At Carsonified Towers, we’re all getting super excited for May, when The Future of Web Design hits London for another three days of learning and inspiration. As ever, we kick off the show with four full-day workshops – each lead by a totally inspirational industry leader. From 9am am to 5pm, we’ll be rolling up our sleeves and knuckling down for a serious hit of web savvy. Numbers are capped at 40 for each workshop, ensuring a great learning environment.

This year’s chosen workshop topics are already proving popular. First up, we’ve got the unstoppable force of web awesomeness that is Paul Boag. Director of Headscape, Paul will be leading a crash course in Running A Successful Web Design Business: ”We like to think that being a successful independent web designer is about creating great websites. Its not. Running your own business is about a lot more than having the right professional skills. ”

After wowing the crowds as a Rising Star back in 2011, Steve Fisher has rapidly become one of our most popular speakers. He’ll be joining us again in London to lead his Rock Solid UX Deliverables workshop: “No longer something that has to always be hugely complex and costly, we’ll cover the back-to-basics approach to UX design in this workshop and how to practically dispatch a rock solid responsive web design UX deliverables package.” 

Next up, creator of the uber popular Coach to 5K app, Josh Clark will be crossing the Atlantic to deliver his Teaching Touch workshop – a sell out success at FOWD NYC last year: “The workshop presents nitty-gritty ‘rule of thumb’ design techniques that together form a framework for crafting finger-friendly interface metaphors, affordances, and gestures for a new generation of mobile apps that inform and delight.”

Last but not least, longtime Carsonified favourites, the Web Standardistas will be joining the fun, to teach their Good Ideas Grow On Paper workshop: “Armed with some fundamental design principles and an abundance of tools – which naturally includes the Standardistas’ ‘Bag of Awesome™’ (containing a veritable cornucopia of material) – we show the aspiring analogue designer a range of methods for breaking out of the stranglehold of the often clichéd digital world.”

It wasn’t until college that I started reading more design books and realized that I wasn’t asking the right questions during my process. Questions like:

• Why is the user on this screen?
• What is the most important piece of information to them?
• What’s the next action they want to take?

It was no longer about patterns and standards and all about how those can facilitate the user’s experience. This was a turning point in my approach to design, and the responses to my work changed accordingly. Suddenly, a lot of folks were asking me how I do what I do—almost as if I had developed that sixth sense.

I’m going to demonstrate how those questions impact my design thinking with a walkthrough of a design I’m working on now.

Identify the primary goal

Here’s a bunch of stuff I need to put on the class page for Treehouse, the new Think Vitamin Membership.

A class is basically a playlist of videos related to a particular topic—Design Fundamentals or CSS Animation, for example. I also need to include some information about the video and actions for the class.

Before I do anything, I have to get into the user’s head. Designers are fortunate to be equipped with fantastic imaginations, and this really comes in handy when you want to pretend you’re someone else. Alright, I’m the user. Why am I on this page? What do I want to do? This is the time to be discerning—I have to decide on their primary goal.

I’m going to assume their primary goal is to watch the class, so that’s my focus.

Group and Assign Value

Now that I know my focus, I can group the elements and assign value from there.

Of all the information about the class, the description, thumbnail, and author are most important is helping the user determine whether they want to watch the class. The total duration of the playlist and number of videos in it is less important.

Similarly, the two most important actions are watching the class and taking the quiz. Less important are the RSS feed, downloads, and social sharing.

An Arrangement of Elements

Once I’ve identified the most and least valuable elements, it comes down to making the important stuff stand out and de-emphasizing the unimportant stuff. There are lots of ways to make things stand out—size, boldness, contrasting color. Since I’m sketching, I’m just going to use what I can represent on paper: size and position.

What’s important here? The big stuff. The title is a large font size, the “watch class” action is the largest button, the playlist takes up the most space, and the quiz button is differentiated from the less important action button next to it by bigger size.

Remember: If you use the same visual style for two elements, you’re saying they’re equally important.

Open to Change

I never get it right the first time, always making further re-arrangements as I go along. Don’t be afraid to scrap layouts and start over—if you get the feeling things could be better, you’re probably right. With every change, take a moment to get in the user’s shoes and walk through the interface; asking the same questions about their goals, desired actions, and intentions.

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This post has been kindly translated into Korean.