-Task" domain and following a system design approach
• Product safety and ergonomic studies
• Exploration of form based on product function
• Quick prototyping for iterative design process
• Design optimization based on value engineering techniques
• Support for detailed technical design
• Product aesthetics and visual communication
• Development of functional prototypes for field studies and testing

Staff Augmentation

HFI offers flexible and scalable UX staff augmentation solutions to help you build, grow, and manage the UX teams you need.

What we provide

• Staff with a wide range of experience and skills such as:
  • UX evaluations
  • Detailed & structural design
  • Interaction design & information architecture
  • Ecosystem research
  • Persuasion engineering
  • Visual design & prototyping
• A custom-built team that will include the skills and experience you need
• Experts that are well trained and highly qualified
• Full and flexible organizational support
• Technical and project management as needed
• Scalability – from one to 100 or more – whatever you need
• Geographic flexibility – remote, onsite, or blended
• Professional tools like UX Enterprise^TM

How you benefit

• Flexible, scalable, cost-effective staff augmentation solutions:
• Rapid access to missing capabilities and skills
• Seamless integration into your operating model
• Avoid hiring / de-hiring costs
• Transparent cost model

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