User interfaces (UIs) combining computation with communication functions, e.g., phone, video, the Web and music are enabling products/services to penetrate environments for work, home, education, play and on the way. Consequently, developers must learn techniques to make products/services easier to learn and use, more usable, useful and appealing to an every wider, more diverse set of users. This course summarizes key principles and techniques, and surveys issues and current products/services. Special attention is given to information design and visualization, to emerging culture differences, and to current design guidelines, templates, and tools. Analyzing and designing user-experiences from an information-oriented, visually-oriented design perspective can make products/services easier to produce, sell, learn, use, and maintain. Users will find it easier to find, sort, play, and pay. Participants will be informally quizzed about their cross-cultural experience and asked to analyze brief cross-cultural communication examples.

Level

Beginner

Prerequisites

Basic background in user interface-design

Intended Audience

The course is for people who are new to the topic of culture theory and cross-cultural communication but may have some user-experience design background. Even experts will learn new things. These professions will benefit: analysts, anthropologists, designers, ethnographers, evaluators, game developers, marketers, researchers, software developers, software engineer.

Presenter(s)

Aaron Marcus, President, Aaron Marcus and Associates Inc.

Mr. Marcus authored The Past 100 Years of the Future: HCI in Sci-Fi Movies and TV (2012), edited a User Experience issue on this topic (2013) and gave keynote lectures/tutorials on this topic since 2010. Since 1968, Mr. Marcus published 350 articles and 15 books, taught, and designed/consulted worldwide. He is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of User Experience, Editor of Information Design Journal and editorial board member of Visible Language and International Journal of HCI. He is Visiting Professor, IIT’s Institute of Design, Chicago; Master, De Tao Academy, Shanghai; and International Advisor, Dragon Design Foundation, Beijing.