Skills you'll gain

Specialization - 8 course series

You will learn how to design technologies that bring people joy, rather than frustration. You'll learn how to generate design ideas, techniques for quickly prototyping them, and how to use prototypes to get feedback from other stakeholders like your teammates, clients, and users. You'll also learn principles of visual design, perception, and cognition that inform effective interaction design.

This is the first course offered in the interaction design specialization series. Browse through previous capstone projects for some inspiration here: https://medium.com/capstone-projects/capstone-projects-2019-abc67d3f6f26

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.

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.

Design Principles: an Introduction

Social Computing

Input and Interaction

User Experience: Research & Prototyping

Information Design

Designing, Running, and Analyzing Experiments

Interaction Design Capstone Project