Interaction Design Specialization

What makes an interface intuitive? How can I tell whether one design works better than another? This course will teach you fundamental principles of design and how to effectively evaluate your work with users. You'll learn fundamental principles of visual design so that you can effectively organize and present information with your interfaces. You'll learn principles of perception and cognition that inform effective interaction design. And you'll learn how to perform and analyze controlled experiments online. In many cases, we'll use Web design as the anchoring domain. A lot of the examples will come from the Web, and we'll talk just a bit about Web technologies in particular. When we do so, it will be to support the main goal of this course, which is helping you build human-centered design skills, so that you have the principles and methods to create excellent interfaces with any technology.

People are social creatures and the modern Internet reflects that. Technology has made collaboration at a distance possible in new ways that present their own set of challenges. This course will introduce you to the major challenges and opportunities for creating online communities. What does the future hold? Learn how social computing can create collaboration experiences that go beyond what’s possible face to face.

In this course, you will learn relevant fundamentals of human motor performance, perception, and cognition that inform effective interaction design. You will use these models of how people work to design more effective input and interaction techniques. You’ll apply these to both traditional graphic and gestural interfaces.

What makes for a great user experience? How can you consistently design experiences that work well, are easy to use and people want to use? This course will teach you the core process of experience design and how to effectively evaluate your work with the people for whom you are designing. You'll learn fundamental methods of design research that will enable you to effectively understand people, the sequences of their actions, and the context in which they work. Through the assignments, you’ll learn practical techniques for making sense of what you see and transform your observations into meaningful actionable insights and unique opportunity areas for design. You’ll also explore how to generate ideas in response to the opportunities identified and learn methods for making your ideas tangible. By answering specific questions and refining your concepts, you’ll move closer to making your ideas real. We’ll use cases from a variety of industries including health, education, transportation, finance, and beyond to illustrate how these methods work across different domains.

Good luck and we hope you enjoy the course!

A blank canvas is full of possibility. If you have an idea for a user experience, how do you turn it into a beautiful and effective user interface? This covers covers principles of visual design so that you can effectively organize and present information with your interfaces. You'll learn concrete strategies to create user interfaces, including key lessons in typography, information architecture, layout, color, and more. You’ll learn particular issues that arise in new device contexts, such as mobile and responsive interfaces. You will learn how to apply these design principles in a modern context of increasingly diverse form factors - from tablets, to walls, to watches.

You may never be sure whether you have an effective user experience until you have tested it with users. In this course, you’ll learn how to design user-centered experiments, how to run such experiments, and how to analyze data from these experiments in order to evaluate and validate user experiences. You will work through real-world examples of experiments from the fields of UX, IxD, and HCI, understanding issues in experiment design and analysis. You will analyze multiple data sets using recipes given to you in the R statistical programming language -- no prior programming experience is assumed or required, but you will be required to read, understand, and modify code snippets provided to you. By the end of the course, you will be able to knowledgeably design, run, and analyze your own experiments that give statistical weight to your designs.

Apply the skills you learned during the sequence of courses -- from needfinding to visual design -- as you redesign a new interface, service, or product for your Interaction Design Capstone Project. We’re working with some exciting design teams in Silicon Valley across multiple industries to develop real-world design challenges for this final project. Upon completion, you will have a polished capstone project you can share in your design portfolio to highlight your work and document your design process.