This half-day workshop provides participants with practical skills in one of the most mysterious and difficult aspects of design – taking the leap from research to a first conceptual design.
It is easy to learn how to conduct user research, identify business goals, take content inventories, make paper prototypes and conduct usability tests. It is much harder to figure out what to do with the research you have collected, the personas you have created and the scenarios you have written. Experienced designers often just do it without knowing how. Methodologies abound, but many are overly complicated and involve a frightening amount of modelling and documentation.
In this workshop, I can help you learn how to tackle the design step by:
- Considering the social nature of design
- Identifying the key learnings from your research
- Developing personas and scenarios that provide real value for the project, not just for putting on the wall
- Identifying key content and functional requirements
- Focusing on the core structure or interaction style
- Identifying content elements required for an interface
- Modelling content relationships
- Using design sketches to brainstorm interface ideas
- Creating high-level and detailed interface sketches that put you on the right path
These approaches differ depending on whether you are designing a content-rich site (information architecture) or a functionally rich site (interaction design). The workshop will look at both, and will examine the similarities and differences.
Most importantly, this will be a practical and creative workshop. We’ll get out of our chairs, use coloured markers and paper, draw, talk about our work and share experiences.