Designing for people

Taught at: Optimal Usability, Wellington
Workshop date:

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.