Designing for People
| Cost: | NZ$750 excluding GST. |
|---|---|
| When: | TBD |
| Where: | TBD |
| RSVP: | Simply email Michelle if you have any questions. |
Description
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.
RSVP
Simply email Michelle if you'd like to attend.
About the presenter - Donna (Maurer) Spencer
Donna (Maurer) Spencer is a freelance information architect and interaction designer. That’s a fancy way of saying she plans how to present the things you see on your computer screen, so that they’re easy to understand, engaging and compelling. Things like the navigation, forms, categories and words on intranets, websites, web applications and business systems.
Most of the projects Donna works on are large, messy monsters, like government websites and intranets, internal business applications and web applications. But she still gets to work on something small and funky too. So she’s intimately aware of the challenges of both long-term, ongoing projects and short-burst, agile programming type engagements. She’s also an old hand at sketching screens, drawing wireframes and building prototypes.
But whatever sort of job Donna’s working on, there’s one common requirement. She has to comprehensively understand the needs of the user. Only then can she make the system as usable as possible. Luckily, she’s also quite fond of people, so doing user research and running usability tests is a pleasure, not a pain.
Not surprisingly, given Donna’s obsession with usability and fondness of people, she’s also quite the teacher. She’s a very experienced speaker and regularly holds workshops and speaks at local and international conferences, on the topics of information architecture, interaction design, the web, writing and more. She even runs a user experience conference (UX Australia).
Donna’s been doing this since 2002. She’s worked on the boards of the Information Architecture Institute (international) and Web Industry Professionals Association (WIPA). She’s also written a book on card sorting. Read her full resume...
What to wear
For your enjoyment all our workshops are designed to be as interactive and relaxed as possible, so please wear comfortable clothing. We are not always able to completely control air conditioning and room temperature, so wearing layers will be handy in case you are too hot or too cold.
Course cancellation
- A course may be cancelled or postponed by Optimal Usability either due to exceptional circumstances beyond our control (e.g. presenter illness) or should the minimum number of participants not be reached.
- It is recommended that if you are travelling from outside the city that refundable travel tickets and accommodation are booked. We cannot accept liability for non-refundable travel and accommodation in the case of cancellation or postponement.
- If a course is cancelled or postponed you will be advised and, on your instruction, the fee will either be refunded or transferred to an alternative workshop.
Participant withdrawals
- While you may send a substitution at any stage at no extra charge, we do ask that you notify of us of this within 48 hours of the workshop commencing.
- A 20% withdrawal fee will be charged if you withdraw between 15 and 5 working days before the start of the workshop.
- A 50% withdrawal fee will be charged if you withdraw between 5 working days and 48 hours before the start of the workshop.
- A 100% withdrawal fee will be charged if you withdraw less than 48 hours before the start of the workshop.
