Design

This half-day workshop teaches a set of fundamental principles that are useful for all types of design work – information architecture, interaction design, visual design and even industrial design.

In the workshop we’ll look at:

• How our visual system works.
• Visual and cognitive attention, and how to grab them.
• The limitations of memory and how that affects our design.
• The types of errors that our users are always going to make.
• How to design intuitive interfaces.

For each of these aspects, we’ll talk about the principles, demonstrate how they work, and discuss the implications for design. You’ll go away with a better understanding of people which will help you make better design decisions.

Would you like your design team to collaborate better? Are you looking to gather more valuable insights from your focus groups and interviews?

Design games are a fun, technology-neutral way of gathering design insights for your projects. In this presentation, I will show you how to take advantage of design games in many situations, with all types of people, including:

• Freelisting, modified card sorting and scavenger hunts: To learn about
  your users language and categories
• Design the Home page and Divide-the-Dollar: To identify and prioritise functions and features
• Reverse-it and Idea cards: To break a creative block and generate ideas

I have played all these games and more with users, stakeholders and design teams, so this presentation will be based on my experience organizing games and making sure they provide useful inputs to the design process.

In this presentation I will focus on games and tips most applicable to IA projects.

Would you like your design team to collaborate better? Are you looking to gather more valuable insights from your focus groups and interviews?

Design games are a fun, technology-neutral way of gathering design insights for your projects. In this presentation, Donna (Maurer) Spencer, an expert information architect, will show you how to take advantage of design games in many situations, with all types of people, including:

• Design Your Ideal Page and Role Playing: Facilitates the brainstorming of design concepts and ideas
• Divide-the Dollar: Prioritizes your site’s features
• Modified Card Sorting: Helps you create content categories and terminology

This workshop is run with Russ Weakley from MaxDesign.

Workshop description

A hands-on workshop with user experience expert, Donna Maurer, and CSSexpert, Russ Weakley.Over two full days you will build detailed websites layouts from the ground up – starting with page layout, navigation and form design; and ending with clean markup and elegant styling using XHTML/CSS.

Day 1: Planning and designing the user experience – Donna Maurer

On day one you will plan and design a website – focusing on the user experience: designing the navigation, page layout and forms.You will:

• learn techniques to understand your users, and prepare user scenarios
• understand your content with content analysis methods
• create an effective and usable site structure (information architecture)
• design a range of navigation methods
• create page layouts for content, home, index and special pages
• design simple forms

For each step, Donna will outline the fundamentals and show examples from small and large website projects. But most of the time will be hands-on -you work on your own project, ask questions and discuss with the group.

Day 2: Building beautiful sites using CSS – Russ Weakley

On day two you will build your website from the ground up – starting with structural markup, adding accessible markup and then styling your layout using CSS.You will learn:

• how to create well structured, accessible markup
• the basics of CSS including rule sets, selectors, shorthand rules, inheritance and the cascade.
• how to structure efficient CSS files
• how to create a full CSS layout from a flat graphic mockup
• how to deal with browser issues including specific browsers such as IE5,IE6 and IE7.
• how to create a resolution dependent layout
• how to create CSS for printing and hand held devices

Testimonials

Feedback from participants from these workshops included:

• “Great examples of how I can apply techniques”
• “The comprehensive workbook with further references/books, examples and pictures was great”
• “It was thorough, delivered with regular visual examples, solid knowledge, humour, functional activities”

This workshop provides attendees with an understanding of user-centred design and improved interaction design skills via a combination of theory and engaging activities. Real world examples and practical activities are used to reinforce theory.Attendees will work throughout the day on a group design project. After discussing user research principles, they will choose appropriate methods for their project, undertake some user research and prepare scenarios. We will discuss fundamental interaction design priniciples using examples and group critiques; and will discuss the value and practice of prototyping. Attendees will then design a detailed paper prototype of a small system.