UX & Usability in the Shop

UX & Usability in the Shop The two-day seminar for everyone who wants customers to find what they are looking for: you learn to judge user guidance, to find weaknesses with simple tests and to justify changes so that they actually get implemented. By the end you can assess a page without arguing about taste.

UX & Usability in the Shop at a glance

• Format: 2 days on site + self-learning track
• Level: basic to advanced
• Participants: max. 16 people
• Language: German (English on request)
• Certificate: AEI certificate of attendance
• Investment: €490.00 plus VAT

Shop design is usually argued about with opinions. One finds the button too small, the other the colour wrong, and in the end whoever is loudest or sits highest up wins. What nobody can answer: whether the customer will find what they were looking for next time.

Usability is not a question of taste but a question of the task. A shop has few tasks — find, compare, decide, complete — and every one of them can be checked. Once you have learned that, you no longer discuss preferences but observations.

This seminar works on real pages. You assess user guidance, check readability and hierarchy, run a short usability test and translate the findings into a prioritisation. The test is not a project here but an activity that takes an hour.

What you take away

• A framework for assessing any shop page in twenty minutes.
• The ten heuristics that surface the most common problems.
• A procedure for a usability test with five people that you run yourself.
• A prioritisation that weighs effort against impact.
• A format that makes UX a fixed appointment each month instead of a project.

Your learning objectives

• You distinguish a usability problem from a matter of taste.
• You recognise where users lose orientation and name the cause.
• You check readability, contrast and hierarchy against traceable criteria.
• You run a usability test so that the results are usable.
• You prioritise findings so that the most important ones are handled first.

The levers at a glance

Users do not read, they search. Whoever designs a page knows it. Whoever uses it sees it for the first time and looks for an anchor. Without an anchor nothing is read, it is clicked — and then abandoned.

Consistency beats originality. An unusual button stands out and costs a moment of hesitation every time. A shop may surprise in one place, not in thirty.

Five testers find almost all problems. The most common reason for not testing is the belief that it is too much effort. A test with five people takes half a day and reliably finds the rough edges.

Without prioritisation nothing happens. A list of sixty findings does not get worked through. Three measures with a rationale do.

Accessibility is a usability floor, not an extra. Contrast, font size and keyboard operability are the same criteria that help every user on a phone in daylight. Whoever treats accessibility as a separate project builds the same problems twice.

Who is this seminar for?

For people who decide about shop pages or design them.

• Shop managers who have to justify changes without appealing to taste.
• Marketing and content leads who look after landing pages and categories.
• Product managers who want to sharpen requirements for development.
• Designers and developers who want to argue from the user's perspective.

Prior knowledge of design or development is not required. Anyone who uses a shop brings the foundation; the methods are explained during the seminar and practised directly.

The seminar is not suitable for teams building a new design system. We work on assessing and improving existing pages, not on designing from scratch.

Investment and dates

Participation costs €490.00 plus VAT, including the self-learning track, materials and certificate of attendance. There are six dates per year in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich and live online, plus an in-house variant for teams. You will find all dates in the list on this page.

If possible bring a page from your own shop that annoys you. We work on it during the seminar — that is more productive than any example.

After the seminar

You keep the materials, the assessment framework as a one-pager and a guide for the five-person usability test including a consent text. All of it written so that you can apply it without further explanation.

Two weeks after the seminar you receive a short follow-up: a test you ran on one page and the option to sort the findings with us. That is the step where most people stop.

For teams the seminar is available as an in-house event with your own pages. The procedure stays the same, the examples come from your shop.

Programme: 2 days

Day 1 – UX fundamentals

• What user experience is made of
• Understanding user behaviour
• Orientation and navigation
• Clarity and consistency
• Readability and hierarchy
• Mobile use

Day 2 – Design

• Usability tests made easy
• Heuristics for a quick check
• Integrating UX into everyday work
• Measuring and prioritising

Both days run from 09:00 to 16:15 with breaks in the morning, at midday and in the afternoon. Short self-checks sit between the blocks so you can test where you stand before moving on.

Each day has three parts: an introduction to the pattern, an exercise on a real page and a review in the group. At the end of day one you formulate three findings on your own page; on day two we check them against a heuristic.

The seminar includes a self-learning track. It contains the patterns from both days as short units with examples and one self-check each. You can work through it before the date to clarify terms, or afterwards to repeat what stuck and what did not.

Our approach

We work on your pages, not on a collection of beautiful examples. At the start of each exercise you decide which task a user has to complete on the page; at the end stands the assessment of whether the page carries that task.

The exercises are short and repeat in variations. That is deliberate: an eye for user guidance does not come from watching but from assessing repeatedly with the same framework.

Every block ends with one sentence that you could show a colleague: what is wrong here, why does it matter for the task, and what would you change first. That sentence is the difference between a finding and an opinion.

We work in pairs, in small groups and in plenary, with changing partners. Every participant gets feedback on their assessment, not just on their taste. Group level and participant count are deliberately limited: with 16 people no anonymous lecture is possible.