The UX Workshop.TV

Cindy Chastain: Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design

As designers we too often neglect to define a common vision, or coordinating force, behind the scope of what we’re designing, making or building. Without some means of unifying our efforts we can easily end up with a product or service that falls short of its potential for delivering an optimal user experience. One path to holistic coordination is to employ the concept of themes as used by fiction writers and filmmakers. In experience design, themes can be used to pattern and unify product solutions as well as a means of unifying teams, assisting in the work of defining strategy and helping to design for the intangible pleasure, emotion and meaning in experience. By aiming to capture the value and focus of the experience we intend to deliver to users, themes guide us in the design process and, by extension, strengthen the impact and meaning of that experience.

Cindy Chastain, user experience designer and screenwriter, has been exploring ways to engage an audience through storytelling, teaching, writing and design for over twelve years. She is currently the Director of User Experience for Interactive Partners, a New York-based agency specializing in entertainment and media websites.

Donna Spencer: Design games for information architecture

Would you like your design team to collaborate better? Are you looking to gather more valuable insights from your focus groups and interviews?

Design games are a fun, technology-neutral way of gathering design insights for your projects. In this presentation, I will show you how to take advantage of design games in many situations, with all types of people, including:

* Freelisting, modified card sorting and scavenger hunts: To learn about
your users language and categories
* Design the Home page and Divide-the-Dollar: To identify and prioritise functions and features
* Reverse-it and Idea cards: To break a creative block and generate ideas

I have played all these games and more with users, stakeholders and design teams, so this presentation will be based on my experience organizing games and making sure they provide useful inputs to the design process.
In this presentation I will focus on games and tips most applicable to IA projects.

Bio: She’s been doing this professionally since 2002, and she’s a regular speaker at Australian and international eventst. Donna’s a freelance information architect, interaction designer and writer. 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.

Dave Malouf: Foundations of IxD

This is a REALLY short version of a complex topic that aims to discuss the nature of interaction design as a material of form similar to visual design and industrial design and explains how foundational education and practice leads to better communication & critique (wish me luck!)

Bio: Dave is current the Professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). He is one of the core founders of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and its first VP. Before coming to SCAD he had a rich design career in industry most recently in the Innovation & Design Department of Motorola Enterprise Mobility as a Senior Interaction Designer.