Everett McKay (short bio)

Principal, UX Design Edge, United States

Objectives:

Attendees will gain a fresh way to think about, discuss, and design for two of the most important and challenging design objectives: making designs intuitive and simple.

Content and benefits:

This tutorial combines two of the most challenging design objectives—making designs intuitive and simple. Intuitive design is challenging because it, as commonly understood, is vague and subjective. Simple design is challenging because many people incorrectly believe that it requires harming a product or “dumbing it down.” This tutorial presents an objective framework and shared vocabulary for understanding both concepts, and applies the framework to a mobile design challenge. The objective is to optimize for what is most important for the target users, and have immediately self-explanatory tasks that don’t require documentation or training.

Here’s the tutorial outline:

• Intuitive
  • What does intuitive mean, really?
  • The attributes of intuitive interaction
  • Strategically unintuitive
  • Intuitive task flows
  • Exercise: Redesign a website to make it intuitive
• Simple
  • What is simplicity?
  • Powerful and simple
  • Simplicity design principles
  • Simplicity examples
  • Why is simplicity so hard?
  • Exercise: Resign a coffee maker to make it intuitive

Each section that isn’t an exercise will have at least one class discussion.

Target Audience:

There is no prerequisite knowledge, but intermediates and experts will benefit the most.