Improve product UX — without reinventing processes or giving everyone more work to do.
The companies I consult with are staffed with smart people, from execs all the way down to the product team. Everybody has more than enough capability, talent, knowledge and skill to deliver well-designed software, apps, sites. So why isn’t it happening?
I’ll tell you why: because when they try to implement most expert-recommended UX “best practices” they only give themselves — and an already overworked product team — even more work to do. Methods and processes that force people to work in ways they’re not used to working.
That’s all bullshit. So that’s not what I do.
Instead, we start with where your processes and practices are getting you what you want, and where they’re not. We don’t add work or process. Instead, we change the way people think about the work they’re already doing. About how they collaborate. About the decisions they make.
About the questions they should be asking before they act.
Here are the most commonly requested UX consulting packages I offer — but please ask about custom services.
Interested in this package, or have questions for me?
One ( 1 ) Day UX Audit $5,400 + TRAVEL
This is a one-day, six-hour collaborative review session with product stakeholders and design/development team members. It is the fastest, most efficient way I know to uncover the most critical obstacles to product adoption and success, and at the same time formulate a clear, actionable plan to solve them.
I designed the UX Audit to focus specifically on quick wins — areas where a relatively small amount of time, effort and investment on the part of your team will yield impactful results. In other words, it’s designed to give you the maximum bang for your buck.
The UX Audit applies to any kind of digital product, from websites to apps to enterprise systems. It’s a participatory analysis, evaluation and real-time design session that identifies and solves problems across multiple aspects of UX, which almost always occur in these core areas:
- User Expectation & Prediction
- Information Architecture, Language & Labeling
- Navigation Scheme & Method
- Interaction & Task Flow
- Visual UI Design Quality
The audit involves examining how customers interface with your product and checking its compliance with standard Usability and UX design principles and best practices. I act as a facilitator, leading your design/development team down specific areas of analysis regarding User Experience, Usability, User Interface and Interaction Design.
I want to be clear that there’s no abstract theory or dog-and-pony show happening here: we’re working. It’s people and a whiteboard, nothing more. The day is broken up into three (3) core sessions and activities, with each activity informing the next:
- Identify gaps between user expectation and user experience
- Identify Information Needs: Labeling and Organization
- Revise UI Design: Presentation, navigation, information and interaction
All deliverables are created during the session. After the six-hour session, the engagement is complete.
“Of the resources we’ve brought in to elevate UX in our organization, Joe was by far the best
Several years back, a mutual connection introduced us as I was starting a new position at company where UX just beginning to be understood. Having read Joe’s book and recognizing what an amazing local resource he was, I knew I wanted to bring him in for a workshop with my team and business partners.
Joe’s presentation was fantastic, and his workshop was exactly what my team needed. Joe led a white board walkthrough that helped us identify and understand our current engagement, and he was able to pinpoint key areas where we can streamline and reduce pain. We didn’t erase that diagram for months!
For those looking for UX consulting, speaking, or teaching, Joe is the real deal. I look forward to when I can bring him in again!”
Interested in this package, or have questions for me?
THREE ( 3 ) DAY UX + CX INTENSIVE $14,400 + TRAVEL
This is three six-hour days of collaborative review, analysis and solution generation sessions with company and product stakeholders. The intensive is a participatory process designed to solve complex problems to improve underperforming products.
I act as facilitator for a series of detailed discussions around key principles of user-centered design in order to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the current product in terms of User/Customer Experience, Usability and UI Design. The tasks and activities across our three days together are collaborative, and help us build a solid, shared understanding of what’s wrong and what needs to be done to fix it. Specific areas addressed include — but are not limited to — the following:
PROBLEMS, USER NEEDS + BUSINESS GOALS ANALYSIS
- Review common concerns, understandings, shared expectations and commitment across project stakeholders.
- Review existing issues and obstacles to use and profitability, functional and technical requirements, especially those related to system performance.
- Create contextual user scenarios describing user tasks, activities and expectations; map scenarios to related requirements.
- Uncover any additional requirements or constraints implied by those scenarios.
- Prioritize all user interface- and workflow-related requirements.
- Uncover regulations, standards or industry practice or process constraints affecting user needs and behaviors.
- Investigate emerging technologies and related issues.
- Review competitive products and features/functions.
UX REQUIREMENTS + UI DESIGN SOLUTION ITERATION
- Define functional elements, brainstorm possible approaches, features and functions; focus on those most promising.
- Organize approaches, features and functions into a proposed approach; validate for feasibility and viability.
- Iterate and refine content and/or data presentation formats, interaction workflows, form, visual language and labeling.
- Review & analyze scenarios to determine where each approach may fail or break.
- Solicit input and buy-in from stakeholders, subject matter experts and engineering/development teams on each approach.
- Develop a sketched series of wireframes and/or storyboarding for each proposed approach.
- Create paper or HTML prototypes for later internal presentation to (and discussion with) internal management and/or other stakeholders.
All deliverables are created during the sessions. After the third six-hour session, the engagement is complete.
“Joe always brings great expertise in helping us to improve our user experience and, most importantly, he gets us to focus on ‘what is your goal and the value of doing X?”
So many UX people we’ve worked with focus on the UI and erroneously assume we have a clear goal and defined value. Joe leads us to that first — and then makes sure that it becomes the litmus test going forward, driving decisions.
If the design decision doesn’t align with the goal/value, we don’t do it.”
Interested in this package, or have questions for me?
five ( 5 ) DAY UX + CX INTENSIVE $22,800 + TRAVEL
This is five six-hour days of collaborative review, analysis and solution generation sessions with company and product stakeholders. It’s designed for any large enterprise organization whose outward facing offering is essentially a series of complex systems with disconnected presentation layers and insufficient coordination across subsystems. This is typically a situation where interfaces with customers have already been identified as either a potential strategic concern or a current problem area.
The audit starts with a line of inquiry regarding the company’s presentation layer, meaning anything and everything that’s outward facing: software, websites, mobile apps, machine or system control interfaces, automated voice, text and email response systems.
Investigating these areas from a user and customer experience perspective often highlights complex strategic internal issues, such as operating efficiency, organizational design, team collaboration processes and enterprise economics. So the first few days of the audit focuses deeply on the following core questions (which typically lead to many others):
- Have we deployed the right interfaces in the right places, at the right times and in the right ways?
- Do we have too many interfaces — or too few?
- Have we optimized each of the interfaces according to our customer preferences and needs, by segment?
- Do we understand the pathways our customers expect — and define — as they flow through our interfaces in typical purchase or service processes?
- Have we aligned and integrated those interfaces into coherent systems?
The tasks and activities that follow in the subsequent sessions are collaborative, and help us build a solid, shared understanding of what’s wrong and what needs to be done to fix it.
Specific areas addressed include – but are not limited to – the following:
USER AND DOMAIN ANALYSIS
- Review common understandings, shared expectations and commitment across project stakeholders.
- Review existing functional and technical requirements, especially those related to system performance.
- Create contextual user scenarios describing user tasks, activities and expectations; map scenarios to related requirements.
- Uncover any additional requirements or constraints implied by those scenarios.
- Prioritize all user interface- and workflow-related requirements.
- Uncover regulations, standards or industry practice or process constraints affecting user needs and behaviors.
- Investigate emerging technologies and related issues.
- Review competitive products and features/functions.
UX/UI FRAMEWORK DESIGN + ITERATION
- Define functional elements, brainstorm possible approaches,
features and functions; focus on those most promising. - Organize approaches, features and functions into a proposed approach; validate for feasibility and viability.
- Iterate and refine content and/or data presentation formats, interaction workflows, form, visual language and labeling.
- Review & analyze scenarios to determine where each approach may fail or break.
- Solicit input and buy-in from stakeholders, subject matter experts and engineering/development teams on each approach.
- Develop a sketched series of wireframes and/or storyboarding for each proposed approach.
- Create paper or HTML prototypes for later internal presentation to (and discussion with) internal management and/or other stakeholders.
All deliverables are created during the sessions. After the last six-hour session, the engagement is complete.
My workshops have trained project teams of all kinds to improve product design and integrate UX best practices —
without changing their current processes.
UI Design Crash Course for Developers Workshop
1 DAY : ONSITE : $5,400
Developers tasked with UI design often tell me, “but Joe, I’m not a designer!” And I tell them, “it doesn’t matter.”
This workshop arms non-designers and developers with timeless, ironclad, unchanging rules for good UI design that they can apply to anything and everything they ever work on. Trends will come and go, and it won’t matter: your UI will still be useful, usable, appropriate and relevant for its users.
I’ll give your team all they need to make great UI design decisions, no matter what the content, context or product may be.
UX Requirements Made Simple Workshop
1 DAY : ONSITE : $5,400
I created this workshop specifically to end the vicious cycle too many product teams are trapped in: vague requirements they had no hand in creating, constant rework and a never-ending stream of new (and changing) requirements.
They’ll learn to use faster, simpler methods to generate, validate and prioritize requirements, resulting in an MVP that clearly demonstrates the power of good UX — from the very first sprint to the very next project.
And going forward, they’ll be able to quickly identify the “sweet spots” where features and functionality deliver maximum value, great UX for users and ROI to the business.
UX Audit and UI Redesign Group Workshop
1 DAY : ONSITE : $5,400
One of the questions I’m asked most often is “how do we figure out what’s wrong with our (app/site/system) in the first place?” This workshop was born from that question.
I’ll show your teams how to get off the starting block with some common, universal things that are easy to spot (and often easy to fix). These are ubiquitous issues that show up in every product — site, app, enterprise system — that I’ve ever seen.
Your product teams will learn how to tell what works and what doesn’t. And most importantly, they’ll know what to do about it.
UX + Agile Integration Made Simple Workshop
1 DAY : ONSITE : $5,400
This workshop was built on a simple premise: if integrating UX is slowing down your Agile development cycles, you’re doing it wrong.
I’ve heard and read all the prescriptions for integrating UX and Agile, and here’s the thing: none of them actually work inside an organization. Dogmatic adherence to any of these dogmatic processes will get you precisely nowhere.
Your sprints will still be inefficient, your deadlines will still be missed and your backlog will still be enormous and growing daily.
There’s a better, simpler way, and in this workshop I’ll show your teams what that is — and why it works wonders.
UX Design Fundamentals Group Workshop
5 DAYS : ONSITE : $22,800
Attendees will learn how to account for product customers’ and users’ motivations, expectations, environment and possible actions. I’ll share time-tested methods for figuring out what users want, need and are willing to use.
Your teams will learn to make informed decisions at every step of their design and development process —decisions that create positive UX outcomes.
They’ll learn to work in a way where they’re acutely aware of how every decision affects the final product — in terms of quality, feasibility and viability.
UX Maturity Made Simple Workshop
1 DAY : ONSITE : $5,400
Product failure — internal apps and systems that fail to realize expected efficiencies or cost savings, products that don’t deliver revenue — is rarely the result of an unskilled product development team. Instead, they’re usually the result of gaps in understanding, communication and trust.
This workshop will show your execs, managers and teams how every person in every role, in every decision, every action is both creating and influencing the quality of the user experience.
You’ll learn why improving UX doesn’t mean changing the processes and activities in your SDLC — it means changing what people think about before they act.
“Joe Natoli has patiently taught our technical team how to make UX the focal point of everything we do, from requirements negotiation and design to development, quality assurance, and release management. His engaging classroom sessions and intensive working sessions have, in a short period of time, transformed our team into user advocates, a transformation that has given us a unique competitive advantage.”
Interested in hosting a workshop? Let’s talk.
Looking to improve an underperforming product? Sharpen your team’s UX skills? Improve cooperation and collaboration across your product teams? Whatever it is, I can help. And if you don’t see what you need here, no problem — tell me what you’re facing and how I can be of service.