Archive for the ‘HCI’ Category
User Centered Design vs. Genius Method – Which Approach Is Best for you?
This is a guest blog post by Devin Jordan of IdentityMine.com. Devin discusses some of the benefits of using an expert-evaluation based model, rather than a pure user-centred method. Read on to see his argument, and comment on what you think!
Does WarioWare DIY make users into designers?
As established in a paper by Allison Druin, there are degrees to which user’s can be engaged into the design process. At the very low end of the scale are simple users, with the level of engagement increasing through ‘testers’, ‘informants’ up to full ‘design partners’. Design partners have the strongest level of engagement and have considerable influence over the final product created.
WarioWare DIY is a Nintendo DS game released last year that gave players the ability to design and build their own mini-games, by creating art, music and code using easily accessible in-game tools, and requiring little experience. As well as providing an easy to use toolkit to create games, WarioWare also gives players the tools to share their creations with other players. Today I’ll be considering whether this makes the player into a design partner, and hence becomes participatory design.
WarioWare DIY
How presentation affects perception when working with users
In our Human Centred Computing Systems lecture, Dr Chris Frauenberger relayed a story where shoppers were asked, after having walked past a row of products, which item they preferred. Inevitably, all shoppers said they preferred the final option presented to them – regardless of the order in which the items appeared. This is a key example of the setting in which a question is asked influencing the answer, a bias that needs to be recognised and mitigated when performing usability and user experience research.
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Ethnography as an application of third space theory
After many competing companies had failed, IBM were tasked with creating an air traffic control system. As you can imagine in this setting a correct solution was crucial – lives were at risk if anything went wrong. The first thing IBM’s designers did was go to the air traffic control tower for a few weeks, and watch how they worked. But why? And how did this influence the design process? Today, we look at ethnographic research, and how it is based in the theory of the ‘third space’.
Unintentionally designing with users.
Participatory design is the idea of involving every stakeholder in design decisions when creating or maintaining a product or service. As a formal process, it is at the more extreme end of human centred design – rather than just analysing users and using this to inform the design; it gives the user’s direct control over the direction a project takes.
Sometimes this handing over of control can happen accidentally, when user’s behaviour or meme’s become formally incorporated into, or define the very core of how a service works. Today I’ll be considering a few examples of this.
