Cooper Training
April 15th, 2007
Sorry for the delay on this post, but the bad thing about leaving town for a week is that the work you would have been doing patiently awaits your return.
One of the things that has never quite sat right with me about design, is that it’s all so awfully subjective. Sure, you can point to universal design principles, competitive analysis, heuristics and all of that – but when the rubber meets the road there’s a certain lack of teeth to explaining to someone why a design is not only good, but why it’s right.
That’s one of the many reasons why I’m been making efforts to become more than a web designer, but an experience designer as well. Knowing that this transition takes more than reading Boxes and Arrows and subscribing to UIE’s Spoolcasts, I decided that I needed some hands-on training. So recently, I was able to attend Cooper U’s 4-day Interaction Design Practicum.
Central to the course were personas – archetypes of actual user interviews, used to guide the design of a product or web site. Over the four days we discussed preparing for user interviews, interviewing techniques, methods for interpreting interview notes, creating personas from user interviews and making design decisions based on personas.
The best part is that the course was very hands-on, and each day I got an opportunity to actually try out what we were talking about. It’s one thing to read about interviewing, and an entirely different thing to interview the guy next to you. But I pushed myself to get out of my comfort zone, and volunteered for anything that was offered in class. I figured if I were going to fail anywhere, this was a great place to do it. As a result, I got some great experience from the course – and I’m excited to try some of those techniques on my next project.