Specialist half-day training course in Perth
Customer research and testing
Learn practical ways to understand the people using your online services and where their experience is letting them down.
Customer research can transform the decisions we make about websites and online services. But it doesn’t have to become a large, expensive research program to be useful.
Sometimes that means talking to people. Sometimes it means watching them try to complete a task. Sometimes the evidence you need is already sitting in analytics, search data, customer enquiries or feedback.
Learn how to choose the right research for the question you’re trying to answer, and turn what you learn into better online experiences.
Who this course is for
This course is for people who need to understand customers as part of improving a website, online service or wider customer experience.
It’s particularly useful for communications and digital teams, customer experience professionals, website managers, content specialists and people involved in website redevelopment or service improvement projects. You don’t need a research background. If you want practical techniques you can use to make better decisions based on real customer evidence, this course is for you.
What you’ll learn
Learn how to work out what you really need to know, choose the research techniques most likely to give you useful evidence and turn what you discover into practical improvements.
Start with the question, not the method
Work out what you need to learn, which assumptions you need to test and what decisions the research needs to inform before deciding whether you need interviews, testing, analytics, surveys or something else.
Choose the right mix of evidence
Understand the different things qualitative and quantitative evidence can tell you, and how interviews, observation, usability testing, analytics, search data, feedback and other sources can work together.
Find the right people to learn from
Learn how to think about who you need to hear from, build a useful mix of participants and include people with different needs, abilities, confidence levels and experiences.
Interview and test without leading people
Learn how to ask better questions, create realistic tasks, know when to stay quiet and observe what people actually do rather than accidentally helping them towards the answer.
Know when you have enough
Explore how many people you really need to speak with or observe, why bigger is not automatically better and how to recognise when patterns are becoming clear and new sessions are adding less.
Turn evidence into improvements
Learn how to bring different findings together, recognise recurring patterns, separate isolated opinions from meaningful evidence and translate what you learn into practical priorities and decisions.
What you know gets in the way
You can know your website inside out and still have no idea what it feels like to use it for the first time.
The people inside an organisation know its services, terminology, systems and structure. Customers don’t. That difference can make it surprisingly difficult for us to recognise the assumptions, confusion and barriers built into an experience we already understand.
Some of the most valuable things I’ve learned have come from simply sitting with people, asking the right questions, giving them something to do and resisting the temptation to help.
Good research gives us a way to put aside what we know for a while and see what actually happens for somebody else. The aim is to get useful evidence without turning every research activity into a major project.
Learn from real experience
I’m Michelle Kember-Imrie. For more than 25 years, I’ve helped organisations understand their customers and improve their websites and online services.
I’ve interviewed customers and staff, facilitated consultation, observed people using websites and online services, run usability testing and worked with analytics, search data and feedback as part of customer experience and website redevelopment projects.
Over the years I’ve tried different approaches and learned which techniques give the most useful insight for the time and effort involved. I’ll share the ones I keep coming back to, and where the effort makes the biggest difference.
More about MichelleWhat you’ll take away
You’ll leave knowing how to plan a focused piece of customer research, choose methods that suit what you need to learn, find the right people, run better interviews and testing, use the evidence you already have and turn what you discover into practical improvements.
What’s included
I want my training to feel relaxed, welcoming and genuinely enjoyable. Somewhere you can settle in, learn something useful and leave with fresh ideas, helpful resources and, of course, something delicious to eat along the way.
Practical tools and resources
Tools and resources to help you plan research, select participants, prepare interviews and testing, and make sense of what you learn, along with a certificate of attendance.
A warm, welcoming experience
I put care into creating an environment where people can settle in, ask questions and work through how the techniques could apply to their own customers, projects and organisation.
And yes, there’ll be great food
I take this part seriously too. Scheduled courses include a scrumptious morning tea. In-house sessions include morning or afternoon tea to suit your timing, and I’ll happily cater for dietary requirements.
For scheduled courses, I choose welcoming Perth CBD venues with a little more character than the usual training room. For in-house courses, I bring the training and catering to you.
Training options
Join a scheduled course in Perth or arrange in-house training for your team at a time that suits your organisation.
Scheduled courses in Perth
Join a small group of up to 12 people for a half-day, face-to-face course in the Perth CBD, with time to ask questions, work through examples and learn alongside people from other organisations.
$595 + GST per person
Next scheduled course
9.00 am to 12.30 pm
In-house training
Bring the course to your organisation for a dedicated session with your team. I can tailor the examples and discussion around your customers, online services and research needs.
Up to 12 people: $3,500 + GST
For larger groups, please enquire about available options and pricing.
Arrange in-house trainingMichelle was highly involved in the new website implementation for the City of Bayswater. Michelle was largely responsible for customer research, user experience testing, information architecture development, content editing and migration planning, website governance planning, Writing for the Web training and UX wireframe development.