Author: accst724

I found a lot of chapter 6 to be an interesting read. Around page 86, the author writes about how the designer’s personal design philosophy begins to compete against the traditions and norms of usability and even challenges the tendency towards common sense. Designers make conscious decisions to go against the norms. As a graphic designer, I can compare this to working on a grid with a flow line and deciding to break the grid for part of the layout. This does one of two things: it can either make your layout, or product in the case of interaction design, stand out or it goes horribly and viewers don’t like it. Designers can spend years learning about the importance of things like color, balance, and so on but these poetics of art can clash with the fundamental need for usability.

The author mentions that people often construct their place in the world through the products they buy, and if your product can’t even be used properly due to the importance placed on artistic qualities rather than usability, then what was the purpose?

The part in this chapter that I liked the most and admittedly made me excited was on page 87. The page starts with a quote that reads “Design serves as a cultural backdrop for our world. A designer makes subtle decisions that individually seem insignificant, yet each decision is amplified in scope as they are released into society en masse.” There are so many times that I sit around people studying nursing, biology, and engineering and feel like I’m selfish for choosing a career that doesn’t exactly help people the way nursing would. I feel like graphic design just doesn’t have the same impact on people’s lives. And this just isn’t true. Depending on what I do with my career, I do have the chance to make some change. My individual projects may seem insignificant, but over time I’m helping shape a culture. And people are so happy about their culture, it’s something that they hold dear and take everywhere with them. So I’m so happy that this book went over something that I’m sure bothers other designers as well. It shows just how important design is.

What information can ethnographic tools give you to improve the interactivity of an online banking website?

Ethnographic tools provide information like the frequency of use, communication, and usability. This can be helpful for a designer of a banking website by giving the designer information about the most used information on a website, such as transaction history, and making it more readily available for the users. Banking websites tend to be confusing, so these tools would help a lot in minimizing the confusion and giving users a good experience on the website.

 

At what point is a design finished? What makes it a success? What is its purpose?

One of the most alarming things I learned freshman year is that a design is never truly done. A design can always be improved upon, there’s no such thing as perfection in the design world. It’s purpose is to be desirable (beautiful, elegant, and appropriate,)  and user centered. A design can be considered successful when it properly serves its purpose and enhances the user experience, meaning it should improve all aspects of human life.

 

Identify a product family you use regularly (can be anything from technology to consumables except for coffee). How has its branding affected your use, relationship and experience with the product?

I really like Canada Dry Ginger Ale. To almost an excessive, obsessive amount because it’s pretty much all I drink. Strangely enough, I initially started drinking it because my mom said ginger ale is good to drink when you’re sick and (although it may have been placebo) I always felt much better after drinking it. Then I just grew to enjoy the taste and I liked it a lot. Once I got big into design I started to pay careful attention to the packaging, which I find the graphics are pretty and very much my style – a lot of greens, bubbles being used for movement, and vines. Their website is nice as well, though I’m not sure how many people think to visit a website for a soft drink, I sure haven’t until now. I occasionally see a commercial and those are usually funny and capture people’s attention. I feel as though their branding is good, although it hasn’t really affected my use or relationship with the product because I’ve been obsessed with it since I was a little kid and will continue to be obsessed regardless of their branding decisions. One thing that is interesting is that my reason for drinking it, being sick, is never mentioned in any of their advertisements. I don’t know if that would help them, but it’s something!

What makes up interaction design and what are some of the industry’s challenges?

Interaction Designers are doing more than using technology to solve a problem. They are an expect on how human beings relate to each other, to the world, and to the changing nature of technology and business. Their creations should become vehicles to provide a dialogue between the designer and the viewer. This design is a dialogue. And getting to the point where a designer can honestly form a dialogue with a user is hard. There are six steps: Define, discover, synthesize, construct, refine, and reflect. These steps allow the designers to properly hypothesize scenarios and interactions that will exist with their product as well as evaluate what aspects of the design either need to be implemented or removed. This is important as hypothesizing scenarios allows the designers to contemplate their users. Empathizing with their users is important as interaction design is about humanity. The products should be focused on the human users, not the technology used to create the product.

Some unique challenges arise due to the human focus of the field. The industry is currently focused on technology, as it’s rapidly growing and there’s so much to know and do in order to become successful. So when hiring designers, they make job postings about HTML, Java, the Adobe Suite, and so on instead of what really matters: the ability to empathize with the user. And empathizing with a user isn’t as easy at it sounds either, it’s truly a tough task. A designer can only go so far before they need to do testing with their prototypes with real users. Designers will always believe that their designs are good because they know everything about them and have spend hours navigating the ins and outs of their work. Real users are never that involved in a product. The product should be able to effectively communicate with the user without distracting or humiliating them. A good design does not make a user feel stupid. A good design should be a perfect interaction between user and product, like an old, married couple that don’t even need to speak to understand each other. And the industry just doesn’t understand that. They hear interaction design and assume they have a computer scientist and graphic designer all in one, which leads them to focus on the technology and less about the people.

What is interaction design, how its evolving. What fields does it draw knowledge from?

“Interaction design is a creative process focused on people” (page 20.) It is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product. The dialogue doesn’t need to be lengthy and involved, as we interact with a number of things naturally without even realizing it. The way we sit in chairs, how we hold our silverware, if we use just one strap or both when we sling our backpacks on our backs… these are all interactions. We may not do what was intended by the designers, which is why design is seen in the fourth dimension, which includes time. Over time we will act differently with our products or we may not even interact with them at all. Landfills are just filling up with iPhones and dead technology because there’s nothing about it to keep it around. It’s not intended to last. And this is why interaction designers are working on better ways to communicate with their audience to create products that will meet user needs and become devices that no longer trouble or inhibit the user from completing their tasks.

Interaction design draws knowledge from several fields. Computer Science, Psychology, Engineering, and Graphic Design are the main fields. Designers must be able to interact with the user on any platform, with a physical product or through the use of technology. They need to be able to understand and empathize with the behavior of their users, to the point where they understand their users better than they understand themselves. And finally, they need to be able to engineer and construct products that match the vision they have created and ensure that the product properly converses with the user in an effective and clear manner.

• The goal of Apple’s website is to be a hub for all things related to their products. It’s a great resource for a potential customer that wants to gather information on products, a current customer interested in the latest information on their products, and also offers support to current customers having an issue with an Apple product. A customer who has just purchased their first MacBook will have all of their needs met on this website. The navigational bar is very clear and at the top of the page. This customer would find the most use out of the Support page, as the Mac page is aimed at potential customers interested in learning more about the product. From their, the customer can enter in any questions they have about their new MacBook. If they need more help than the support page and support communities can provide, the website also has the option to chat with a representative either online or on the phone. Overall, the website is very helpful to any type of customer!
• Functional specifications are typically typed up in one big document that details what the programmers want to be included on their site. Facebook, for example, has a search bar to look up friends/pages/events, drop down bars showing your notifications/friend requests/private messages, a home button, a left navigational bar with shortcuts to your popular pages, a place for you to update your status, the wall itself which shows your friend’s and liked page’s posts, a sidebar for easy access to messaging, and details on a page if you have one. The programmers wanted to make sure that you had easy access to everything you wanted to do while on Facebook. This allows people to quickly find what they want, making the experience more enjoyable and making the user have a more positive outlook toward the site.
• The four architectural approaches to information structure are hierarchical, matrix, organic, and sequential. The easiest example of a hierarchical structure is software. Software uses a parent/child relationship that is found in the hierarchical structure. The matrix structure can be found in websites like Amazon or some clothing store like H&M that allows you to browse by color, size, or price. Organic structures, which don’t follow any consistent patterns, are good for some educational and entertainment sites which allow users to have a free-form exploration but make it difficult for them to reliably find their way back. Lastly, sequential structures are the most popular offline. This structure is similar to how we view books, articles, and audio and can be found in online articles, or anything on a smaller scale.
• The majority of the Huffington Post, Etsy, Google, and Wikipedia pages are navigation. News sites like the Huffington Post are relying on you clicking on their articles, that’s how they make their money and that’s the point of their business, to provide information. So they list a bunch of links to all of their articles, hoping one will catch your eye and you’ll click on it. Marketplaces like Etsy are heavy in navigation because they want you to click on a product and purchase it. Informational and search engine sites also have a lot of navigation because they want all of the information you want to be just a click away so you’ll like them and keep coming back.
• Landor has a beautifully executed, rectangular, and asymmetrical design. The limited color use allows the user to focus on what’s important, and the color also guides your eyes to where the designers want to lead you. Having their navigation tucked behind a hamburger menu also keeps the viewer’s eyes on the information they want them to know and they can decide later what they’d like to do with it. The clean cut, rectangular design makes the site clear in its intentions and doesn’t distract from the message.