interaction design

This full-day workshop teaches a set of fundamental principles about humans, 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
• Limitations of memory and how it affects our designs
• Types of errors that people will make, why they make them, and how we can design for them
• How people make decisions, and how we can design for more informed decisions
• Socialness and how to design social interfaces
• Learning about people via user research
• Checking what we’ve designed to make sure it works (usability testing)

This will be a very practical workshop. To learn about the human attributes we’ll play games, look at fun examples of human behaviour, discuss the implications for design and sketch example interfaces. For user research and usability testing, we’ll discuss the principles and run a mini research session and usability test. You’ll leave with tons of practical skills to use on your next project.

You’ll also leave with a detailed workshop booklet, containing slides, additional explanation and follow-up reading.

The User Interface Resource Centre have published an article I wrote for them called What, Where, How: Designing and selecting components for user interfaces.

The article is about how to make sure your components will be usable and easy to learn. It covers some fundamental cognitive principles and their implications for component selection.

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.

This masterclass will cover a wide range of interaction design skills, including how humans think (and why we need to know that); key interaction design processes and skills like sketching. It will be theoretical and practical and allow you to immediately apply ideas to your projects.

This masterclass will cover:

• Human attributes – vision, visual attention, memory, error, intuition & habit
• Design process – conducting user research, developing personas, writing scenarios
• Designing – sketching, iterating and prototyping
• Interface flow & layout – posture, structure & flow; components & patterns
• Communicating design

The format of the workshop combines short lectures, group discussion and hands‐on activities. Extensive notes and resources will be provided for further personal exploration.

Wireframes beyond the basics, not for the weak at heart. In this panel, three experienced designers will share their tried and true tips for making wireframes really work. We’ll talk about how to sketch a wireframe on the fly to demonstrate an idea and how to create a standalone wireframe deliverable; when to show a concept and when to describe nitty-gritty detail; how to make a narrative wireframe and how to make a specification wireframe. And best of all, we’ll show you plenty of examples.

This panel is being presented at SXSW Interactive, with Nick Finck and Michael Angeles.

AJAX, Flash and other rich internet application technologies have changed the way we design interaction on the web – all for the better. Before, we had static pages with a few interactive pieces – form elements, hyperlinks and submit buttons. Now, we have the ability to update part of a page, provide in-page editing, and allow users to interact with a wider range of elements on the screen. Designing for new interaction styles require a combination of our old skills plus a new set.

This workshop will provide skills and practice that will help you design effective, usable interactive interfaces. We will discuss:

• A recap of the ‘old way’ and the ‘new way’
• Cognition: We’ll discuss key aspects of human cognition that affect how people react to interactive interfaces, such as visual
• perception, memory, intuition and error.
• Components: We’ll examine new components we could be using (single select, multi-select, sliders etc) and how to design them from scratch Interacting with the screen: We’ll spend a lot of time looking at examples of different types of interactions such as part-page updates, in-page editing, exposing hidden data and more. We’ll discuss what works and doesn’t (and why).
• Documentation: how to explain interactions with sketches, wireframes, prototypes and pattern libraries.
• Project processes: We’ll discuss other changes, such as the need for more usability and technical testing

The workshop will combine discussion of principles and hands-on, relevant activities. It will include a detailed set of notes and resources for you to follow up.

Note: this workshop will not cover technical aspects of developing interactive interfaces, nor will it cover the technical aspects of making them accessible. It will touch on many aspects of traditional interaction design (user research, page layout, designing forms, designing task flows) but not in depth.

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is most suitable for designers and developers moving to, or already designing, more interactive interfaces. It is suitable for less experienced people as well, but they will need to follow up some of the more traditional aspects for a full picture.

What will you learn?

By the end of the day you will:

• understand humans better and be able to use that understanding to design more confidently
• have practiced designing components from the ground up
• have seen and discussed loads of good and bad examples
• be able to think through the pros and cons of particular design solutions
  have a range of documentation methods ready to try on your next project

This two-day interactive workshop will provide a thorough overview and understanding about how to effectively use information architecture to make your intranet or website as effective as possible. It will cover a wide range of information architecture issues such as the following:

• What information architecture is and how it can facilitate user experience
• Analysing and sorting content
• Carrying out user research: surveys, focus groups and card sorting
• Classifying, sorting and labelling within your information system
• Using wireframes and site maps: the ‘bread and butter’ tools of IA
• Navigating, indexing and designing page layouts
• Effectively carrying out your IA project: tips, tools, techniques and processes

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”

Description

Information architecture affects people – there’s no doubt about that. And in any practice that affects people, a range of ethical issues come into play. Each and every decision we make can help or hurt many – our users, clients, peers and even our profession as a whole.This presentation will examine some of the ethical issues that we face as information architects, including:

• The myriad of effects of our design decisions on users
• Working with clients and peers
• The consequences of creating categories and classifying objects
• What inclusive design really means
• Personal beliefs and their role in projects
• How can we design for sustainability

I’m not a philosopher, so this presentation will be very much from a practitioner’s perspective. It may even be funny!

Presentation files

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Description

This presentation will explore Web 2.0 applications and some of the traps associated with these newer forms of interaction.