Thoughts on Interaction Design Chapters 3, 4 & 5

  1. Ethnographic tools assist in helping us designers understand how our consumers use our products. By using these tools, we gain information on the steps our consumers take, what is analyzed by them, and if our intended goal is occuring. From this information, for an online banking website, we can learn how to streamline the process and make it easy to understand. We can see if some steps are not needed and can be removed, or if some steps are made unclear and would be frustrating to consumers. With the importance of banking, it is essential that the website is clear and easy to interact with, and ethnographic tools can assist us with that.
  2. A design is not finished after the product is made, but after it has been tested and the intended results occur. As designers, we can try our best to make a design we think consumers may find easy to use, but we are biased from experience and may percieve a process to be simple when a consumer would actually find it very difficult. A design is only finished when our intended result works as intended, when the consumer can use our design as we hope they would. Our design is successful, then, when we can make one that the consumer can truly understand properly.
  3. A product family I use regularly would be the Pepsi product family. I tend to consume its products a lot, especially Pepsi and Mt. Dew. I see its products everywhere, and in my past I have seen marketing for it a lot. Whenever I think I need energy in the middle of my university day, I immediately just think of Mt. Dew since I tend to rely on its caffeine so much. Overall, its branding has developed a bit of a dependency on it for me, and I choose it very often over other products, even coffee.