Courses

Examples of problems our courses handle:

What do our clients or customers really want? Often, people can’t know what’s possible. We show how to use laddering and think-aloud to help people discover what they actually want.

Finding new solutions: Using techniques that tap into human strengths in spotting underlying patterns, as well as techniques for systematically investigating possibilities, to generate and develop new solutions.

Is there a better way of tackling this problem? Learn ways of thinking about problems that give a better handle on the real issues.

Why don’t they get it? We cover methods for identifying where misunderstandings arise, and for showing information in clearer ways.

Example: Using card sorts on perceptions of risk; why has this person grouped them this way, with the coach crash in a different group from the aircraft crash?

Contact us about workshops and training

Classic courses

Finding out what people really want, think or believe: beyond interviews, questionnaires and focus groups, and into methods such as card sorts, laddering and think-aloud.
Generating and developing ideas systematically: constraint relaxation to be systematic, pattern-matching to spark outside-the-box ideas, idea commenting to develop initial ideas.
Representing knowledge: beyond pie charts and mind maps, and into methods such as like/dislike plots, crisp and fuzzy categories, and faceted graphs.
Handling common student problems: why academic writing is deliberately impersonal, how to do literature searches and literature reviews efficiently and well, and how to stay well.

Customised courses

We provide customised courses, to suit clients’s specific needs, such as:

My clients keep changing their minds mid-project
We’re missing something, but we don’t know what.

Course structure

We offer several lengths of course: 50 minutes, 2-3 hours, and all day. We can do courses on your site or ours.

Our courses are designed to encourage informal communication, and make participants feel comfortable. The sessions combine theory to explain the principles, and hands-on work to show how theory maps onto practice. The component parts of each section form a sequence, so participants see how the parts fit together.

We prefer to deliver courses face to face, since this is the most effective way of learning the methods, but we can do online courses if necessary.

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Contact us about workshops and training