Over the next few weeks I will be teaching at Hsuan Chuang University a undergraduate class in design – this will be my forth year stressing out students as I teach only in English. It’s an elective course usually filled with bright young students from various faculties through out the university.
The topic hasn’t changed much, I spend 3 weeks talking about Designing User Experiences, and it is still as necessary as ever. Putting your customer at the forefront of your application or site design is still as foreign a concept to many here in Taiwan as it is in standard brick and mortar businesses. The language of our profession (or jargon) – user friendly, simplicity, usability, IA – may have made it’s way through many corporate design departments but in practice it’s still very much an afterthought or not a thought at all.
Hopefully talking about the concepts. methods, and tool will in some miniscule way help bring forth these concepts to the business mainstream.
Tonight I give a brief introduction, the following weeks I take a different approach by focusing on weblog usability. Since so many students today are creating “blogs” this will allow them to immediately put into practice some of the ideas we discuss. An important first step.
Creating the User Experience and Visual Design for the Web.