Usability Week 2008
New York
Apr 7-12		 London
May 19-24		 San Francisco
Jun 16-21		 Melbourne
Jul 21-26

Interaction Design 101: 3-Day Immersion

  • New York: Monday-Wednesday, April 7-9
  • London: Monday-Wednesday, May 19-21
  • San Francisco: Monday-Wednesday, June 16-18
  • Melbourne: Monday-Wednesday, July 21-23

Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini
3-Day Tutorial

Spend several days with this world-renowned user interface guru, designer, and writer as he distills thirty years’ experience with human-computer interaction (HCI) into straightforward principles, processes, and techniques that guarantee successful designs.

This immersion course covers—and you will experience through a series of workshops—the entire design life cycle, from initial information gathering through iterative design, and testing. Upon completion, participants will understand the basic principles of effective interaction design and be prepared to apply them in real-world design work.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn:

  • How to organize for success
  • A simple process that not only ensures designs that work on “first release,” but cuts as much as 50% off time-to-market
  • The science of design: Theory and principles to guide you in your every interaction decision
  • Every step of the design lifecycle--from initial field study to usability evaluation--which you’ll learn by working with a team to actually design a new product or service

Course Outline

  • Introduction
  • Choosing effective organizational structures
  • Increasing the power and visibility of HCI and your HCI group
    • The fast track methodology: Reduce time-to-market by up to 75%
    • The counterpoint technique: Avoid chaos while speeding up the process
    • The iterative design process: The inner loop of HCI design
  • Gathering requirements
    • Interviewing clients
    • Shadowing workers
    • Let’s do it! Interviewing and shadowing workshop
  • Information Theory: HCI’s scientific underpinning
  • Project launch
    • How to choose and engage an effective project team
  • Principles of interaction design: Simple rules that lead to successful products
  • Constructing an effective design
    • Task analysis: Identify “low-hanging fruit” for maximum impact, minimum time to market
    • Fast, informal prototyping approaches
    • Let’s do it! Paper prototyping and user scenarios workshop
  • Fast and cheap usability testing
  • Case study: Color or black & white?
  • Advanced principles of interaction design
    • Let’s do it! Usability testing of workshop designs
  • Case study: The impossible problem and its rodentiary solution

Format

This tutorial is conducted over 3 full days. It encompasses lectures and several in-depth exercises.

Handouts

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend?

This is an ideal course for engineers, graphic designers, software managers, and other professionals who would like to increase their understanding of or skills in user-centered interaction design. This is a basic course; there are no prerequisites.

Instructor

Photo of Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini is a recognized leader in human/computer interaction design. As chief designer at Healtheon/WebMD, he helped establish WebMD as the premiere healthcare website. Before that, he was distinguished engineer for Strategic Technology at Sun, where he led the Starfire project that predicted the rise of the World Wide Web. During his 14 years at Apple Computer, he founded the Apple Human Interface Group and acted as Apple’s Human Interface Evangelist. In 2000, he rejoined his long-time colleagues as a principal at the Nielsen Norman Group. A sought-after public speaker and consultant, he has published two books, Tog On Interface and Tog On Software Design, both from Addison-Wesley, as well as the webzine AskTog.