5 - Hayden Mills

The technique that I would use from the chapter five reading is the "60-Second Deadline". The "60-Second Deadline" technique is where you write down all the features of your design and then cross-out as many unnecessary features as you can in 60 seconds. This technique forces you to quickly determine what your essential and non-essential features are for your design. By applying this technique the goal is to slim down and simplify your design. Hopefully when finished you have only the sole essential features of your design left in which you can concentrate on to make the best design possible.

Thinking about the redesign me and my partner did for the third project I can think of one necessary feature that we could do without. We chose to redesign the comment section of YouTube and make it possible for users to comment anonymously on YouTube videos. On one of our two redesigns we added a feature that would allow users to private message other users that had commented on the same video. This feature was a nice add-on but it was not entirely accomplishing the main goal of our original plans for the comment section redesign. In this instance the private message function was unnecessary and just a "bells and whistles" kind of feature. The private message feature would be the feature that we would remove in hopes of simplifying our design and better concentrating on our main goal for our YouTube comment section redesign.

Above image of the YouTube comment section redesign. To the left of the comment section you can see the "Private Message" button I talked about in my post.