What is Interaction Design? What are the differences between UX and UI? What about Service Design? These are the topics Rachel Inman will tackle in her moduled started today. The starting point is well expressed in the masterpiece The Design of Everyday Things, in which Donald Normal stated that ‘User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products’. Regarding the product development stages, Interaction and UX designers are often responsible for many of the activities of a service designer. That’s why for service designers it’s so important to deal with these fields of Design.
In this course, our students will gain an understanding of key interaction design concepts and methods through a practical, project-based approach centered around user narratives. Using case studies and industry examples, they’ll learn where interaction design fits within the larger product development cycle, how interaction designers can effectively collaborate at every stage with their cross-functional peers, and how interaction design interrelates with service design, user research, and UI design.
Building upon the ideation phase of the product development process, they’ll learn methods and approaches to apply once they’ve identified user goals, pain points, and generally identified the opportunity space. With a focus on user scenario narratives, they’ll learn how storyboards can be central tools to focus the product design process and measure success post-launch. Additionally, using hypothetical design briefs based on real-world products, they’ll gain hands-on experience defining functional groups and hierarchies for digital applications, sketching interfaces based on usability best practices, creating low-fidelity prototypes for rapid testing, developing research protocols for usability testing, creating digital wireframes for tappable prototypes, and applying a framework for measuring success post-launch. As for many other modules, they’ll work in teams delivering a project at the end of the classes.
