Product Design Masterclass

Former Senior Designer Evernote, Cofounder Skitch

Course overview:

This high-velocity masterclass turns good product designers into great product designers —giving them cutting edge practical strategies that enable Silicon Valley companies to design products that millions of customers love. Keith Lang cofounded best-selling image sharing app ‘Skitch’ in 2009 which was acquired by Evernote in 2011. He has spent the past five years leading a major design team at Evernote in Silicon Valley, designing products used by hundreds of millions of people.

Course outcomes:

A rapid usability testing plan for your product, including analytics, heatmap, guerrilla-testing and hosted user-testing sessions.
An advanced insight into the cognitive systems that drive visual comprehension including a a set of ‘visual unit tests’ for new logos and iconography.
An awareness of new prototyping options, with strategies to use what, when.
An understanding of the latest architecture of apps drawing methods and view and event handling, improving your ability to design great interactions that actually get built
Skills for improving your design presentations to your boss, colleagues and/or development team

This workshop is suitable for:

UX, UI, web and app designers who have a product in development
Experience in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Figma, Sketch

About the expert

Keith Lang is an independent designer working on his next big startup. Keith previously co-founded Skitch, acquired by Silicon Valley company Evernote, and spent five years with a 30 person team working bringing this application to Mac, Windows, Android, iOS as well as embedded versions, used by millions. Prior to Skitch, Keith co-founded ‘Plasq’, makers of ‘Comic Life’, winner of an Apple Design Award. Keith’s design experiences also encompasses iOT and smart-home systems. He is an advisor to number of communication, cryptocurrency and lifestyle startups.

Mentorship curriculum

Module 1: Measuring your product’ user-friendliness

Test and validate what is important when and what to measure in analytics
Learn how to conduct online, guerrilla, and hosted usability testing
Tips for analyzing and using results to motivate stakeholders and others
Learn best practices for using ticket (JIRA etc) within development team

Module 2: Fast sketching and prototyping

Get an awareness of various prototyping approaches
Learn about click-through, property-based, and coded prototypes
Learn how to quickly mockup a product, or feature idea for testing or sharing
Get a set of design tricks to match expectations to design granularity

Module 3: Designing idiomatically

Develop an understanding of the engineering that drives your design. Learn strategies for choosing design approaches that best fit the ‘materials’ of software
Templates, libraries, best practices
Develop a flexible approach to building features, when and how to adapt to agile development
Learn how to reach more customers via different platforms, languages, and through accessibility

Module 4: Designer performance enhancement

Learn best practices in file annotation, versioning, and file-management
Developing materials that make your boss and colleagues look good—tips for presenting your designs
Tools of choice, ergonomics and other tools to manage RSI

Mentorship logistics

This workshop is one day and is limited to twelve participants, enabling us to focus on your product’s needs. Keith delivers the course in person, weaving in real-life examples from his time at Evernote and elsewhere. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions particular to their design objective by email in the week leading up to the workshop and Keith will personalize the content and exercises to address everyone’s goals. At the end of the course you will walk away with a definitive set of strategies that will make your products empirically better. This workshop is held in an awesome boardroom in the CBD and runs from 9 am – 5 pm with short breaks. Lunch and morning tea is provided.