IxDA Library

This short presentation provides an introduction to the exciting world of mission critical interaction design, where safety, security and protecting human life enters the realm of digital technology.

In mission critical solutions, user requirements are extreme – the physical conditions are often difficult and stress levels are high. However, users are required to complete vital tasks with no room for error.

Traditionally, creating and maintaining a pattern library has been a daunting task requiring extensive resources and, sometimes, dedicated full-time employees. At Salesforce.com our first attempt at producing a comprehensive library was bogged down by a waterfall-based creation and review process that yielded only two patterns in a six-month period. At this rate we would never approach completion.

User journeys describe the greater context of an experience including the conditions, motivation, and environment for a particular audience. Yet as the experiences we design continue to evolve, our methods for describing these stories remain static. Existing page-based journeys add little inspiration to the powerful experiences we are designing. In this session, we will explore how user journeys can leverage animation, sound, and visual continuity to communicate robust interactive experiences in simple and effective ways.

As websites have transitioned from a series of hyperlinked static pages to rich, interactive applications, the traditional means of documenting their structure and behavior has struggled to keep pace. Site maps fail to capture the detailed interactions on and across pages, use cases fail to show the relationship between activities, and data flow diagrams ignore the nuances of presentation and user choice.

This talk illustrates how game design thinking provides new tools for the design of non-game products and campaigns. We discuss four ways in which game-design techniques enrich interactive design:
1. Understanding that in our ultimate goal as designers is to make the user happy. Games accept this by default.
2. Understanding a product or message better by imagining it as a game. If you have a message you want people to find and interact with, invite them to play with it!
3. Conveying a message by building it into an advergame.

You’ve worked hard on a design and finally got it nailed. You’ve thought deeply about the user experience and designed for usability and great information presentation. The visual design is compelling. Enjoy it while you can because you’ve been asked to hold a design review. Your creative and well thought-out design is about to be transformed into a into a patchwork quilt as stakeholders argue for changes based on their off-the-cuff reactions and personal agendas.

Whether you work inside a large corporation or you’re a consultant, managing design reviews is critical. This session will focus on:

1. How to prepare for a design review
2. How to manage difficult participants like Ivan the Intimidator, Cathy the Clueless and One Note Nate.
3. How to sift through the comments and respond to real concerns constructively and creatively.

Foundation and critique are two core elements that separate design from other ways of thinking and practicing creation of ideas and solutions. Foundations are the core elements that we manipulate within our craft. Critique is the way we judge the results of that craft. For critique to be effective though it requires foundation. It is only through our understanding of what it is that makes up our craft, that we can bring consistency and consensus to design criticism.

The properties of Gestalt psychology are ever-present in today’s interfaces. Knowing how these properties affect the brain allows designers and developers to leverage the physiological and cognitive responses that are hard wired into their users.

The basic properties and of Emergence, Reification, Multistability and Invariance are foundations of design and will be defined and explained traditionally, then reviewed through current real-world user interfaces.

The Gestalt laws: Closure, Similarity, Proximity, Symmetry, Continuity and Common Fate offer a fantastic set of “best practices” rooted in theory and can be easily implemented into any existing workflow.

By giving designers and developers tried-and-true rules based on cognitive theories, we can further remove opinion from the process, and focus once again on the user. Designers will be interested to know why they do this inherently, developers can utilize the Laws as a loose set of rules, and administration/support roles will learn how clients may interpret design approaches.

For an industry steeped in high technology and accustomed to sophisticated digital tools, this session is decidedly “lo-fi.” The speaker will review practical drawing and sketchbook techniques that can serve as a cornerstone to the interaction design process. The concept of ‘drawing as problem solving’ will be introduced through case studies and real-world interaction design that demonstrate the efficiencies to be gained through the use of these techniques. The acceleration of rapid-development and rapid-prototyping situations through improved sketchbook will also be reviewed. From basic “do’s and don'ts” to “lessons from the masters,” attendees will learn how to leverage their visual thinking into the creative and development process to greater effect.