This week HCI 2006 has been taking place at London's Queen Mary University. While the whole of the conference, to my mind, is usually too academically-oriented and time-consuming for a practitioner, the pre-conference tutorials I've visited so far have generally been very good and useful.

As a UXD consultant at headshift, I do a lot of interface design in the form of paper wireframes and so I thought that the "Principles of Interaction Design"-Masterclass would be a good choice. And it was.

To describe it briefly with the presenter's own words: "This tutorial [was] not about design process, but rather the underlying knowledge that designers apply when generating design solutions, regardless of the process."

Although none of the 26 principles we covered (this was a full day class in case you're wondering) was news to me, the process of going through them again in detail and context, their use and raison d'etre was extremely useful. If you have been designing interfaces for some time, you tend to make at least some design decisions intuitively (I hate that word BTW but I can't think of a better one right now), which can create a bit of a problem when - for example - you're having a design critique meeting and you want to use everyone's time better than getting into 30-minute discussions over the width of a horizontal line. It also reminded me of what Kathy Sierra said a while ago in a post about experts vs amateurs.

We also did some practical doodling starting with everyone having to draw their favourite interface which was not a computer interface. Because I'm a simple person who loves functional minimalism (see, I paid attention), primary colours and was run over by a car at the age of 4, I drew a traffic light and because boys will be boys they drew a games console (I actually used to think that was a computer but never mind, I reckon the traffic light is chipped too - which now makes me think I should have drawn a dinner table instead).

The only improvement this tutorial could have done with was to include more examples of web application interfaces (there was a bit too much desktop design going on), and related new strategies such as AJAX and to initiate more discussion about possible new principles for Web 2.0 collaboration tools.

Thanks to Shane Morris of Echo Interaction Design for a lively and useful presentation.