Bonus Blog Assignment

Your last (optional) blog assignment. You have until next Monday, May 5th, to complete it. This is completely a bonus assignment for extra credit. Writing a thoughtful response will give you THREE magic points.

Designing Your Life

That's the topic of this blog assignment. We spent an entire semester talking about human-computer interaction design; you know, designing the obvious. And perhaps you've learned something along the way; not just the intellectual skills, not just the things you learn in order to pass a course, get the grade, but real things — the things that are truly important. Slow Change. Not twitter, not IM, not your smartphone — not the high school-like chatter that occupies so many of our conversations: "she said …; he said …" Really, who cares? What does it really matter, anyway? I'm talking instead about Slow Change. Important stuff. Life stuff.

Did this class teach you to take a risk? To learn in a new way? Did it make you think that on the next iteration of "playing the [design] game" you might actually change something about yourself? When will you stop taking from the planet and give something back instead? What are you planning to do to minimize bad habits and focus on the new and healthy?

I realize this note is a bit strange. Hey, it's the last blog note! Let's mess it up a little bit. Give me something interesting to read this week. It's just between you and me. No one is watching. Have fun. The deadline is the last day of class. An easy 3 bonus/magic points.

9 - Donald MacLeod

Help systems can be useful; however, they are no substitute for obvious design. Some of the help systems I find useful are contextual - the help is tailored to what is being presented at the moment.  The help menu that gives help for an entire product all at once is not very useful because one needs to search to find the help.  If anything, the help feature should embody obvious design as well. For example, on pages with lots of inputs, I like it when there is something that explains the purpose or explains each individual field.  While help systems are always going to be necessary - no amount of obvious design can explain everything - the help should go complimentary with the design.  So that the design and help are one cohesive functioning unit to the user.  

Some persona categories for project 5 include, the avid comic book fan, the causal movie watcher, and the casual fan of movies and comics.

9-Ying Yu Hong

I think the usefulness of the HELP systems such as online help and tutorial videos is limited to a certain extent. There is no perfect design, which means there is always some bugs or imperfect features exist in a design. When users have to figure out the problem in order to make the program run, the HELP systems played an important role of fixing problems. However, users may complaint about the inconvenience of looking up a solution because they have to read the instruction or watch videos to understand how to solve and they have to manually fix the problem themselves. This drawback contradicts to the aim of "designing the obvious". Users may change to other program that doesn't have problems.

The persona we are designing is the fans of the hero because they are the target consumer of the product. The design will be focusing on how to developing product that meets their needs.