UI12: The Essentials of Interaction Design

Kim Goodwin's talk at User Interface 12 in Boston outlined the entire Interaction Design process, with a focus on core skills and tools to improve solutions.

• A designer visualizes concrete solutions to human problems.
• Visualization skill is part aptitude, part fearlessness, and part imagination.
• Practice fearlessness with gesture drawing. Keeps focus on process, flow; not end goal. (Playing scales on piano.)
• Cooper phrase: "Reality bats last." Gets away from scarcity thinking and toward abundance thinking.
• Play encourages imagination.
• Pretend it's magic. Drop constraints.
• Pretend it's human. A great human assistant knows you.
• Collaboration: 2 or 3 are fast, 4 are slower, too many are deadly.
• Design Patterns: a designer's vocabulary.
• Practice deconstructing what you see. Identify components and relationships between them. What problem does it solve, and how else could it be applied?
• Design Principles: grammar. Tell us when and how to use vocabulary of patterns.
• Personas are the characters used to drive the story in scenarios.