Readingseminar 2

For this seminar we read chapter 6, 7 and 8 in ‘Designing for Interaction’ by Dan Saffer. Most of the information very relevant to our project. The only negative I have to say is that I felt like some came a bit late. We have already gone through the brainstorming part of the project for example.

But never the less, the key for developing is to repeat. Chapter 6 had brainstorming and principles in focus. By reading this chapter I got a deeper understanding of why it’s so important to let brainstorming take time. It takes more than one idea to get a good end product. You need to have many ideas so when you are ready to move on, you know that you have the best idea. It takes time to become a professional “brainstormer”, and it is easy to make mistakes along the way. But I think my group did a good job with following the important rules of brainstorming. We stayed focused during the whole exercise and “lived” by the most important rule of them all: leave your ego behind and there are no bad ideas!

Principles are something that’s new to me but I can really see the use of it: it’s created so that the whole team is on the same page. And can be used as a measuring stick when deciding on ideas worth keeping. By having principles you can make sure that your original vision on what problem to solve is intact.

Now when we have decided on a prototype the next step its important to know your constrains of the project and how to work around them. For us it’s important that the project doesn’t take to long since we have a time limit for example. Since our product in the end will be seen on interactive screens I thought the piece about feedback and feedforward was interesting. It’s very important to give the user feedback so they know it´s working. And it’s a matter of seconds; if the feedback is delayed the user will think less of the product.

One other thing to help use understand the product was affordances: how shape indicates how the user can use something. By using standards on how it looks like will help our prototype to be user friendly.

Question: how can we use feedback and feedforward in our prototype?