Course schedule in 2012

In 2012 the Interface and Interaction Design course will take place on the following dates:

• January 30-31
• March 5-6
• April 2-3
• April 16

This is a hands-on workshop that requires full time attendance. In order to meet the needs of working students the workshop starts at 16.15 in the afternoon and lasts until 19.45.

Deadline extended for book summaries

I still haven’t received book summaries from some of you and decided to extend the deadline. New and final deadline is Sunday 05.06. This also means that other students will not get their grades yet. I hope it is fine for you.

About presentations and e-Vent

I am very sorry, that I haven’t been able to follow and comment your work during last weeks. I have been too busy with supervising, projects and other courses.

On Thursday 05.05 at 17.30 we will have a semi-public presentation of the projects. In the presentation you should have:

• Pecha Kucha presentation about the design process of your projects (20 slides, each slide 20 seconds)
• Video (doesn’t have to be completely ready, but has to be good enough to show)

The best projects could be also presented in e-Vent demo day along with other projects from the Institute of Informatics. You can submit you project at the e-Vent web site. Presentations with video should choose a 10 minute time slot.

Book summaries

As an independent work you are expected to read a book on interaction design / interface design / usability topics and write a summary. There is a selection of books available in the institute of informatics (rooms T-419 and T-511) and in TLU library:

• IFI library
• IMKE library
• ESTER (human computer interaction)
• ESTER (usability)
• ESTER (user interfaces)
• ESTER (web design)

The amount of time that you should spend on reading and book summary is about 40 hours. Therefore a 200…300 page book is a good choice. For longer books you can read just selected chapters. The expected length of a book summary is 800–1200 words. Book summary can be published in the student blog or sent to the teacher by e-mail. The deadline for sending book summaries is May 22nd.

Please let me know which book you are planning to read (post a comment here or send me an e-mail). So far I have agreed books with Tatjana (About Face 3) and Arne (Designing with the Mind in Mind). Several students may also choose the same book.

User interface prototyping techniques

Presentation about user interface prototyping techniques.

A few notes before the next workshop days

I have gone through all your blogs and commented your works last week. All the personas that you have created are quite good, although they are not based on real user research. With the scenarios there are a few common problems:

• Several scenarios have long introductions that describes the setting. Problem description is needed with the first scenario, but with additional scenarios we should already expect that the reader knows the context. In that case a short one paragraph description of the setting is enough. Main focus of the scenario should be on describing the interaction with the system.
• Some scenarios do not add much new information about using the system or additional features. Before planning the scenarios it is important to decide on the most common use cases and write the scenarios that describe these cases.
• Some scenarios are a little bit too connected with the personas — they describe a different persona using the same features that were already described in earlier scenarios. You don’t need a scenario for each persona. In real projects it is common to have several scenarios with the primary persona and some persona (supplemental or served) that doesn’t appear in any scenario.

If you have managed to organize the design sessions, then you will probably know, which scenarios worked better than others. I can see that two groups have already summarized the feedback from the design sessions (IMKE Project and The Party Guide).

On Wednesday we will start at 14.15 with microlectures about user stories and prototyping techniques. After that your groups will start working on three tasks in parallel:

• writing user stories (or updating the existing user stories)
• working on the user interface vocabulary
• creating paper prototypes

For the next workshop you will need:

• Black fineliner pen (line width 0.4-0.6 mm, something like this or that). Rahva Raamat in Viru Keskus has usually a good selection of pens, but yesterday they had only Artline Ergoline Calligraphy Pen 1.0 mm (the same is available in Apollo in Solaris). That should also do the work. Ballpoint pens or graphite pencils are not good for prototyping.
• Scissors (one for each group)
• Digital camera (one for each group)
• CMapTools software (on one laptop for each group)

See you on Wednesday. Please be there on time!

User Stories in Interaction Design

Scenario-Based Design

Scenarios are simple but powerful communication tools between the designers, users and other stakeholders.

Example scenarios:

• LeContract project
• EduFeedr project
• iTEC project
• LeMill project

Personas in Interaction Design

Persona is an interaction design method for describing archetypal users and their goals. The following presentation is based on chapters 4 and 5 from “About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design” (Cooper & Reinmann, 2003).

Example personas:

• LeContract project
• FeedForward project: Laura, Zoe
• Sakai project

Welcome to IMKEDesign 2011 course!

This year the Interface and Interaction Design course will run for the fifth time. Detailed information about the course and requirements is in the course programme (PDF).