Unit 1 Design Thinking

• Design Process June 24, 2019

  In this course, we’ll take an iterative approach to design. No one “process” fits all projects. However, we’ll find it useful to alternate between divergent (exploratory) and convergent (decisive) thinking, and to find ways to test ideas efficiently to gain confidence in our decisions.

• Paper Prototyping June 25, 2019

  Prototyping is often best done in cheap and fast ways, so that we can work out the kinks in design concepts quickly and deliver a better final product.

• Usability Testing June 25, 2019

  In order to build better products, it’s useful to test prototypes with potential users to identify opportunities to improve our designs before investing in full production.

• User Interviews June 26, 2019

  When planning new design work, interviewing potential users helps us understand behaviors and contexts to narrow down the problem(s) we should address.

• Research Synthesis June 27, 2019

  Affinity diagramming will help us look for patterns in our raw data, and we will distill our findings into problem statements.

• Surveys June 28, 2019

  Surveys can also help us form a better picture of our users, their behaviors, and preferences.

• Personas July 1, 2019

  Personas are a deliverable which helps us summarize and communicate findings from user research, embodying those findings in a representative user which other stakeholders can empathize with as well.

• Design Reports July 4, 2019

  Writing about your design work is a good practice in general, to document your process and results. For us, these will serve double duty as early drafts of our eventual portfolios.

Unit 2 Interaction Design

• Inspiration and Aspiration July 5, 2019

  In this lesson, we will explore a few different topics in order to stretch your UI skills.

• Visual Design - Typography July 8, 2019

  Visual design makes our work, aesthetic, clear, and usable. We’ll start exploring some principles of typography and layout in this class. Keep in mind that theory will only take your design work so far. You have to produce work, look at it, and try again in order to actually improve.

• Human Interface Guidelines July 9, 2019

  We’ll focus on Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for iOS (phones and tablets) for now, with an emphasis on the navigation models in iOS.

• Material Design July 9, 2019

  We’ll focus on how Google’s Material Design system works on Android devices (primarily phones) and explore the primary navigation model.

• Evaluative Research July 10, 2019

  We’ll extend our evaluative research toolbox to include heuristic analysis.

• Motion in user interfaces July 11, 2019

  Motion should be used to add clarity to a user interface, and then sparingly and with nuance. A little bit goes a long way.

• User Interface Design July 12, 2019

  Exploration is key to creating beautiful user interfaces. We don’t see design in our mind, we perceive it with our eyes, and interact with it with our hands. Until a possibility is down on paper or screen, it’s not a possibility you’ve considered. Give yourself as many possibilities to choose from as you can.

• Competitive Analysis July 18, 2019

  We’ll cover how to conduct competitive research.

• Desirability Testing July 19, 2019

  We’ll try out a couple of card sorting techniques to help us more objectively gauge the desirability and aesthetic appeal of our designs.

Unit 3 Information Architecture

• Material Design & Human Interface Guidelines Review July 17, 2019
• Content Strategy & IA July 25, 2019
• Responsive Layout July 26, 2019

  We’ll work together in class to build out more of the Brio example responsive web app layout in HTML & CSS.

• Contextual Inquiry August 1, 2019

  The best way to gather information about users’ behaviors is to actually observe them doing things in their natural context.

• IA Methods August 1, 2019

  We’ll briefly discuss task analysis and scenarios as optional information architecture topics which may be helpful for your projects.

• User Stories August 1, 2019

  User Stories will help us define smaller chunks of features, which we can then prioritize for our products.

• Working with Clients and Stakeholders August 9, 2019

  We’ll discuss as a class some strategies for setting expectations and effective communication with clients.

• Adaptive Interfaces August 15, 2019

Unit 4 Web Development

• HTML July 1, 2019

  HTML is the essential building block of web pages. It provides structure to content, and gives browsers meaningful information which supports built-in accessibility and discoverability features.

• CSS for Typesetting and Composition July 8, 2019

  CSS provides us a way to give the web browser hints about how we want the content of our website to render. We’ll start working with CSS by using it to style typographic compositions.

• CSS Animations July 22, 2019
• CSS for Layout July 22, 2019
• Coding review! July 29, 2019

  A chance to review together everything we’ve learned so far about HTML & CSS and how to apply it to our current project.

Unit 5 Final Project

• Portfolio Workshop

Unit 7 Visual Design

• Designing in Sketch June 28, 2019

  Visual design aims to improve the user experience through the use of layouts, colors, typography and other visual elements. It’s important to start thinking about how to approach this process and the tools we can use. In this class, we will use Sketch as our primary tool for visual design.

• Visual Design - 4 July 12, 2019
• Dashboards August 5, 2019

  We’ll look at some examples of dashboards and discuss some best practices for organizing content within a desktop web app.