Beginner level
No prior experience required
Core Principles of Interaction Design
Flexible schedule
Approximately 3 weeks, 6 to 8 hours per week
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*Proof of full-time student enrollment required. Acceptable forms of ID include a letter from your university’s registrar office or an unofficial transcript. Email your documents to learnlab-help@lists.andrew.cmu.edu.
What you will learn
- Analyze affordances, feedforward, and feedback in interfaces and evaluate impact on user experience.
- Evaluate the application of Gestalt principles like proximity, similarity, and figure/ground relationships that guide user attention and communicate relationships between elements without explicit instruction.
- Map and evaluate complete user experiences by identifying touchpoints, analyzing design materials, and assessing how context shapes user perception across multi-step journeys.
- Evaluate the application of evidence-based laws including Fitts's Law, Hick's Law, and the Doherty Threshold in interface layouts, menu structures, and response times.
Course description
Every time you tap a button, navigate a website, or use an app, you’re engaging with design decisions rooted in psychology, perception, and human behavior. This course explores the foundational principles that separate frustrating interfaces from intuitive ones. You’ll learn how users perceive and interact with digital products through affordances and feedback mechanisms. Discover how visual perception shapes interface design through Gestalt principles and other laws of interaction design. Through hands-on projects analyzing real products and mapping user experiences, you’ll develop the analytical skills to evaluate existing designs and the conceptual foundation to create better ones.
Syllabus
Module 1: Experiences & Interactions
- Break a user's experience down into clear and distinct moments.
- Identify touchpoints, interactions, interaction design materials, and user emotions.
- Evaluate whether a moment presents an interaction design improvement opportunity, and propose a concrete improvement where applicable.
Mini-Project 1: Map & Evaluate an Experience
- Document an everyday experience by identifying distinct moments, touchpoints, and interactions, as well as the design materials that shape them.
- Track emotional highs and lows across the journey to identify pain points and opportunities.
- Evaluate experience quality using established criteria and analyze how changing user context transforms the same touchpoints into different experiences.
Module 2: Interaction Design Laws & Principles
- Distinguish between perceived affordances, feedforward, and feedback in design.
- Distinguish semantic and direct carriers of meaning.
- Analyze how, and to what extent, a specific product communicates how to use a control.
- Evaluate how to apply Fitts's Law and Hick's Law to optimize target acquisition and decision-making.
- Evaluate how to apply Miller's Law, Tesler's Law, and the Poka-Yoke Principle to manage cognitive load and prevent errors.
- Evaluate how to create effective system responses through state tracking and latency management.
Module 3: Gestalt Principles
- Evaluate how to establish clear focal points in layouts using the figure/ground principle.
- Evaluate how to design efficient visual communication with minimal cognitive load using the closure principle.
- Evaluate how to organize interface elements using the laws of proximity, similarity, common region, continuity, and symmetry.
Mini-Project 2: Product Analysis
- Analyze products you use daily to identify how they communicate function through design.
- Distinguish between perceptual affordances, feedforward, feedback, state indicators, and semantic versus direct carriers of meaning.
- Identify both effective design patterns and problematic communication failures that create user confusion.
Meet the instructor
Julie Saunders
Julie Saunders is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where she leverages over 25 years of industry leadership to teach interaction design and advise undergraduate and graduate capstone teams. Her work is driven by a deep curiosity about human behavior, with a focus on designing innovative products, services, and experiences that balance user delight with strategic business objectives. Prior to joining the faculty in 2022, Julie was an independent consultant across the retail, fintech, and Web3 sectors. She previously held leadership roles in healthcare and led innovation and new product development initiatives in sleep technology. Julie earned her MDes in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005.
Where to go next
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