Are You Designing for Real People or Just Personas?

Eric Meyer Explains How to Create Meaningful Interactions

Last month, Aquent Gymnasium hosted an awesome event, Designing for Real People: Making the Case for Meaningful UX, featuring Eric Meyer. For those of you new to the UX world, Eric is an international expert on CSS, and author of Designing for Real Life. The conversation — second in a series about interactive design trends — was hosted by our very own Academic Director Jeremy Osborn. Jim Webb, who teaches our UX Fundamentals, joined the conversation as well.

This hour-long conversation explored the benefits of user research as a starting point for interactive design projects, as well as making the case to stakeholders about best practices.

Highlights of the conversation include:

• How to design with user context in mind by identifying stress cases — what users maybe be doing or feeling during their visit to your site — which will improve the user experience for everyone
• Compelling benefits of usability testing for ideal outcomes
• Top strategies for implementing user-focused design in the real world
• Conducting a pre-mortem as a way to anticipate what could go wrong before it does

Watch the full recording below to get the full scoop.