Design Principles: an Introduction

Go to Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/design-principles

Introduction

**Course Review: Design Principles: An Introduction on Coursera** In an increasingly digital world, the importance of intuitive design cannot be overstated. It shapes not only how we interact with technology but also our overall user experience. Coursera offers a dynamic course titled **Design Principles: An Introduction**, which is designed to guide learners through the fundamental aspects of design, from visual presentation to user interaction. ### Course Overview The course delves into essential questions regarding design efficacy: What makes an interface intuitive? How can we assess the effectiveness of one design over another? Throughout the course, students will explore key principles of visual design and user perception, as well as learn methodologies for evaluating their work through user testing and feedback. ### What You'll Learn The curriculum is both comprehensive and engaging, divided into several modules: 1. **Welcome and Course Overview** - The course kicks off by setting the stage for what learners can expect. It outlines the resources available and encourages students to immerse themselves in the world of design principles. 2. **Direct Manipulation and Representations** - This module focuses on the pivotal innovation of graphical interfaces. It explains how direct manipulation allows users to interact with elements on the screen seamlessly, which not only aids learning but also enhances usability. By examining real-world examples, students gain insights into how well-designed interfaces can facilitate user comprehension and cognitive distribution. 3. **Visual Design and Information Design** - Having established foundational concepts, the course shifts to the nuts and bolts of user interfaces. This module investigates crucial elements like scale, contrast, color, typography, and layout. Students will appreciate how subtle variations can influence user experience and learn to implement these elements effectively in their designs. 4. **Designing Experiments** - The final module emphasizes the importance of user testing in the design process. Participants learn how to design experiments, conduct usability tests, and analyze the results to refine their work. The iterative cycle of prototyping and testing is highlighted as an essential practice for any designer, encouraging a mindset of adaptability and responsiveness to user feedback. ### Recommendations **Why You Should Take This Course:** - **Practical Insights:** The course provides concrete examples from real-world applications, allowing learners to make meaningful connections between theory and practice. - **User-Centric Focus:** Emphasizing the significance of user feedback, students are equipped with essential tools to design with their audience in mind. - **Interactive Learning:** Through assignments and projects, learners can apply concepts immediately, solidifying their understanding and enhancing their skills progressively. - **Expert Guidance:** The course is led by knowledgeable instructors who share valuable insights from their experience, helping learners navigate complex design considerations with ease. ### Final Thoughts Whether you are a budding designer, a seasoned professional looking to refresh your skills, or someone curious about how design influences our daily interactions with technology, **Design Principles: An Introduction** is a highly recommended course. It equips participants with the foundational knowledge necessary to create more impactful, user-friendly interfaces. This course is not just an academic endeavor; it's a practical toolkit for anyone interested in the art and science of design. Enroll today and unlock the potential to transform your design thinking!

Syllabus

Welcome and Course Overview

Welcome to the course! Here are some helpful resources to guide you through this course.

Our lecture videos in this module begin with the major innovation of the graphical interface: enabling people to perform input directly on top of output. This directness makes interfaces easier to learn because it enables people to recognize familiar elements. And continuous feedback makes interfaces easier to use, encourages exploration, and prevents errors. To illustrate the benefits of direct manipulation in real interfaces, the videos provide several examples of both particular designs and interface styles. I find that's a lot more useful than just stating abstract principles. Now is a good time to remind everyone that I am not endorsing (or rejecting) any particular product, organization, or person. What I am doing: real people in the real world make real design decisions -- you can learn from this -- and in this course I'll discuss these concrete examples so you can gain real knowledge. The rest of the videos will cover topics related to the importance of representations, such as understanding a user's mental model and helping people to distribute cognition. I will show some examples of how representational differences can impact performance. As you watch these videos, think about how you have arranged or lamented representations in your everyday life. Maybe you put your keys by the door, sunglasses on your hat, or a post-it on your laptop? You'll get a chance to delve into these examples in the assignment.

So far, many examples in our videos have been physical. I like physical examples because they’re often easier to understand, and they durably express fundamental principles. Equipped with those fundamentals, we'll now focus more on concrete issues in interaction design to help you flesh out your interactive prototypes. This module’s videos introduce visual and information design. These are the nuts and bolts of user interfaces: scale, contrast, pattern, shape, color, typography, and layout. What I hope you'll take away from these lectures is a newfound appreciation for how subtle changes in this visual variables can powerfully impact people's experience of documents and interfaces. Dive into the first visual design lecture here. Visual design organizes the world of information. As this module’s lectures show, that visual organization provides important cues, yet the structure itself is often invisible.

After you’ve made a design, how do you know whether it is good? Or if your team has a couple ideas it is considering, how do you know which one is better? Rather than arguing, throwing chairs, or playing rochambeau, we suggest getting your designs in front of real users to see how well they actually work. To enable you to do this, our final module of lectures will introduce you to designing, running, and analyzing experiments. Testing your ideas with people and using what you learn to make them better can often mean the difference between a flop and a hit. Usability testing also gives you a chance to flex your rapid prototyping muscles. Build several interfaces quickly, try them out with people, and use what you learn to revise them. Through repeated iteration and testing, you can end up with a wonderfully polished interface. For me, the most exhilarating aspect of running experiments is the element of surprise. Nearly every time my students, colleagues, and I run a study, we learn something that we never even thought to think of. Sometimes, it's a roadblock or bug. Other times, it's an unexpected new use of a system -- many great startups have emerged out of finding unexpected new uses for technology. Either way, it'll give you new fodder for design. As in the prototyping lectures, the evaluation lectures emphasize comparison -- testing multiple ideas. In many ways, design is choice, and comparing multiple interfaces helps you make good choices. Learn more about designing studies here.