I recently went through a bunch of notes I found on my computer. All of them look to be the beginnings of blog posts, but I thought it would might be fun to throw them all together in one blog post and expand up on them later. (And then I can delete them from my computer!) Anyway here they go in no particular order: Continue reading »
Apr 212010
Apr 212010
This post will most likely feel like like a train coming off the rails. I will clean it up at some point. Maybe. Anyway…
Most designs are the result of a process of co-design, involving several stakeholders and people directly involved in the creation of something. In this process, there is a constant state of exchange between the people involved. Effective communication is important at all stages, but this isn’t easy to accomplish. There are many things to consider, including the different roles, perspectives, and communication skills of people, as well as how we even might measure what “effective” communication looks like. Continue reading »
I was going to write a post today about the ways in which design is being discussed, viewed, and used by individuals and organizations. My colleague, Matty Snyder, and I have spent a lot of time discussing this and alas, he beat me to it and wrote it better than I could have. Check it out.
Feb 052010
I just got done reading an article from Google’s Official GMail Blog, entitled Serving Better Ads in Gmail. Scott Crossan, the GMail Product Manager, stated that GMail will now provide advertisements based on past emails if the current email doesn’t provide a good enough match. They are doing this in the spirit of giving you “more of what you’re interested in and less of what you’re not.” 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.
