One of the things I try to get my students thinking about in CS462 is Web site design. I'm not talking graphics here--most techies are terrificly bad at making things look nice. I'm talking about the interaction.

I'm not hoping to turn them into usability experts, but I do want to give them the tools to design and document interaction and tie it to Web site behavior. People say you can teach design and I agree that it's hard to lecture about--but you can teach it. I have my students do design exercises as groups in class to get them thinking along these lines to to get some hands-on experience with design.

I just put a show on IT Conversations this week that's relevant. Dan Saffer's presentation on interaction design from the Adaptive Path User Experience Week is a good intro to the subject of interaction design and why it's important. He gives a more tactical presentation later in the conference that I hope we'll publish as well later on.