User Experience Testing 101

The rapid pace of technological change drives not only more innovative approaches to storytelling but also new behaviors among story consumers. Understanding how audiences experience media platforms and the stories they deliver is one key to retaining and growing them in a shifting media landscape. Applied in a wide-range of professions toward goals as diverse as the design of new digital products and improving hospital patient outcomes, user experience testing is an approach to understanding what audiences do and why they do it in order to adapt to their needs and leverage their behaviors.

This training will introduce a number of user experience testing strategies and explain how communication and media professionals can use them to understand readers/users and identify opportunities for growing audiences and engagement with stories. We’ll talk about what user experience testing is and isn’t, which aspects of media platforms and stories can be tested and how to
implement tests with an eye toward actionable results.

This session is the third of three taught by the Center for Emerging Media Design and Development at Ball State University. Check out our linked sessions on Design Thinking and Transmedia Storytelling in neighboring weeks. A portion of the instructor fees for these sessions will be donated to Puerto Rican hurricane relief.

Handouts:
- User Experience Testing 101: Types of research and key methodologies
- 10 Minutes to Win It: Low-resource user experience testing

Who should take this training:
- Publishers and broadcasters hoping to grow their audiences
- Communication designers including web and page designers, web producers and digital editors
- Strategic communication professionals
- Producers/project/product managers

About the Instructor:

Megan McNames is the Director of User Experience at Emplify, a SaaS company in Fishers, Ind., where she applies her obsession for learning about and understanding people to helping business leaders to do the same. Leveraging her background in journalism, instructional design and interaction design, she conducts user research and oversees the design of Emplify’s Insights product. McNames was recently recognized by Techpoint as a member of the Class of 2017 Tech 25 for her contribution to Indianapolis’ tech community and the Emplify product. Prior to jumping into the business world, McNames was a faculty member of Ball State University’s Department of Journalism where she taught visual communication, human-computer interaction and digital media design. In 2015 she was named a Teacher of the Year by Ball State’s Office of Educational Excellence. She continues to teach at Ball State as an adjunct instructor. McNames also wrote and reported for Gannett until 2010.