I’m so glad my final project for Applied Design of Software User Interfaces (ENP166) is over; indeed the class as well. The class sessions were awesome to sit in: the teacher, Michael Wiklund and ta Allison work together at the teacher’s design firm so they had all sorts of real world stories to draw upon. Much better than the dry academic stuff a “real” professor usually would have to share.
The class ended up being pretty grueling in terms of workload – the first three or four weeks had a project every week; there was the pet adoption web site design, the art museum tablet pc like guide book design, the airline in-flight entertainment system design and prototype, capped off by the bicycle computer/navigation system team project. Lots of practical experience with the phases of UI design working through conceptual models, ui structure maps, templating, visual design and prototyping meant lots of time in front of computers using omnigraffle, free mind, fireworks, the gimp, and flash.
Even given all the experience gained using the tools, I’m afraid I didn’t learn all that much. I don’t know if I’m in an in one ear, out the other rut right now, or I was just usually so tired for class having been up late the night before finishing projects – I can’t rattle off some of the buzzwords like some other people in class can. Hopefully $3000 worth of stuff stuck upstairs somewhere.