discussion about fieldwork

What I am thinking is maybe we forget something in the process of desgin- fieldwork.

Before we begin a design project, maybe it is helpful to looked around and find out what is going on in our world. Maybe some very good design is in use or already provided to public as a design prototype. After known the related existing designs, we can find out their advantage and disadvantage, at the same time, we can save a lot of time to design an existing thing.

For project2, e-learning quiz system, maybe it is not a bad thing if our design is similar with some existing system in someway. Users can very easy to use it, because users feel familiar with it. And users can concentrate on the content of the quiz, but not the software surface. But for the mickey mouse project, if our design is very similar with something already existed, users maybe feel that our design lacks imagination or maybe cannot fascinate users. This difference becomes from the different design goals and different design using environments. E-quiz system is used in a very serious way, and it should be transparent as a tool. Mickey Mouse project should not be very transparent, because users should get a lot of fun from it. I believe that if we went to disney together, and observed there for one or two days, we could have more fun and diverse design.

wodom said:
I agree that fieldwork is a very important part of the design process, particularly in regards to understanding your target user group and the environment they interact within. In the disciplines of Folklore and Anthropology—where the main goal is to truly understand the soul and cultural construction of the observed group—fieldwork (or ethnography) is the principle data collection methodology.

Understanding the other designs and research already publicly available in the field is essential to the design process as well. Design doesn’t always have to be creation of something completely new. In fact, often it is improving something by linking components that already exist is a new and imaginative way. I don’t necessarily think that if something is more transparent, it is less fun, actually I believe very much the opposite. In essence, transparency refers to how well users can interact with the core idea of the design, opposed to getting bogged down with technical/usability problems. From my point of view, transparent design generates fluid transition and user imaginativeness, while oblique design actualizes a wasteland of cognitive dissonance.

tympace said:
Fieldwork, without a doubt, is the preferred means for understanding the motivations and processes of a user group. However, designers are often not given the opportunity to pursue rigorous user experience research. How do we draw the line between what should be done and what will be done as fieldwork?

I'm curious as to how oblique design creates a sense of conflicting cognitions among users. Any examples?

me:
I think maybe I misunderstood about what is transparency. I think transparency means users even forget what kind of systems or tools they are using, but concentrate on the content or enjoy the functions the systems provided. For example, when we use a web browser, we can just notice the content of the website, but not it IE(Explorer) or Mozilla Firefox. But if for fun, users should notice that what the design is, and the imaginativeness get noticed very easily.

vdiaz said:
changm,

I think your example of transparency is right on track. To use your example and go a little further with it, if you were browsing the web and using a browser other than the one you are used to and not aware of this change it is absolutely transparency.

When I think of transparency i think of a system that i can work with having never needed any sort of training or learning time. It may be the case that a truly transparent system would be discussed in terms of affordances rather than transparency.

Does anyone have a simpler example of transparency?

--Vince--

wodom said:
Right, so what I was getting at with 'oblique' design is exactly the example Mingxian brought up with using a web browser to see website content without having to concentrate on browser itself. Marty made a good analogy using Microsoft Word to explain transparency. Transparency should allow the user to engage in fluid thought an expression. When you are composing a document in Word and you have to stop to figure out how to insert a table or correct formatting, you lose cognitive fluidity and the experience is adversely affected.

Transparency and computer imaginativeness appear to be joined at the hip. From my own experience, the contrast between oblique and transparent design in no more apparent than in my production of music. For years I battled with computer-based music production programs, but I could never achieve the sound I envisioned in my head. I spent endless amounts of time tweaking digital knobs and sliders, ultimately never being satisfied. Too many options were offered and embedded within so many windows that it was difficult to keep track of them. I couldn’t interact with these imaginative components because the design was so oblique.



Eventually I transitioned to using a hardware sampler. The screen display was much less complex and I immediately began producing the sound I had been looking for without opening the manual once. Although the interface was foreign to me, I could intuitively figure out any problems simply by touching and manipulating it. My focus was taken off navigating a cumbersome visual interface and centered on the sound itself.



Transparency = Creativity = Sustained Interaction

me:
Thanks alot, it makes sense for me.
Transparency is realated with easy to use directly, and if a design is transparency, it is creative and accepted by users.

If I want users notice my design product very easily, it is not called 'oblique'. It should still be transparency, and at the mean time attract users by its aesthetic or other kinds of features.

tympace:
Perhaps it is the juxtaposition of transparency and obliqueness that confused me. At first I thought you meant "opaque" as the simple antonym of transparent, but with your example I think you're addressing the alternative meaning of oblique by commenting on design that deviates from an accepted, (maybe even transparent) path.

Changm:
I think there is something between transparent and opaque. Just like what we discussed at Youn's class today, you can not just give two or three answer choices for a question in a survey like this: How do you feel this system?
excellent, just OK(maybe there is even no this choice), devil.
The right way to let users to chose is provide five choices, such as Excellent, good, not good and not bad, bad, very bad.

Maybe there is no totally opaque design, (maybe yes, who knows? But if yes, Why they design such things?) we said opaque here is just for the designs which is not very transparent in order to compare. I think.
balchenn:
Our group would completely agree that fieldwork is an essential part of the design process. For the disney project, we set out to design a system that helps visitors customize their trip and a navigation system that integrates with that customization. We were almost ready to chalk out an entire design, when we realized, by a chance comment from our mentor to see if we were solving a problem that existed, that almost everything we had envisioned was present on Disney's website.

We would have saved time if we had done earlier research. But, I am not sure if not going through the process of rejection, would have led us to our idea about the magic mirrors. The way we got to that idea, definitely had to do with brainstorming and deliberation, but we can't rule out the fact that certain unplanned events helped us get to our idea. That makes me wonder if there can really be a process to get to the good design. My understanding is that the process would include elements of the events that we couldn't include but happened by chance, thus making a good design.

me:
If a system is transparency, I would like to say that it is creative, and maybe eariser to be accepted by users.

sramalin:
Field work is definately a factor that could possibly give us a better design in the end, but how long can this be done? In the real world, I am not sure if enough time is given for a project to conduct effective fieldwork. This is atleast true for a few companies, unless people are specifically employed to do this work not as part of a specific current project. I do think that fieldwork could do a whole lot of good for the end product, but isn't it true that companies (especially software) are always working towards a deadline? When this happens, it kind of boils down to the importance that the management places on fieldwork and other research.

rfrieser:
I think field work does happen in the outside world. Just maybe not quite as often in a very formalized or ethnographic research context, although some of the big boys have been said to keep their own in house ethnographers on hand.... - Field work, if I am interpreting this term correctly from the initial post, is abstracted to market research fused with technology strategy (which must always take a holistic approach to the industry sector and beyond - at least this is how I have approached my past consultancy work in this area), and product revisions based on customer and competition response.

The idea of operating in a conceptual vacuum of writing code or creating artifacts - "and they will come" is a luxury that went out of the window when the last dot com bubble burst [see Mike Kuniavsky 2003, Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research, Chapter 1]. This does not mean that some companies will still try and do this. But I feel that, as with many things out there in the wild, there is the academic ideal and then there is the pragmatic real world implementation. What matters is that the concepts and goals are understood and applied.

I think we have seen this even in our own work here, quoting one of my fellow student's during one of Youn's lectures "We are being taught all the good methods and then forced to pick up all the bad habits implementing them" - while they may be bad habits, it is still better than not having any concept of the methods at all. So we should integrate field work into our projects in whatever guise, otherwise we will end up with nothing but technocratic solutions that prone to disregarding human needs, and failing in the real world.

Cheers,
Ralf

PS: Another staggering example of this could also be the methodically sound but sociologically flawed social housing project of post war britain that are now famed for their distinct dehumanizing qualities [See Brian Lawson 2006, How Designers Think, 4th Edition, Chapter 13, Fig13.10, "Streets In the Air"]; A lot of which the author blames on the isolation of the designers from the real world and the concepts this world operates by.