A Dictionary of Cool Words That Hide True Feelings & Meanings from Parents Many of the strange vocabulary words, that…
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Read more →Not much to add here — how many other cool video games are there for visually disabled? Using tactile clues instead of visual signals is a nice interaction design solution. Well done!
A person uses a piece of software, a Web site, or any other product — “virtual” or “real” — to achieve a goal. The design of interaction with these products can either help or form obstacles that interfere with the realization of that goal. A product is easier to use when its interaction is designed to meet the needs of its intended audience. Product designers who consider those needs produce far more effective interaction solutions than those who base their designs on aesthetics or business needs alone. But how does one go about “considering” user needs and then come up with a design solution that works? Oscar Wilde famously said: The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. Pure and Simple design is similarly rarely pure and never simple to develop. I my class, Cognitive tools for Product Designers, we explore what users bring to usability. We all arrive at the scene with different baggage — our experiences, education, perception, memory, and so on are unique to each of us. No two individuals interpret an experience in exactly the same way. While this sounds daunting, we shouldn’t give up on design all together. We all have some…
This is an interesting collection of videos and background materials on End-User Development — situations when end users design and develop software for their own use. If you’re old enough, you would remember BASIC and HyperCard — tools that let anyone develop simple games and applications. A great example is “Spelunking” game totally developed in HyperCard (these guys when on to develop “Myst”!). I’ve made a few games like this myself. And of course FileMaker is another system that allows application development by the end users — we have one for time tracking. There have been many many others, and unfortunately, many of them are now gone. The discussion on what happens when end users develop for themselves is fascinating. Most times, these users are experts in their own fields and are not software developers (some have no and some have little formal training). Thus there are cultural differences between “real” programmers and end users that take up programming to achieve their own goals, often because they can’t find what they need out in the world. These end-user designed products have strengths and they also have many weakness. In particular, these products are tightly focused on the needs of those…
In the Galaxy Far Far Away… What if sentient being evolved on a planet with permanent cloud cover? What if these being never saw stars? Would they still be able to discover the laws of nature? These kinds of hypothetical thinking questions — the Gedankan Experiments, as Einstein put it — are very useful in science. I’ll try to use them here for analyzing product design and communication. So what senses do we need to communicate? And what body appendages are necessary to produce this communication? Note that it helps keep track of these separately. Aroma-bet When I was little, I “designed” a language based on smell: each smell was assigned a character in an alphabet and, strung together in sequence, my smelly letters transcribed into words — the Aroma-bet. There were several problems with this: It was difficult to get an alphabet-worth of distinct odors; Arranged next to each other, the odors started to blend into each other, making “reading” difficult; I got a very bad headache; My mom didn’t like her expensive perfumes used in such a creative way… And I couldn’t remember what letter each smell stood for, requiring the creation of a smell-o-dictionary, which in turn…
Games can be used to change our behavior — make something fun, and we are likely to do it again and again. Psychologists call is positive reinforcement. Pleasure triggers our amygdalas — makes us make strong neural connections between the activity and positive emotion. Thrills are memorable and we seeks them out in our daily lives. Here are two examples of using fun to change people’s behavior, to make us do something we ordinarily don’t particularly want to: climb stairs and recycle. November 17th Update A fellow member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), David Watts, recommended the following:
Interfaces.com was given a free advanced preview of Thomas Erickson’s report and videos on social computing. The videos are very well produced and provide an interesting point of view and good insights on social media. Below are few of my notes based on the video content and ideas discussed on this blog in the past (my former students should find these familiar). Social Media Definitions & Ideas Social Computing: this is really about groups working together using ICT (Information Communication Technologies). I think this is a broader definition then the one offered by Thomas Erickson, as it includes all forms of ICT. Social Scaffolding: we all have a set of social scripts — culturally-specific, socially constructed norms of behavior — that help us navigate group interactions and allow for self-organization of crowds, at least shot-term and for a limited goal (like crossing the street). [Please watch Dr. Erickson’s example of street crossing in “Video 4.3: Social Computing video 3 – Face-to-face Interaction as Inspiration for Designing Social Computing Systems”.] Product design needs to create opportunities for social interaction — these scaffolds have to be built into the system: meeting spaces, places to sit down, well-lit areas, easy communication tools, games,…
Sometimes failure to communicate happens at the end of the product distribution line. Below are some examples of what happens when sales people don’t pay attention to how their actions alter the message on the product. Enjoy!
