DIG2500C – Fundamentals of Interactive Design is a 3-credit course on designing digital experiences that people use — websites, applications, and interactive media. Daytona State College carries related content as Fundamentals of Interactive Media. The C suffix reflects a required computer laboratory.
The course sits between visual design and software development and belongs entirely to neither. Its subject is how an interface communicates and behaves: whether a user can tell what is clickable, find what they came for, recover from a mistake, and complete a task without being taught. That is a design problem with established principles and evaluation methods, not a matter of taste.
Content covers interaction design principles — affordance, signifiers, mapping, feedback, and constraints; usability and its heuristics; user-centered design process — research, requirements, design, prototype, evaluate, iterate; users and tasks — personas, scenarios, and task analysis; information architecture — organization, labeling, and navigation; wireframing and prototyping at increasing fidelity; visual design for interfaces — hierarchy, layout, grids, typography, and color; interface patterns and conventions and why violating them costs users; responsive and mobile design; accessibility — WCAG principles, contrast, keyboard navigation, alternative text, and screen readers; usability testing — planning, moderating, and interpreting results; optimization and performance as a design concern; and design documentation and handoff.
Offered at approximately 10 Florida institutions with digital media programs.
Florida's technology sector in Tampa, Orlando, and Miami hires designers, and much UX work is remote-eligible, which broadens the market considerably — while also meaning the applicant pool is national, so portfolio quality matters more than location.
The most consequential professional content in the course. Web accessibility obligations arise under the Americans with Disabilities Act and, for public institutions and government, under Section 508 and state requirements. Florida public colleges, universities, and agencies are subject to accessibility requirements for their digital content, and litigation over inaccessible websites is common and growing. A designer who cannot produce accessible work is a liability to an employer.
The practical baseline is learnable in a week and should become automatic: sufficient color contrast, never using color as the only means of conveying information, keyboard operability for everything, meaningful alternative text, proper heading structure, visible focus indicators, and labeled form fields. The WebAIM contrast checker takes ten seconds. Students should leave treating these as constraints on every design rather than as a checklist applied at the end.
The central discipline of the field. Designers are not representative users: they know where everything is, understand the domain, and have seen the design evolve. Usability testing with even five representative users reliably surfaces the majority of significant problems, which is why the method is worth doing badly rather than not at all. Students consistently report their first usability test as the moment the subject clicks — watching a real person fail to find something obvious is more persuasive than any critique.
Users arrive with expectations built from every other interface they have used: underlined blue text is a link, the logo returns to home, the shopping cart is top right, a magnifying glass means search. Novel interaction patterns impose a learning cost that the novelty rarely repays. Students often want to demonstrate originality; the professional position is that originality belongs in the visual and brand expression, while the interaction patterns should be boring and predictable. Departing from convention is sometimes right — it just requires a justification and, ideally, a test.
Figma is what the industry uses, has a free tier and an education plan, and is what job postings name. More importantly, UX hiring is portfolio-driven, and what employers want is not pretty screens but case studies: the problem, the research, the alternatives considered, what testing revealed, what changed as a result, and the outcome. A student who documents each project that way throughout the course finishes with a portfolio; one who saves final screenshots does not. This is the single highest-return habit in the course.
Interfaces designed to manipulate — hidden costs revealed late, subscriptions easy to start and hard to cancel, confirmshaming, pre-checked consent boxes — are effective in the short term and are increasingly the subject of regulatory enforcement and litigation. Students should be able to recognize the patterns, name them, and understand that being asked to build one is a professional situation they may actually face.
The course appears as DIG2500 and DIG2500C, titled Fundamentals of Interactive Design at most institutions and Fundamentals of Interactive Media at Daytona State. Related DIG numbers cover distinct content — DIG2030C digital video, DIG2109 and other numbers for imaging and web — and are not interchangeable. Web development courses carry CGS or COP numbers. SCNS equivalency applies to the same number at the same level, never across numbers.
Generated August 31, 2026 · Updated August 31, 2026