Back in November we reported that Mozilla Labs would be supporting a group of 15 students from Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany as they embarked on a course of ‘Open Interaction Design’
Today we like to give you an update to the students progress and other activities that are in the pipeline.
Background
The ‘Designing for Action’ course – conducted by Prof. Jens Geelhaar and Jan Dittrich – challenges the students to design solutions to overcome today’s problems of information overload while surfing the internet and the re-findability of the valuable webpages.
The course teaches the basics of interaction design and challenges exploration into the design of user-centered software in the open.
All phases of outputs and course-ware will be released to the public under Creative Commons open licensing via the Media Faculties Wiki. This includes:
- course structure and notes
- research
- ideation
- wire-framing
- prototyping
- final proposals
What’s next?
The students are very close to completing the first phase of the project. Mozilla Labs have arranged various means to support the initiative via multiple channels:
- social media coverage (blogs etc.)
- guest lectures
- mentoring
Paper prototype UI elements
Social media coverage
We will actively publish blog posts outlining the Phase 1 outputs from the different teams. These posts will include:
- initial concepts
- sketches
- wire-frames
- prototypes
- user testing
Guest lectures
We have lined up two exciting guest lectures for the students. These will be conducted by:
- Jinghua Zhang – Mozilla Labs User Research Catalyst and Test Pilot program lead
- Eric Reiss & Søren Muus – CEO & Creative Director respectively of FatDUX
We hope to be able to provide video from these guest lectures at a later date. Be sure to watch this space!
Mentoring
We have lined up a handful of internationally recognised UX professionals to provide the students with some mentoring feedback – with focus on a few core usability lens.
After a initial virtual group meet, each mentor will have two teams assigned to themselves. They will conduct in-depth reviews and feedback for their teams as well as make themselves available for ‘open hours’ once a week.
- Cennydd Bowles – UX Designer at Clearleft
- Eric Reiss – CEO at FatDUX
- James Kalbach – Author of Designing Web Navigation & Assistant Editor at Boxes and Arrows
Going forward
The students will continue to refine their concepts based on the upcoming results from prototype testing as well as all the mentoring feedback sessions.
After this further refinement phase, the final outputs will be presented around March.
Remember, you can always follow the students progress on the course by visiting the universities course wiki or stay in touch with updates by following @MozConcept on Twitter.