From the course: Interaction Design for the Web

Welcome

From the course: Interaction Design for the Web

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Welcome

- Hello, and welcome to this course on Interaction Design for the Web. My name is Chris Nodder, and I'm a User Experience Specialist with a background in psychology and interaction design. One thing I've found in the 20-plus years I've been working in this field is that when it comes to UI design, there are many guidelines but few hard and fast rules. That makes it hard for you when you're creating a new interface, because there isn't a simple checklist. In fact, people in my profession like to joke that the most frequent answer we give is, "It depends." But don't worry. There's a pretty good workaround for the lack of rules. What's important is to know why the guidelines exist, the underlying psychological principles, so that you can work our for yourself how best to apply them in your situation. And that's what we'll cover in this course. People are strange. The way they interact with our software is often unbelievable to us. In reality, much of use that's seemingly random behavior is actually very predictable when we understand how people think. Once you're familiar with these thought processes, you can build software that appeals better to your users. We'll look at some of the limitations our brains and senses have, and show you how you can use software to help remove those limitations rather than reminding people about them. We'll see how people bring stuff they learn from the physical world into their interactions with software and how you can make use of this to help them understand how your app or site works. We'll look at some workflow concepts that will help you move people between the tasks they need to perform, and we'll talk about the importance of telling a good consistent story so that people can follow along. We'll wrap up this course by talking about the design tweaks that delight people and make them come back to your software time and time again. That's a lot to cover, but we're going to make it fast and fun. So, let's get started.

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