Seminar 2 - Josefine Martinsson

Chapter 6 is about the part of the design process where there is a lot of brainstorming and when it comes to ideas it is, as they say in the book, about quantity over quality. This is a part which we are now passed in my opinion. Reading about it I feel like we did a lot of the things being talked about during our brainstorming and the structuring of our ideas.   

 Pictures from our brainstorming and structuring of ideas.

During the brainstorming we came up with a lot of ideas and used “analog” methods such as pen, paper, whiteboard and post its. I believe, just as the literature, that this really helps the process and keeps the flow going. What we did not do was keep away all technology, we still had laptops present and there was some multitasking present, which perhaps we should avoid in future projects as well as focus even more on the quantity over quality of ideas. But I do think that we had a great environment during this part of our project where all kins of ideas were welcome and we had a lot of fun!

The next stage of the design process is Refinement, which is discussed in Chapter 7. I would say our project is currently at the end of this stage. It is all about refining the ideas the team came up with during the brainstorming by considering constraints and various principles of interaction design. We talked about constraints already during our brainstorming, which perhaps should have been saved for this, and I believe we have done a good job taking them into consideration. The various principles really intrigued me, especially since some of them could have solved the problems we found with the interaction today at Naturhistoriska. Especially feedback and feedforward is something we found issues with and something I think we should focus on in our design. I also found The Poka-Yoke principle very interesting. I would like us to work with scenarios as we finish this stage.

The last chapter, Chapter 8, is all about prototyping, testing and development and is the stage we are going to next. While the development part of the product is not something we will do during this course; prototyping and testing is very relevant for our project. We have limitations here, both in the skills available in our group but also the time at hand for doing this. I think this seemed like a huge task at first, but I liked what Tod Zaki Warfel said about prototyping in the book: 

You dont’ have to prototype everything - it’s a prototype. And prototypes, by definition, are incomplete.

This made the task seem less intimidating. 

I believe we should work with paper prototypes at first, which we did a little bit already during about idea stage, and work our way to a digital prototype. I am looking forward to the prototyping and testing and I believe it will be a very new and challenging part of the course.

Questions: What are some good scenarios we can work with? With the limits in skills and time what are good approaches when we work with prototyping?

Seminar 2

Chapter 6 - Brainstorming and Ideation

This chapter was focusing on the starting point of projects in general and our group have already passed this part. I can say that this part is something I enjoy when I work in projects and this time was no different. It’s fun to just come up with as many ideas as possible an not having to worrying about if they are good or not. This time in our project we din’t really come up with a whole lot of ideas though, we came up with a concept that we all liked and really wanted to keep working on that single concept. However on that single concept, and the few others we had, we came up with a lot of ideas to further explore that concept so with that in perspective it worked really well for us. In our group we are all good at coming up with ideas and the whole “no ideas are bad” attitude is really accepted in our group and no one is afraid to speak up.

Chapter 7 - Refinement

We haven’t really started the actual prototyping of our concept other than discussing how we want it to look and what features we want, so the refinement have just started. We will go for a simple and timeless design because we want everyone to be able to interact and understand it, we also don’t want the museum to feel the need for continuous upgrading of the system. I think it’s important to not include a lot of new features for our design if we want to keep the simplicity and really focus on making a few features function really well.

Chapter 8 - Prototyping, testing and development

Well, this chapter is hard to discuss since we aren’t really there yet. But we will probably build some kind of web-based prototype and see if we can test it at the museum. None of us have any real experience in prototyping like this but if we find a good way to build the prototype I think this part of the project will be really fun.

Seminar 2 - Rickard Bergeling

Chapter 6 – Brainstorming and Ideation

This chapter was about a stage of the project that I feel we are well passed at this point. It’s about brainstorming and how to come up with ideas. Since we have already concluded the fact that our current idea is the one we are going to stick to, it feels a bit excessive to further analyze the different methods of brainstorming and ideation. What could be relevant, though, is to analyze our design process and how it has related to the contents of this chapter.

“Brainstorming requires some tools. First, because of the limitations of today’s available technology, brainstorming should never be done digitally; it should be done with paper, pencils, pens, markers, and possibly whiteboards and sticky notes. You need to be able to jot down an idea quickly, set it aside, and move on to the next idea. Fumbling with technology just gets in the way.”

This is something that I feel has worked very well for us, even though many of the members in our group frequently brings laptops and tablets to school, we have kept brainstorming using as little technology as possible. Something that also went well was the fact that we have a great tolerance in the group for different ideas and perspectives.

Something that I think could be improved for the next group project when it comes to the brainstorming-phase is that we shouldn’t spend too much time on a single idea. In our group, we really wanted to evolve the idea as much as possible as soon as we saw even the slightest potential. I think it could be better to move on and come up with as many ideas as possible and then go back to get the best features from each idea.

Chapter 7 - Refinement

When it comes to this chapter, what I found most interesting was Direct/Indirect Manipulation and The Magic Number Seven-rule. Since we have not started on our interactive prototype-development yet, we have only stated in words how we want the interaction to be. We have said that we want an ageless design that is intuitive to use. Therefore I think that we will benefit the most from using Direct Manipulation as our main concept when forming the interactive tools. Also, this chapter state that you should not deviate from the standard unless your design significantly improves the program. I therefore believe that we should design using the guidelines of application-making for tablets and try to deviate as little as possible. Our products “personality” will come in place with the choices of fonts, colors and so on. Not by using a weird layout.

The Magic Number Seven-rule states that a person’s short-term memory can only hold 7 (plus-minus 2) pieces of information at a given time. If given too much information the person will naturally forget some of it. I think this is something we can use when deciding how much information the visitor should be exposed to before our product indicates that he/she is able to answer questions about the exhibition. 

Chapter 8 – Prototyping, testing and development

Since we do not stand to actually develop our product, my discussion about this chapter will be limited to prototyping and testing. This is something that I am really excited about, although I am not sure of how we are going to make the prototype since none of us have experience in application-programming.

A quote from this chapter that really stuck was: “Eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”, stating that we do not want excessive options or such that will plotter the application and make it hard to use. We have stated previously that we want an ageless and simplistic design, which I think will aid a lot in eliminating unnecessary elements.

So far we have not yet discussed whether or not our product should use sound as a tool for feedback to the user. My instinct tells me that we should limit our use of sound as much as possible since we have clearly stated that we don’t want our screens to take focus from the exhibition itself, and using sound-queues might be distracting to the other visitors.

Questions for the seminar:

How do we best visualize the interaction with a product without being able to code it? Are you allowed to use video?

In our case (explain project if necessary) will we need to actually make an RFID-wristband or does a simple 3d-model suffice?