CONVERSATIONS WITH TECHNOLOGY

Principles of Interaction Design

Echo's "Principles of Interaction Design" has been taught at OzCHI (3 years running), British HCI, CHI 2007 (San Jose) as well as numerous times in-house.

Contact us if you would like to learn about presenting this tutorial for your own organisation.

About the Tutorial

This tutorial introduces 23 key principles of interaction design that can be used by all interaction designers to design better user interfaces.

Many, if not most, interaction designers come to the field with little formal training in user interface design. They apply personal experience, intuition, imitation and extensive evaluation to produce and refine their user interface designs. Along the way, designers build a body of conscious and unconscious design principles that help them produce high-quality designs, more rapidly.

In this tutorial interaction designers will develop their working vocabulary of these design principles. Participants will build their skills in identifying and applying these principles to produce high-quality designs which are based on sound principles - and in less time. Familiarity with these interaction design principles will also assist participants to communicate, discuss and defend their designs in their everyday work.

Over a full day we will identify 23 fundamental principles of interaction, information and visual design, discuss how they can be applied and examine examples - good and bad - of their use. Topics covered include universal principles of interaction design such as "functional layering", "direct manipulation" and "visual hierarchy", fundamental guidelines like "Fitt's Law" and cognitive considerations like gestalt grouping principles.

The day ends with a hands-on exercise where we will apply our new knowledge to a real-world design problem.

What this Tutorial is not About

This tutorial is not about design process, but rather the underlying knowledge that designers apply when generating design solutions, regardless of the process.

Neither is this tutorial about visual design, although some principles of visual communication are covered.

Your Instructor

Shane Morris is one of Australia's most experienced interaction designers, with 16 years experience designing for all forms of interactive technology from physical devices to mobile applications, kiosks, graphical user interfaces and web sites.