EBoard 03: Design failures and more

This class will be recorded! Its use will be limited to members of the class. Please do not share with others.

Approximate overview

• Preliminaries
  • Administrative stuff
  • Q&A
• Design failures
  • Small group
  • Large group
• Break
• Design failures, continued
  • Debrief
• Understanding the user
• Sketchpad thoughts (if there’s time)
• Ethics, revisited (if there’s time)

Administrative stuff

General Notes

• I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
• I’m working from home today. I don’t expect my mediocre ISP to affect class (it usually doesn’t), but it might.

Upcoming Activities

• CS Table Monday at noon. “Please join us for our discussion of chapter 5 of Addiction By Design – Live Data: Tracking Players, Guiding Play. The book is available electronically through the Grinnell Libraries at https://muse-jhu-edu.grinnell.idm.oclc.org/book/61897.
• Community Circle Tuesday at noon or 3pm: Mental Health in Experience and Practice
• Karla Erickson Convocation Thursday at noon. “I/Robot: The Social Life of Machines”

Work for Mondays’s class

• Readings and video on accessibility.
• Journal: Primary points.
• Tasks: (a) Post an example of an inaccessible design you’ve encountered in online learning and (b) Post an example of successful Universal Design you’ve encountered in online learning.
• Think about Investigation 2 and how you’d like me set up groups.

Work for Friday’s class

• Do Investigation 2: The box or the room.
• Readings forthcoming.
• Journal details and Tasks forthcoming.

Q&A

Can I write explicit insructions to the user for Investigation 2?

No

Can I write other text that might encourage particular actions?

Yes

Are journals and tasks and investigations due at the start of class?

Yes

Do we have to do rub, turn, grab?

Yes

Can we make them do other things, such as “eat” or “stick to wall” or “throw in recycling bin” or “jump up and down upon in a fit of rage”?

Yes

Small-Group Poster Fair

• Present your poster (approx. 2 min)
• Feedback from others (approx. 4 min)
  • Questions
  • What is the particular task that is complicated to do? (Not “there are 50,000 things you could do, so it’s hard to tell”.)
  • Other factors
  • Other solutions
  • Critiques of solution

Large-Group Poster Fair

• Everyone looks at your poster (approx. 1 min)
• Answer Sam and Mai’s questions (approx. 1 min)
• Two hours straight is too much; somewhere midway through we’ll take a break

Debrief

• Design is (or can be) hard.
  • What happens if someone fails to mark the room as unoccupied?
  • How do you present a wide array of options in limited space?
• Pay attention to privacy.
• Those who specify may not be those who use.
• Lots of people don’t even ask if there can be something better.
  • Or don’t realize how bad the UI is until they’ve bought it.
• Different experiences / world views.
• Importance of aethestics
• Tradition
• Multiculturalism is a challenge (Standardization is the first part of SRAW)
• Avoid Waste (the W in SRAW)

More

• Were there common problems, factors, or issues to consider?
• How could you avoid them in your own design work?
• Other important issues to share?

Were there common problems, factors, or issues to consider?

How could you avoid them in your own design work?

Other important issues to share?

Thoughts on Sketchpad

Sam thinks this is important because

• “You will see a designer effectively solving a problem step by step and he will not know at the outset know precisely what his problem is nor will he know exactly how to solve it. But little by little he will begin to investigate ideas. He and the computer will be in cooperation in this work.” The move from computer as calculating machine to assistant.
• As many of you noted, the model of computer graphics and interactivity does not seem sixty years old (other than slowness).
• Object-oriented programming before there was object-oriented programming.
  • Templates for objects.
  • Do we have this in most drawing programs yet?
• The power of constraints.
• Q: Why did our models of physical user input evolve the way they did?
• Q: What would have been different for the novice user?

Understanding the user

• You are not your user.
• You should be able to put yourself in the place of others.
• You need to find ways to understand your users, the issues they face, and the issues they are likely to face.

TPS

• How do you understand your user?

UXPA Code of Professional Conduct

The UXPA Code of Professional Conduct is at https://uxpa.org/uxpa-code-of-professional-conduct/

• Would following it have prevented Ko’s SRAW?
  • S: Interface technologies Standardize, erasing diversity
  • R: Interface technologies Reconfigure human experience
  • A: Interface technologies Amplify social choices
  • W: Interface technologies Waste
• How do you deal with unanticipated consequences?