Target Audience

I believe that the target audience is an important part of a design and it should be known at the first phase of the design process. The target audience directly connects with the content, and their way to use, understand... And also, the target audience and the content decide the way, the methods we design and implement. Outcome is decided by goals.

Process to construct a website

The following material is copied from http://movielibrary.lynda.com/ on-line training material

Content and target group

What is the content?

Who is the target audience?

Layout and design

Flowchart

Storyboard

Static mockups

Design

Development and implementation

Lay out the navigation

Design and implement the main and tertiary content

Create navigation interactivity

Deployment/Upload Testing

Attitude

It's all about Attitude. Attitude is the most important thing in our whole life, both personal and perfessional lives.

answer to classmate's question:how important is emotion in HCI

This is the same kind of question about when aesthetics is important in a design. I believe that this kind of questions always depend on the design. In Maya Lin’s memorial design, memorial is a kind of media to express human’s emotion. Emotion is a big part of music design too. But it would be very hard to design the emotion part in a serial of diving actions for Olympic competition.

When we talk about “Human-Centered Design”, I believe that it includes all the designs in our whole world. This is the human being’s society. Everything we designed, are designing and will design is for human use. Although sometimes we see something as a bad design, but we cannot deny that the bad design sometimes is welcome by some people. One difference between good design and bad design is that good design is in favor of larger group of people than bad design. In different design field, Architecture, music, dance, there are different factors involved. Human Centered design is not in the same taxonomy with them. I remember a word, but I forgot who said it:” if you want to design for all the people, you are designing for nobody.” Then why do we try to discuss all designs together if they are doomed to be different?

I believe that our goal to learn different designs belong to different subjects is not learn the designs in a fast way, but find out all the possible factors which maybe matter in our design. It doesn’t matter about what our design is, website, artifact, or others. We know we should think about functionality, aesthetics, emotions, complexity, laws, time limitation, budget… In our further works, we know where we should begin with after we get a design problem, what kinds of method or process we can chose.

What is design? What a designer could do?

Who could be a designer? And what kind of activity could be called as a design?
Someone said, "everything is design, everything!" Some one said:” everybody is a designer.” I agree these words sometimes, maybe in everyday life or other discussions. But here, I’d like to say that “everything could be designed, and everyone could be a designer.” What’s the difference between them? I am trying to find my answer from three aspects: goal, process and skill.

Scene 1: One day, you accidentally entered an empty house. There was nothing in the house except one thing, and you never knew what the thing it was. You could do nothing to go out of the house without other people’s help. You picked up the thing, and tried to know what it is by knocking on different parts of it. You knocked on it continuously in order to let people get your signals asking for help. GOD! The sound you made was too melodic to be heard. Definitely you created a piece of great music at last even though you know nothing about the thing, the musical instrument. Yes, you created a piece of music, but you did NOT design it. There is no design goal about the music, and the outcome is not expected.

My opinion 1: A designer has clear goals for design works, functional, aesthetic, emotional…

A design has clear goals too, such as why the design is needed, and what problem a design work should solve.

Scene 2: Deliverymen delivered tons of furniture and decorations to the empty house. They have no professional knowledge about interior decoration, but they decorate their own houses very well. They fit all of articles in the house according some rules, such as the refrigerator was put in the kitchen, and the different furniture in same color and style were put in same room. The whole house looks great now. However, they did NOTHING about interior design, no matter the layout of the rooms was good or not, the color in one room was matched or not, and what special impression people could get from the style. You, as an interior designer, suggest that put all the things outside of the house, ask the owner what kind style s/he wanted the home has, investigate the structure of the house, provide a proposal about your design, test on if the proposal can get the result you want to create, make some change on the proposal, get to know if the proposal satisfy the owner or not, repeat some of the above steps, at last, get the house decorated. Well done? No, it is not enough. Beside of the color, layout, impression, there is much more need to think, such as convenience, comfortable.

My opinion 2: A designer has the ability to control the direction and make progress of a design.

A design should have its process to get matured.

My opinion 3: A designer has his/her responsibilities to a design, and all factors involved in should be considered by not other people, but designers. This is the difference between professional designers and people who just give a piece of opinion.

A design is about not only the things created, but also the influence on the context.

Scene 3: A new disabled family member is coming to the big house. New needs were asked, new conditions were generated…

My opinion 4: A designer has the skills to make some change to a design according the variation of the environment outside and conditions inside.

A design should keep change according the context.

Dance and Music design with HCID

Music design and Dance design are user-centered design? I think so, but the role of "user" should be think over.

All of composer, performer and audience could be user.

Performer as a user, the human-computer interaction is performer- action, music, instruments and stage interaction.

Audience as a user, the interaction is between audience and performance.

So music and dance design have two different target groups, and two different interactions.

As a designer in music and dance design, the main theme is how to express emotions,
happy, blue, impressive...

They are different from some other designs because some other designs should able to help users to complete some task as necessary tools.

Question about design

I got some questions in my mind someday last week. I am asking myself day and night, but I cannot get any answer for some of them. Can you discuss it with me?

How much functional aspect should be involved in an interface design, and how much aesthetic?

What kind of relationships exist between simple, beautiful, easy to use, easy to learn, user friendly, user-centered, efficient, effective...?

I believe that if I can do something efficiently, that means effective, right? What is the difference between efficient and effective when we talk about a design?

Usability is very important for a design, but how much more a design should include except usability?

How a design process different with a science research process?

notes for the lecture:"Usability and Risk Reduction"

Usability and Risk Reduction, by Tim Altom 11/14/2006

Eight factors to affect Risk
Internal users vs. External users
Homogeneity of user population
Requiring site usage (if the usage is required, make some guessing is more reasonable)
Internal changes to procedures
Transaction or Information
Strategic Importance
COmpetitive Advantage
Visibility

simple notes for the lecture

Introduction to Usability, lecture by Richard Bellaver

What is Usability:

Technologies for learning about and from users
A user-centered design process
A philosophy for approaching design
A result,

How many different things are they talking about?

Actionable, efficiency, memorability, errors, satisfactiory.

Dimensions of usability-- 5E: Effective, Efficient, Engaging, Error tolerant, Easy to use. How to balance these 5Es?

How to take full advantage of user research, design approach and test technology?

"The user is always right!"

Some name he mentioned: Jacob Nielsen, Dick Miller, Ginny Redish, Whiteney

Remote Control II

11/14/2006 I went to Indianapolis to participate in the Usability Day activity. People sit on a same table automatically became a team, and every team designed a remote control.

Our remote control has two sides. A-side is called simple side, hard button side, which contains only simple buttons, such as power, channel plus and minus, volume plus and minus, and the ten number buttons. This simple side is designed for people who confuse by lots of buttons, and fear to use a complex system. They are old people, children, and maybe some others who fear to make mistakes or don’t understand technologies. B-side is complex and soft ware side. It is a touch screen. Users can choose what hardware they want to remote control, such as TV, DVD, VCR, sound box. According the hardware user chose, different control menu show up on the touch screen. It should be universal (control multi-hardware, recognize the hardware’s brand and model, and fit for people who use different language—universal signs), free (easy to get it). I also suggested that make our remote control smart. If it gets pressure or maybe is covered by some other things, that means it is not easy to be found by users, so it should give some “help” or “I am here” sound signal to people.

Maybe the control menu can personalize in some way. For example, if the user watches only several channels on TV, the menu doesn’t need to show all the channels anymore.

Multiple Used Remote Control

Remote controls, for TV, DVD, VCR, DVR, sound box system, family theater, air conditioner, light, computer, telephone, door, car, and so on, are in everywhere and every family. And the state of art household electronic equipment has less and less control buttons and relies on remote control more and more. Remote control as a tool makes our everyday life easier and more comfortable, but at the mean time, it could be an exhausted work to find a specific remote control in a big house. My question is how many remote controls do we need to keep and manage in our everyday life? Do these remote controls really help us to make our life easier or make us their slaves? And according to my question, my intervention should be that we should be able to use one remote control to control all the electronic machines in our house, and I would like to call it a multiple used remote control.

I observed my family members’ behavior in my home. And get some conclusions here:

1. The main function keys, such as power, stop, pause, fast play, skip, up- arrow and down-arrow buttons, are on almost every remote control handhold. Some of keys changes a little in function when they control different terminals. For example, the key button with the picture of “>>” is a fast play button on a TV remote control, but is fast temperature up-change button (the temperature of a thermometer would go up 2 degree when users click the button one time) when it is on an air conditioner remote control.
2. Remote control is very easy to use or at least easy to learn how to use. Even my eighty-year old grandmother and five-year old nephew who never go to school are able to use remote controls to watch TV, play music and adjust the inside temperature.
3. It is often happened that people cannot find where a remote control is when they want to use it immediately. Sometimes even it is at somewhere that seems can easily be found by people, it still cannot quickly find by that person who want it. And also people can find several other different remote controls but not the one they want to find or use.
4. Sometimes people accidentally or intendedly use wrong remote control to try to do something, and hope that the wrong one can work.
5. Sometimes people give up to find a remote control if they still have no idea about where it is after looking for several minutes.
6. People get a bad mood if they cannot do something only because that they failed to find a remote control.

Based on above observations, it is very easy to manage if we can only use one remote control to control all kinds of household electronic machines. And if we can do this, maybe we can keep two or three same remote controls in our house to be standby, and do not have to spend lots of our time on looking for a remote control anymore.

Sudoku Puzzle game

Sudoku Puzzle game is very popular currently. People can play it On-Line, or using small digital game boxes or on paper forms. Obviously, the most convenient way is that draw a 9*9 table on a piece of paper, and write down several fixed numbers in the table, then fill other blanks. But when I fill it, I need to erase the wrong numbers. It turns into a mass after several wrong guess. So I designed a new way to play Sudoku Puzzle game by using a plastic board just like checker board, and the individual numbers would be the chessmen. How to mark the right numbers and the guess numbers which you are not very sure? The answer would be using different color: one side of the number chessman is green, the other side is yellow, and everyone knows that green light in traffic means OK - safe. Play Sudoku game by this way, people neither need computer and Internet nor pencil and eraser. Checker board and chessmen would never out of power like batteries, and it is cheap!

Thoughtless Action (2)

Wear watch on her small satchel

Thoughtless Actions

Recommend a book to others

Have you ever recommend a book to other people? I did it in last week.

The first person I recommended is a very nice professor, after I recommend my book to her, she picked up the book and take a quickly look, then she said:” yes, it is a good book, I should buy one.” Second, I recommend the book to more than five classmates. I told them it is a very good book, some of them looked at the book, and go without ask what the book is. Some of them asked what the book’s name is, but they didn’t write down the name. I recommend it to another nice professor. The following is the dialogue from us:

I: I read a very good book, and want to share it with you.
He: There are lots of books, …
I: It’s good because at the first part, the book talks about….
He: Send the book’s name to me….

???????????????????????????????????????????????????

NONE of these people would read it anyway. It is really a good book, but I would never tell other people its name again.

As A Graduate student

Why graduate students need to have required class which they must take some time?

How could the classes we take be user-centered (student-centered)?

What is the meaning of "Professor"? Why do people invent the term professor? And what are the main tasks for a professor? Professor as a vocation mixes the meaning of teacher and researcher. We need teacher for class, instructor for project, researcher for research but not for student, manager for the education institutes not for teaching and learning.

These questions fit in the education field all over the world.

A fantasy idea about car’s turning lights

When a car’s turning lights are turned on, they are always flashing. And you can hear the clicking sounds inside the car. The frequency of the flashing and the sound are consistent. Last year, I lost the right front turning light after a car accident. During the time between the accident and the light got repaired, I found the frequency of the flashing and the sound doubled, and the very fast clicking sound made me very uncomfortable. I felt that my heart was beating faster too. After that, sometimes I found that I feel uncomfortable even when I see other cars’ doubled flashing lights. Why do the cars need to double the frequency of the light flashing and the inside clicking sound? What if this frequency is equal to or a little slower than normal people’s heart beating frequency? It would be very nice, isn’t it?

Notes for reading "Design Wise"

Alison J. Head's book--Design Wise, uses lots of interviews with professional people, get lots of insight about HCI interface design. It is a good book for a beginner, easy to read.

The first thing I want to remember is the "Considerable Factors in the HCI Approach to Interface Design"
1. Organizational factors: Training, job design, politics, roles, work organization
2.Environmental factors: Noise, heating, lighting, ventilation
3.Heath and safety factors: stress, headaches, musculoskeletal disorders
4.Cognitive aspects of the user: Motivation, enjoyment, satisfaction, personality, experience level
5.Confort factors: Setting, equipment layout
6.User interface: Input devices, output displays, dialogue structure, use of color, icons, commands, graphics, natural language, 3-D, user support materials, multimedia
7. Task factors: easy, complex, novel, task allocation, repetitive, monitoring, skills, components
8.Constraints: Costs, timescales, budgets, staff, equipment, building structure
9.system functionality hardware, software, application
10. Productivity factors: increase output, increase quality, decrease costs, decrease errors, decrease labor requirement, decrease production time, increase creative and innovative ideas leading to new products.

There are also other things such as IBM's four principles of the usability design process, Design Template

How can we keep up to date as a designer?

I feel a little miserable today because one of my team members said:"While many of your ideas are good, occasionally your ideas are not quite related to the problem at hand." And he recommends me to:"When brainstorming, it might be helpful to ask yourself after each of your ideas "how does this relate to the *** problem?", or in other words, how does this relate to the big picture. If you cannot think of how your idea is related to our project, then just move on to the next idea." This is a very good advice. However, I feel more miserable after I read this because, my team member totally lost when he heard my "news and new ideas" which I really believe that they are tightly related with the project.

This different perspective from me and my team member comes from the different goals in our mind. What is kept in my team member's mind is our current project--current solutions exactly. What in my mind is current project, and how can we broaden our knowledge scope from the current project--up to date news which related with current project (maybe not very tightly), and how can we enhance our current solutions-- are their good enough or can we further improve them?

We are in an information society. How can we keep up to date in the exploding information? -- We are human, and we can individually process information then share it, then we as a group keep up to date. I can say that a project at hand, no matter how big or how good it is, is not the most important thing for us. The most important thing is learning, improve us rather a project.
Obviously I expect to get much more than my team member does. I want to grow up with my every project rather than only do it. Our project is ahead of our time if only we are ahead of our time.

The fifteen ruls of Dream Team.

Copied from the book:"Creative Advertising, Ideas and techniques from the world’s best campaigns”, Thames&Hudson.

1. DreamTeam, A basis for every meeting
2. Your Brief creates space for a motivated team

Two kinds of information in the most briefs: the kind that restricts the team’s creative search-field, and the kind that enlarge the search-field for potential ideas and stimulates the imagination.

3. Switch on all five senses:

Great ideas come from direct, playful engagement with the product. The sulotion to the task is already there in the product. Your five senses are the tools you use to shape the idea.

4. Go into meetings with a clear goal

If you define the target group as everybody, you will end up addressing nobody. Emphasizing everything is emphasizing nothing. Working out a goal with a central statement, or single-minded proposition.

5. Always separate the ideas phase from the evaluation phase.

Make room for creative added value.

6. Avoid idea killers.

7. Use doodles to visualize your ideas.

8. Grab ideas and fun with them.

9. Look for the positive in other people’s ideas.

10. Make mistakes and have fun doing it.

11. Stick with it, the best ideas are yet to come.

12. Develop your sense of humour.

13. Wait before evaluating ideas

When you leave a successful meeting with a few good ideas and a feeling of euphoria, wait a while before assessing the ideas. Step back a little and don’t fall too much in love with the first….

14. Select ideas creatively

Develop new ideas from old…

15. Turing ideas into action

Dream Team

About the point of group process, I read a very good book:” Creative Advertising, Ideas and techniques from the world’s best campaigns”. This book is not about specific design or advertisement. It is about brilliant ideas and how to improve creative thinking. The Part I of this book introduce us a new term—DreamTeam, it is a list of fifteen rules of creative teamwork.

These DreamTeam rules:

Produce a bigger catch of valuable ideas; Give the team a creative boost; Build structured freedom and prevent sessions of destructive chaos; Foster faith in the team and enhance motivation; Allow a brilliant “group brain” to develop; Promote all sorts of fun and increase individual creative potential; Save time, money and nervous energy in the hunt for ideas. The above benefit of Dream Team is copy from the book:"Creative Advertising, Ideas and techniques from the world’s best campaigns”, Thames&Hudson.

all designs are compromise

dproyer wrote:

In my opinion all designs have faults and failures in them, so it is better to figure them out during the design process and try to fix or minimize them, as opposed to finding out about these problems from the client or user.

Like the book "How designers think" said, all designs are compromise. At this point, who is the target group and what is your goal are very important aspect of a design. Do you want 100% of your target group people 70% satisfied or want 70% your target group 100% satisfied? In the book, the author said maybe you can only make 10% people of your target group 100% satisfied, but it is still a good design. Sometimes even we know the problem or the faults of a design, but we still cannot fix it (technical or methodical aspect) or sometimes the correction of one problem maybe brings other problems, and some of the problems are not under control, something like users' mis-manipulation. Under these kind of condition, what we should do is to eatimate the degree of risk or damage of these problems, and the cost to compensate and avoid the effect of these problems, maybe also should account the marketing aspects, and reach to the best we can.

success

Sometimes we spend lots of time, money and our energy on something and hope we can get very good result, but the process and result tell us that the method we used or the way we chose are impossible to reach our goal. One of my teacher told me that it is a good result that if you can prove that one mothod is not proper to do certain thing.

Here is an very interesting paper about success makes people happy, and happy people get more success: http://www.apa.org/releases/success1205.html

Some quotes about failure and success

Faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction--faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.

Hell, there are no rules here-- we're trying to accomplish something.

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration

Do we really need to find failure from success?

There is an old Chinese saying: Failure is the mother of success. It means what we learn from failure(S) makes us success.

However, it depends on how we evaluate the certain failure and the degree of the failure. Sometimes, even we learn a lot from a failure, maybe suddenly we know everything and more than what we can learn in ten years, but we never get a chance to correct the big mistake or turn the tables. And sometimes, a big mistake or a wrong decision can change a person's whole life-- the philosophy of the world or of human life, and even affect the whole family lives and next generations'. This is big failure. Or maybe it's not a failure, but a decision. Both a good decision and a bad decision can have the same big effects.

I know that what I think is not what Kurzweil is talking about. He advocates that find out disadvantage as well as the remedy of the failure and avoid be wrong at next time. When people get success, maybe they more tend to enjoy the success feeling than summary their experience. Why don’t we use a more optimistic attitude—look for success in failures instead of look for the failure in success? I believe that we can learn from both failure and success. How much we can learn depends on people’s motivation: how much do you want to learn from something. The right way of learning should be never blind in front of both failure and success.

I would like to use another sentence instead: Everyday is a new ladder, follow in the proper sequence and learn something in everyday, and you will go to the success.

Compare two humidifiers

From their functional aspect, the first one is noisier than the second one. The second one is quiet and you can see the cold vapor out of it. As a humidifier for a bed room, be quiet is the most important feature. From the looking aspect, the second one looks like a big vase or a piece of orchid flower petal, and this is why I bought this one. So before I went to bed last night, I thought I got the humidifier I really need and like. But after I went to bed, I found that the blue light radiate from the blue lines made me can not fell asleep, although the humidifier looks very cool and more beautiful in dark.

From my experience, the good looking attracts more users, broaden its market maybe, but the fatal feature is its functionality. A user-centered design (a quiet humidifier) becomes not very user- centered because of aesthetic feature. As a designer, how to balance the two aspects: functionality and aesthetic issue?

Treat tiny ideas as our big "inventions"

Sometimes we meet certain situations, look something, a people, a game or whatever, and we say to ourselves:"If this thing could look like that, or work on the way in your mind, it would be better". And after this certain situations change, we just forget what the change we would like to make. How about write down these detailed or maybe tiny changes. Treat these kind tiny ideas as our big "inventions", and feel the happy feeling from them. Maybe days later or years later, we can make some improvement on them, and we get more when we think more. Maybe fantasy idea becomes to be true someday. A casual thought becomes a seed, and it grow up after we trun over it again and again in our mind, maybe it just dies someday, but that doesn't matter.

Ray Kurzweil's seven point program for creating intellectual property

1. Write the advertising brochure: who is this for and why you are doing it? Features, benefits, and beneficiaries?

2. Allow the beneficiaries to invent the product for you. Include the intended users in the design.

3. Understand dynamics of the group process. It’s an interdisciplinary process; understand each other’s terminology. Invent a new terminology from this mix.

4. Encourage thinking outside of the box by assigning problems to persons from opposite perspectives. (Example: linguists work on engineering problems; engineers work on linguistic problems)

5. You can learn more from failure than success. Turn your successes into failures (success has a way of covering up your failures): look for the failure in success.

6. Design for marketability. Identify the unique characteristics of your invention and why this is a well-leveraged fit for your target application. Rethinking the purpose of the invention.

7. Imagine if it existed and how it would work. Create a fantasy in your mind of how your invention will play out.