Designer's Journal
Ok, I admit that I didn’t do well with my designer’s journal. I didn’t really get a chance to annotate all of the resources we have looked at over the course of the semester, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t learn how to look at the world around me and locate examples of good and bad design. Although I didn’t annotate all of the class resources, I can definitely say that all of the ones I reviewed significantly contributed to my understanding of how interaction design works.
Here are a couple that stood out for me while I was trying to really understand what interaction design meant.
Information Design: The Emergence of a New Profession (Horn)
This article provides an introduction to what information design is and why it is needed. According to Horn (1999), information design is the science and art of preparing information with the aim of (a) developing comprehensive, rapid, and accurate documents that can be readily translated into action; (b) designing interactions with equipment that are easy, natural, and pleasant; and (c) enabling people to find their way around environments with comfort and ease. We need information design to make sense of the increasing amounts of information overload and navigation problems in a way that presents it most effectively and efficiently to users so that the cost and effort of processing this information is reduced. Although this article was written several years ago, it predicts how important effective and efficient information design has become with tools such as filters and sorts becoming a customary way to streamline the data we see.
Affective Aspects (Sharp)
Emoticons, sounds, icons, and virtual agents are all examples of affective design that have been used to convey emotional states and evoke specific emotional responses, such as happiness, comfort, or feeling at ease. Sounds and icons are especially used to give users immediate and informative feedback about the interface, including whether it’s working properly. Affective design is also present in the way designers use shapes, fonts, colors, balance, white space, and other graphical elements in their interfaces, e.g. warm colors and rounded shapes are usually induce more feelings of pleasantness than cooler hues and sharp angles. A major challenge for designers is, therefore, balancing a pleasurable design with one that is also usable and effective. Interfaces that aren’t usable or effective, e.g. when applications don’t work properly or user expectations are not me, can cause people to feel negative emotions, such as frustration, helplessness, and stupidity.
Experience Mapping (Johansson)
This is a great overview of experience mapping, and it really helped me understand what it is and why it should be done. The main objective of experience mapping to focus on how users will experience whatever interaction is being designed. Specifically, it lets designers see the experience process through the user’s eyes, describes the experience over time, marks positive and negative points of the experience, and identifies opportunities for improvements or innovation. Constructing an experience map is a necessary step before storyboarding, making wireframes, or building prototypes because it allows designers to obtain a deeper understanding of how users will interact with and experience their design, from initial desire to completion of their goals.