Ben Woods | User Experience Design

I am happy to announce that I will be instructing multiple online sections in IAKM at Kent State University this summer, including 2 workshops with all new content.

Information and Visual Design is a 12 week course covering fundamentals of aesthetics and information structure for multiple media.

Web Coding is a 4 week workshop focusing on HTML and CSS, and is taught with Adobe Dreamweaver.

Image Editing and Optimization is a 4 week workshop that builds basic photo manipulation, image creation for the web, and is taught with Adobe Photoshop.

Rich Interactive Applications is a 4 week workshop that introduces animation and basic scripting with Adobe Flash.

Basic Information Architecture with Jamie Neely from designbyfront on Vimeo.

Will be teaching an online section of Information Architecture at Kent State University’s department of Information Architecture and Knowledge Management. The course focuses on organization, labeling, navigation and search.

I went to the Internet User Experience (IUE) Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan last week. IT was sponsored by MOUPA, UXNET, and other groups. Thanks to Keith for letting me know about it. The conference program was great, it was a good size — not too big, but big enough that it was worth the trip. I like that it was a good mix of practical case studies, some usability focused talks, as well as the requisite Social Media discussion. Highlights were probably the UX panel on Wednesday, and the Susan Weinschenk from Human Factors — but the whole thing was good, and I look forward to the 5th annual event.

Will be teaching Art244 (Introduction to Macintosh) at Cleveland State University. The class focuses on the basic graphic design, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

WEWS Channel 5 (Cleveland) profiled the Usability Lab at Kent State University. The lab is owned and run by the IAKM program at Kent. Story and video are here.

Reading the Usability Engineering Lifecycle by Deborah Mayhew.

I attended DUX07 in Chicago this year. DUX (Designing User Experience) has been a conference I’ve wanted to go to in the past, and finally made it. DUX was a good conference with a lot of inspirational presentations and sponsors. Some of the highlights include BJ Fogg’s presentation on simplicity and Dave Pescovitz from Institute for the Future

Many presentations were very aspirational in nature; some included data representation from Yahoo! and some interesting research on HCI from the University of Leeds.

Overall good stuff – plan on attending in 2009!