Teaching 'Principles of Interaction Design' at OzCHI in Cairns in December

image I'll be teaching "Principles of Interaction Design" at OzCHI in Cairns on the 8th of December. There's a short blurb on the conference website, or here's a longer one:

Principles of Interaction Design

This tutorial introduces 23 key principles of interaction design that can be used by all interaction designers to design better user interfaces.

Many, if not most, interaction designers come to the field with little formal training in user interface design. They apply personal experience, intuition, imitation and extensive evaluation to produce and refine their user interface designs. Along the way, designers build a body of conscious and unconscious design principles that help them produce high-quality designs, more rapidly.

In this tutorial interaction designers will develop their working vocabulary of these design principles. Participants will build their skills in identifying and applying these principles to produce high-quality designs which are based on sound principles – and in less time. Familiarity with these interaction design principles will also assist participants to communicate, discuss and defend their designs in their everyday work.

Over a full day we will identify 23 fundamental principles of interaction, information and visual design, discuss how they can be applied and examine examples - good and bad - of their use. Topics covered include universal principles of interaction design such as “functional layering”, “direct manipulation” and “visual hierarchy”, fundamental guidelines like “Fitt’s Law” and cognitive principles like gestalt grouping principles.

The day ends with a hands-on exercise where we will apply our new knowledge to a real-world design problem.