People First Design

Being a few months removed from my first design projects in my HCI/d Master’s study at Indiana University, I have some reflections and lessons learned.  For this particular project I worked with another student to design a green thermostat.  The project took about a week and included some informal user research, concept sketches, prototyping in Visual Basic, user testing, and redesign.  Here are my reflections in all the glory that a bullet list can provide:

• Clear sketches lead to clearer communication.  Both my knowledge of what sketching can do for me as a language of thought, and my abilities to sketch what I am thinking still need some serious work.  This is something that I have been putting further effort into practicing.
• Personas are a great tool when you can’t do in-depth interviews, ethnography, and contextual research.  They obviously can’t truly stand in for a real person, but they can still be helpful.  Also, any of the designer’s tools (in this case personas), can be put to use in slightly different ways depending on the designer, the company, and the context.
• It isn’t necessary to add more features to accomplish design goals.  We incorporated many features in an attempt to change behavior instead of adapting the design to fit with existing behavior.  For instance we might have let the user turn the thermostat way up or down, but have the thermostat keep the temperature within acceptable ranges.
• High-fidelity prototypes can make it more difficult to get proper feedback.  We did ourselves, our design, and our users a disservice by going straight from concept to high-fidelity prototype.  If we had used a low-fidelity prototype we could have helped our test participants to focus on the concept of the design instead of the little details, and ensured that they were less inclined to hold back criticism.