IxDA Library

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.

In architecture, parti refers to the underlying concept of a building. Will it be a public structure that provides safety or a commercial building focused on customer up-selling?

Design principles are the guiding light for any parti. They articulate the fundamental goals that all decisions can be measured against and thereby keep the pieces of a project moving toward an integrated whole. But design principles are not enough. Every design consideration has a set of opportunities and limitations that can either add to or detract from the parti. Designers who want to bring coherent visions to life need to learn the detailed ins and outs of design considerations so they can select the best solutions from the options available.

Interaction design research activities produce an enormous quantity of raw data, which must be systematically and rigorously analyzed in order to extract meaning and insight. Unfortunately, these methods of analysis are poorly documented and rarely taught, and because of the pragmatic time constraints associated with shipping products, there is often no time dedicated in a project to a practice of formal synthesis. As a result, raw design research data is inappropriately positioned as insight, and the value of research activities is marginalized – in fact, stakeholders may lose faith in the entire research practice, as they don’t see direct return on the investment of research activities.
Interaction design synthesis methods can be taught, and when selectively applied, visual, diagrammatic synthesis techniques can be completed relatively quickly. This talk will introduce various methods of Synthesis as ways to translate research into meaningful insights. Attendees will learn about how to manage the complexity of gathered data, and will learn how to elicit hidden meaning in gathered data.