One of the advantages to missing out on the IA Summit and South by Southwest conference was the opportunity to meet with Jeff Brown’s Advanced Web Design students at Damascus High School to discuss principles of user-centered interaction design.
Over 45 minutes, we discussed an introduction to human factors, cognitive psychology, and interface design heuristics. And since Mr. Brown’s class is in the beginning stages of a web design project for a local business, we also used the time to focus on identifying audiences, task modeling and other discovery-themed processes.
Mr. Brown has done an exemplary job at recruiting phenomenal speakers to talk with his students–to the point that many of his speakers contact him requesting to speak (I fall into this camp).
His students certainly appear to enjoy a dialogue with practitioners who have real-world experience that they can immediately apply to their own schoolwork, and hopefully put to use for years to come.
Hopefully more high schools, community colleges, and universities will begin or continue to interact with the technology community to benefit their students.
But us practitioners cannot wait to be contacted.
Instead, we should introduce ourselves to those who could benefit from our experiences. Yes, it’s personally rewarding. But more importantly, those experiences can shape the thought and actions of our future interns, colleagues, and partners.
