Design and Usability Basics

When I first joined my current role with the NUI Galway, I noticed that my fellow researchers and software engineers tend to build applications without having the user in their minds, which I found to be the same for the majority of researchers.

I planned a presentation for my colleagues on our weekly meeting to cover this issue and help them build better User Experience for their applications (demos), and better designs for their presentations.

This presentation starts by defining the concept of design and its main elements, and express the relatedness of design with functionality. It discusses the importance of design in everyday life explaining the essentials of appropriate working design. It includes showing some examples around us that aren’t appropriate for users, and how people are still using them and nobody asked about developing them. Moreover, it shows how design affects the viewer’s mood and feelings, and how can design help them be more comfortable around applications in particular. This is followed by a discussion of examples from our experience in the NLP unit in developing demos and apps to be used by different types of users, and how we could make easy-to-use yet appropriate designs for each of the use-cases. It finishes by talking about how to find resources for a perfect demo design.

You can find the presentation on this link