My last assignment in Theories and Practice of Interactivity is to summarize what I learned from the class through our course readings, assignments and lectures. Although this final task seems easy on the surface, I have to admit that it’s a bit daunting given the massive amount of new and useful material I have digested through the class this quarter.
Our first assignment this quarter was to find an example of good and bad design. Through this assignment and the corresponding class discussion, I learned that a good design is one that is able to communicate a message to an intended audience without making the audience work too hard to translate the message. As Bill Moggridge highlights on several occasions in his book Designing Interactions, a good designer uses his audience’s existing mental models for this purpose. I also learned through our first assignment that it is important to know your audience as a designer. What might be considered good design to one audience might be seen as poor design by another audience.
Our second assignment in Theories and Practice of Interactivity was to create wireframes for the homepage and first tier landing page of an existing or potential website. For this assignment I chose to create wireframes for the Delaware Legislature’s website. This assignment taught me that bad design, like Donald Norman accurately states in Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things, “….can lead to great frusteration, leading to objects that have lives of their own, that refuse to obey, that provide inadequate feedback about their actions…putting anyone who tries to use them in a big, grey funk” (p. 80). This assignment and the corresponding reading assignment also taught me that poor design can usually be avoided through careful planning and usability testing. As Robert Hoekman, Jr. points out in Designing the Obvious, “Improving usability [through utilizing use cases, task-flow diagrams, usability testing, personas, etc.] means improving the chances users will do what you want them to do“ (p. 50).
Our third assignment this quarter was to design an improved classroom environment. Through this assignment I learned that great design ideas are sometimes built off of impossible or extravagant ones. Through this assignment and the corresponding lecture I also developed a greater appreciation for the design process used by IDEO in which all ideas are welcome, no matter how grandiose or obscure.
Finding and critiquing an example of a poorly designed manmade, non screen-based product that I interact with on a regular basis was the fourth assignment in Theories and Practice of Interactivity. This assignment, coupled with reading Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things, taught me that design is an ever evolving field that is impacted by trends and fads. In order for most companies to be successful, it is important that they frequently update the design of their products in order to meet the constantly changing preferences and needs of consumers.
Our fifth assignment in class this quarter was to suggest changes to the Media Space and diagram those changes via a task-flow diagram, and our sixth and final weekly assignment was to propose ways for the AT&T developer website to create service envy in the developer community. Both of these assignments taught me that when designing a product, whether a website or toy, it is always critical to question assumptions made about the desires of potential users. In many situations, assumptions made reflect a designer’s own desires and perspectives, not those of his intended audience.
Perhaps the most meaningful assignment in Theories and Practice of Interactivity was the term project. Through my group’s term project I learned that designing a sound usability study is a tricky process which requires attention to detail, expertise and careful planning and execution. Before taking Theories and Practice of Interactivity, I took for granted the process behind creating the websites that I love and interact with on a regular basis. Now I truly understand that designing a good website requires a lot of hard work and the combined efforts of designers, programmers, project managers and many others!
In summary, I will forever be a more critical consumer of poorly designed products and a more appreciative consumer of great designs as a result of taking Theories and Practice of Interactivity. My only regret is not having more time to digest Measuring the User Experience and to talk about how to make sound statistical inferences from usability study findings. Thanks Carolina and Ken for a great quarter!
