Design Thinking

Information & Interaction Design

Mick McQuaid

mcq@utexas.edu

University of Texas at Austin

17 Aug 2026

Day ONE

How to Start?

Read the syllabus?

(eventually we’ll hafta, but it’s a boring way to start)

Go around the room saying our names?

(eventually we’ll hafta, but better if we’re energized)

Get the juices flowing!

WHY?

I think it’s better to start with an exercise that reminds us of what we do, no matter how proficient we are at it.

I need to know something about you and this is a very revealing exercise.

EDIPT

Empathize

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test

‹watch video›

Now do what they did!

Materials

three pages

some index cards (about 6)

some colored sharpies (at least 3)

a pen or pencil

Form Groups

first form a pair with someone like you

then form a group of four with a pair that identifies differently from you (gender, ethnicity, or other identity factors)

this gives you support (pair) and diversity (group of four)

Protocol

Empathize (interview)

Define (list of needs)

Ideate (storyboard sheet)

Prototype (cards)

‹interview›

break into pairs so everyone gets a chance to be interviewer and interviewee

interview is about supporting new year’s resolutions

if you’re a trio go 2-on-1 or 1-on-2 either way

‹make a list of needs›

analyze the interview

be sure to think about what they meant, not just what they said

think about how you could have gotten more from the interview

‹storyboard›

draw four panels of cartoons on the ideate page

show a successful interaction with an app

don’t worry about the app details

concentrate on the user experience — what did the user feel?

‹prototype›

now use the index cards

draw a few main app screens

focus on making it easy for the user

think about the circumstances of use

test

we’re skipping the test phase due to time constraints

but keep your cards so you can test later

it’s never too early to test

but testing is the focus of a different course

our focus: design

iterative cycle: design, prototype, evaluate

what did we learn?

give me your insights about each phase and write them in your sketchbook

phases were
- empathize (interview)
- define (list)
- ideate (storyboard)
- prototype (cards)

‹intros›

‹syllabus›

‹canvas›

I’ve five readings on Canvas. These include two books that you will use to prepare your milestones, Cooper et al. (2014) and Holtzblatt et al. (2005). By the way, there is a newer edition of Holtzblatt, but I don’t like it because it doesn’t much except for interrupting itself every few paragraphs to remind us that there are smartphones now. Duh! Another reading is Dodson (2006), which will be useful throughout the semester to support your sketching. Next, we have Rosenfeld et al. (2015), which will help with the second half of the course on information design. Finally, we have Rogers et al. (2023). This is a brand new book on interaction design.

I should add that the librarian told me that I’m only allowed to put three chapters of any book on Canvas, so I did that with all the books. You can find some of them on the library website and you may want to buy some, although a few of them are absurdly expensive. I can not advocate that you go to libgen and download the books for free, partially because it may be illegal to do so. The courts ruled at one time that you had to deprive someone of ownership for an act to be considered theft. That hasn’t stopped the music and publishing industries from labeling downloading as theft, though, and they have enjoyed some handsome out of court settlements over file sharing. Another reason you may disapprove of libgen (as well as scihub) is that it is hosted in Russia, not the most popular country right now. Further, you may feel that the academic publishing industry is not a bunch of parasitic gangsters and instead feel that they fairly compensate authors for their work. You may not feel that universities should cut out the middleman and take over academic publishing. For all these reasons, I do not endorse libgen and only mention it for the sake of raising issues about publishing.

END

References

Cooper, Alan, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher Noessel. 2014. About Face 4.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Wiley.

Dodson, Bert. 2006. Keys to Drawing with Imagination. North Light.

Holtzblatt, Karen, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, and Shelley Wood. 2005. Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design. Morgan Kaufmann.

Pink, Daniel E. 2005. A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Riverhead Books.

Rogers, Yvonne, Helen Sharp, and Jennifer Preece. 2023. Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. 6th ed. John Wiley & Sons.

Rosenfeld, Louis, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango. 2015. Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond. 4th ed. O’Reilly Media.

Colophon

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