Journal Summary – COM 597 Theories and Practices of Interactive Design
My first quarter in the MCDM program at the U.W. is drawing to a close, and I’ve been tasked with summarizing my learning in Theories and Practices of Interactive Design. This will be a difficult task as the quarter has been packed with information. In some cases I had some previous experience, either through work or my own reading with the material. But for the most part, much of the material was new for me.
I will begin with a brief discussion of design, and specifically interactive design. Bill Moggridge in Designing Interactions tells us that design, especially that related to IT should account for usability, usefulness, meaning or quality and sociability. Usability is about ensuring a product is easy to use; Usefulness is about ensuring that a product helps it’s user accomplish something; Meaning or Quality is about the implicit and explicit things that a well-designed product communicates to its owner and others – the obviousness of what the product does, but also the aesthetic qualities the product elicits; and lastly Sociability is about helping enrich the world in which we live and operate. Again, keep in mind the Moggridge is concerned with computer related design, so in addition to these qualities he thinks about products having clear mental models, providing the user with reassuring feedback, allowing for easy to understand navigability, consistency of operations, and minimizing the need for consciously thinking about operation via intuitive interaction.
Donald Norman in Emotional Design thinks of design more broadly than Moggridge. For Norman, design is also about usability (or lack thereof); aesthetics (or meaning and quality); and practicality (or usefulness). However, Norman believes that in order to understand what makes for good design we need to understand the emotional side of design. This means considering the visceral, behavioral and reflective aspects of design.
John Maeda, a designer, artist, scientist and instructor at the MIT Media Lab is all about simplification. Maeda believes that the best designed products are those that have been reduced down to the simplest form while still being useful, and without significant penalty of functionality. For Maeda, a big fan of the acronym, this can be accomplished through the application of the SHE approach. Shrink, Hide and Embody. Shrink down the object so that when it exceeds our expectations, it’s pleasing to us. Hide the complexity of a product. Make the use of the product simple or appear simple. Last, and perhaps most important to counterbalance shrinking and hiding is to embody the product with some quality that is desirable – whether it be through materials or some other messaging cues.
The common thread between these three authors with respect to design is that a well-designed product needs to create some connection with its owner while at the same time being easy to use and serving some purpose.
With this understanding of design in place, I’ll quickly recap my quarter in Theories and Practices of Interactive Design.
Our first class was focused on identifying examples of good and bad design in print. This was supported by a discussion of color, typography and layout to communicate meaning and create clarity. We next applied this thinking to web design by identifying a poorly designed website. I chose www.recordsbymail.com as my example. I have to say the recordsbymail really wasn’t that poorly designed, by I thought there was definite room for improvement. In order to address how we’d propose fixing our example sites, we learned about wireframes as a means for visualizing a webpage layout without introducing emotional elements. This is accomplished by suggesting layout via a series of boxes representing the various content containers in a page, without the use of color, text or imagery.
Our next lesson focused on use cases and task flow. Use case is about who is using a product and how they interact with that product. Task flow concerns the steps a user should take with a product to accomplish a specified task. This lesson was supported by reading Robert Hoekman’s, Designing the Obvious. We applied the task flow lesson later in the quarter to re-designing a poor task flow in the MCDM program’s collaborative workspace, Media Space.
There were a couple of opportunities to apply our learning to a design of our own making. First, we individually had to design an improved classroom layout. I chose to design a class in the round vs. students facing one direction, and an instructor staring back. Our second opportunity was to prototype an imaginary product that we designed to address some problem. Prototyping is a great method for designing a product and came out of lesson on the practices of the international design firm, IDEO.
One of our last assignments before starting on our final projects, was to recommend how design service envy into AT&T’s Developer website for its developer community. Service envy is about applying the principles of meaning and reflective emotions that Moggridge and Norman spoke of and applying it to a service vs. a product. How can we make people desire services more than product? A lot of creating service envy is thinking about the various engagement points with customers and creating a simple and useful experience. This requires a true understanding of who you are designing for, and how they would interact with the service.
Lastly, we applied all the quarter’s learning to our final projects. I’ve partnered with two of my classmates to evaluate the effectiveness of a website called OpenCongress. TomTullis and Bill Albert’s Measuring the User Experience has been instrumental in helping us evaluate the site’s effectiveness. You can read about my group’s proposal in my previous post, Usability Study – OpenCogress.Org.
In the end, I wish this had been a class I could’ve taken in a semester based system because I really enjoyed the content and wished we could have explored it in more depth. To supplement my learning, I plan to develop base level knowledge of Sociology and Psychology.
