Design Speak: Seminar on User Centered Design

To describe Design Speak, Annual Event @ NID in one word would be DISAPPOINTING. Theme of the seminar was User Centered Design (UCD). Seminar started with an introductory lecture from Dr. Eric Schaffer, CEO HFI. Absolutely no content in his talk and I found him to be a Jabberwocky! Same was true for all the speakers who followed. Though every speaker had exceptional profile but no one could justify the topic of the seminar and at the end of the day, Usability still remains a field which is not science and is just matter of common sense.

Anyways some very few points that I found useful in the seminar were:

• ISO process can make UCD more reliable and person independent.
• Times New Roman font was designed to compress characters and put more text in limited space.
• Verdana font was primarily designed for screen based interface.
• Minimize the load on the user on following counts - visual, intellect, and memory.
• The Design Process: Idenity Need -> Create brief -> Brainstorming -> Data Gathering -> Redesign Brief -> Conceptualize -> Validate Concepts -> Final Design
• Punctuations can be made bigger than normal text to attract attention.

These were the points from inital few lectures, after that I dozed off. Just on our way back, visited NIDUS, NID's Design Outlet, displays products made by NID graduates, and proffessors.. though touch expensive but very nice.

I hope, future seminar/workshops based on this theme would be more insightful. One such workshop is scheduled soon at Synapse. For details, click here.

Cheers!