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?

Reading seminar 2

I’ve read chapter 6, 7 and 8 in the book ‘Designing for Interaction’ by Dan Saffer. It was an interested read, the first part being about brainstorming and coming up with ideas for the project and the design. Following come descriptions of ways to work with the development of the design. Many factors weigh in, like for example time, money, user needs, business needs, context and teams and so on, which affects the design. There were a few laws mentioned which I found particularly interesting:

Fitt’s law from 1954 which says the time it takes to move from a starting position to a final target is determined by two things: the distance to the target and the size of the target. This law is useful when designing for interactive screens.

Hick’s law says that the time it takes for users to make decisions is determined by the number of possible choices they have. As an example, users make a quicker choice from one menu of 10 items than from two menus of 5 items each. This is not working for sites full of content though, as Yahoo and Amazon.

Tesler’s Law of the Conservation of Complexity says that you can only simplify the process so far, and then move the inherent complexity. E-mail is mentioned as an example, where you only need address of the receiver and of the sender, but the software can automatically take care of your e-mail and save who you write to frequently.

I think it’s interesting to read about laws since we so far haven’t really come across any in this project, and in all technological courses we read we always have rules to follow. I’m curious to see what other’s put out as guidelines in this subject.

I also found the section where interaction designer standards where discussed interesting. Some standards are widely used (short commands were mentioned in the text). We discussed standards at the lecture the 15 of October, more specific how many webpages created today look a lot like Facebook. I’d like to end this blog post with the question: is it because Facebook has many users or because it has the best design?   

Developing the prototype

Today we continued with our prototype for the information screens at Tom Tits. We got feedback at last weeks' seminar and now we looked over it and made some changes. Some features have been removed and some added, and we hope this will make the design better!