This is sort of a continuation of the previous post about designing to change behavior. I am not really arguing one side or the other here, rather I am searching for some insights about design. To that end I have chosen a few books to dive into this summer, among them the book Freakonomics. One of the main themes of the book is about how we are creatures of incentive. Most people think only of business and marketing when they hear the word incentive, but Freakonomics speaks more about psychological and social motivations. Continue reading »
Jun 202009
Jun 122009
I have read a lot of articles that specifically say a designer’s job is to change behavior. Perhaps I am but a naive designer, but I don’t know if I buy into that statement. I have been thinking a lot about it, and I had a fellow student ask me why I thought this. Here is my response to him: Continue reading »
May 182009
I have always loved RPG games. I often think about how RPGs and MMORPGs can relate to HCI. There are probably a ton of people who could talk on this subject better than I will, but I will spit out my couple of cents anyway. I am considering doing my Master’s capstone project on the subject, and this post is just the tip of the iceberg.
From a truly human-centered design perspective, that is, taking core human values into consideration when designing and implementing technology, MMORPGs have many great things to offer. I will give an example from my own experiences to elaborate on some of them. Continue reading »
May 182009
After attending CHI 2009 I gained some perspective. It seems that the industry that I am about to dive into, full of youthful exuberance and naivety, has grossly understated the value and potential of HCI. The field of HCI seems to still be very focused on user-centered design, and sometimes uses the phrase human-centered design interchangeably. I don’t feel that human-centered design is user-centered design. This is not a new topic, as it has already seen some play in Interactions Magazine among other places. In what follows I will explain what I feel the difference is and why it is important to note it. Continue reading »
I, along with my classmate Thalith Nasir, have started a discussion group at school and it is going quite well. We meet every other week for about an hour and a half to discuss a variety of topics related to HCI. In a interdisciplinary field like HCI, if you look hard enough you can always pull some insight or lesson from any topic. Continue reading »
After watching Bill Buxton’s talk about Microsoft starting to understand design better, I proceeded to view the comments, knowing full well what I would endure. It was pretty much the standard fare for any talk about technology when Microsoft’s name gets brought up: people missing the point and then valiantly defending their OS of choice while vehemently bashing any others. I have seen it a million times before, and this time it sparked the following thoughts. Continue reading »
Apr 152009
I love my Mac. However it seems that because some products are loved so much, we don’t offer up the critique that they need in order to be even better. Contrary to popular belief, Macs are not perfect. The purpose of this post is to illuminate some often glossed-over issues with Apple based on my use of a MacBook and MacBook Pro. I am not going to discuss this by comparing Macs to PCs. Not everyone who has a problem with a Mac will be satisfied by switching to PC or vice-versa. Continue reading »
After reading this paper, Interaction Criticism: A Proposal and Framework for a New Discipline of HCI by Jeff and Shaowen Bardzell, I came away with several insights to add to my personal design philosophy.
In the paper the authors claim that the HCI design process is missing an integral final step, the step of interaction criticism. There are many other art and design oriented fields, such as film and literature, which already have a culture of expert critics. Continue reading »
Feb 212009
Brainstorming is an integral part of the design process, but sometimes it can be difficult to come up with decent or diverse design concepts. During my first semester of study in the Human-Computer Interaction Design Master’s program at Indiana University, I learned several brainstorming tips to add to my bag of tricks. Wolf these down and see how they treat you: Continue reading »
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.
