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Most of good design is things no one notices.

Marcin Wichary, at Smashing Conference NYC 2015

Day 50

The last day. It was bittersweet. We kicked it off with an AMA with the instructors. We didn’t ask them very interesting questions, and somehow the discussion devolved into discussing freelance rates.

We had a design fair in the afternoon where we showed people a project that we’d worked on. I showed my Citibike project.

In the evening we had dinner and celebrated.

However, we couldn’t celebrate too much - we knew that there was still work ahead to put together our portfolios and find jobs.

Day 49

Abby Covert, who has built a brand by calling herself Abby the IA, came in and did a portfolio workshop with us. Her presentation is great: http://www.slideshare.net/AbbyCovert/everyone-needs-a-portfolio-a-workshop

We worked in groups on creating our timeline, which I ended up incorporating as part of my portfolio later.

Day 48

We had our final client presentations. Ocho’s CTO Jordan came in and listened to our presentation. He hadn’t seen any of our previous presentations so we basically summarized everything we had done over the past couple of weeks. He started whiteboarding afterward. We had a discussion with him after as well.

Most notably, he mentioned Pornhub as a mobile UI example - basically how if you held down a button you could preview a video, which would stop playing once you released it, mimicking a hover state using a mouse. He talked more about their vision of using hashtags - and being able to add and subtract which of a user’s hashtag channels you could view.

Day 45-47

Day 45: In Outcomes, we went over Interviewing and practiced interviewing with classmates.

Jon came in for a meeting at the end of the day, as he was traveling and wouldn’t be able to make it to the final presentation.

We showed him the designs we had come up with based on user testing. Despite what our users said, he was stuck on using circles for icons rather than rectangles. Our users indicated that they wanted to be able to see thumbnails to have an idea of what they viewed, but he told us he didn’t think users knew what they wanted to see, and that thumbnails are a horrible preview of video content. We told him our users thought that circular icons indicated profile pictures rather than channels, but he was still intent on using circles.

Day 46 and Day 47: We worked on putting together the final presentation, as well as taking his feedback and working on more interface ideas.

Day 44

We had a facilitation workshop with Jess Greco, where she gave us techniques for facilitating group discussions.

1. ICEBREAKERS

2. TIMEBOXING (if people want to discuss something, set a specific time limit to discuss it, and then move on so that you don’t waste a ton of time talking in circles)

3. SILENT GENERATION Ask people to generate ideas silently,then affinity map them - good for neutralizing unequal groupings (i.e. a VP versus a junior employee) and coming up with a lot of ideas quickly

4. SILENCE Be comfortable with silence and allow people to think

5. SUMMARY & SYNTHESIS - when people tell you stuff, summarize what they said back to them so they can clarify and explain further

6. ACTIVE LISTENING TECHNIQUES ask questions like “ So I’m hearing you say ______, is that right?” to help you understand what they’re saying

7. VISUAL FACILITATION - sketching ideas as they are discussed

8. SURFACE OPINIONS & ASK BETTER QUESTIONS - get people (especially those who are silent) to talk about their opinions sooner rather than later

9. PARKING LOT - a place to put ideas on hold that are good/interesting but not currently actionable (you could write them on a post it and make a board of them

10. DOT VOTING - people vote on ideas by putting stickers next to them

Day 41-43

We worked on ideating and testing interfaces for landscape mode, which we presented on Day 43 to Jon and Max. In that meeting, they asked us to work further on the hashtag channel concept, although they were divided on how it should look. Jon wanted it to look more like Snapchat’s Discover page, with circular icons that represent channels. Max thought it should look more like a conventional feed in other social networks. We did a Design Studio with them to try to refine ideas.

Day 40

I started off the day with a breakfast at Pivotal Labs. I had done some competitive analysis on PebCiti for the Citibike project and had started a correspondence with Joe Masilotti, the engineer behind it. He works at Pivotal and I told him I was interested in working there and he invited me for breakfast. It is a nice office - with a large open layout. It’s quite large considering the neighborhood. The kitchen area has refrigerators with different beverages and a catered breakfast is served every morning. We talked about what it was like to work there - great hours (9 to 6), offices in other cities with the opportunity to cross-pollinate, etc. I also attended their standup meeting.

We had outcomes at GA in the morning and Katie discussed putting together a portfolio. You could either do a project-based or process-based portfolio. In a project-based portfolio (which I ended up doing), you should show about 3 projects, and the portfolio should be about 15-20 pages long, including a couple slides about your background and process.

She reminded us that the purpose of the portfolio is to get an interview, and not to actually get hired for the job, so we shouldn’t spend too long on putting it together.

Day 37-39

We worked on designing interfaces for the hashtag channel feature, and putting together a presentation. We went to the Ocho office in the Grand Central Tech accelerator and presented them to Jon and Max. We left with the assignment of envisioning Ocho in landscape mode.

In the current interface, the app is used in a combination of portrait and landscape mode. The intention behind Ocho is for users to watch the videos in landscape mode. However, viewers end up watching the videos in portrait mode in their home feed, not realizing that they should turn it to landscape mode.

Day 36

We met with Jon, the CEO of Ocho, and had our Stakeholder interview. The project brief we had initially received indicated a desire to design a feature for batch uploading clips, but in our conversation, he said he wanted us to explore using hashtags to create user-specific playlists. For instance, being able to watch one user’s #switzerland videos as opposed to the global #switzerland videos.

After he left, we started playing around with the app to get an idea of how to tackle the project, and realized that there were usability issues with the app. We tested the app with users and videotaped them using the app.

Day 35

We received our final client project assignments. My group’s client was Ocho, a social video network for iOS. The startup, which is backed by Mark Cuban and some other investors, allows users to upload and view 8-second videos in landscape format. It is a social network that exclusively features video content.

Dom gave us a lecture on Stakeholder Interviews.

With bigger organizations, he recommended using a RASI chart.

Responsible

Approval

Support

Inform

This chart helps keep track of who makes decisions and needs to know about changes and decisions.

This is a good checklist of questions to ask:

http://boxesandarrows.com/a-stakeholder-interview-checklist/

WHAT NOT TO TALK ABOUT

‣ Solutions

‣ Features

‣ Implementation details

‣ Colors and typefaces

WHAT TO TALK ABOUT

‣ Users

‣ Problems

‣ Goals

‣ Culture

Ask clarifying questions - remember the 5 whys (ask why 5 times to get at the root cause of an issue)

Remain objective

Listen

Take notes

Day 34

We gave our presentation, in a conversational setting. We received excellent feedback. We did a little tweaking after the presentation but here is the prototype, made in Hype: http://www.tinyurl.com/CitiApWa

#citibike #applewatch

Day 31-33

More working on the projects. On Day 31 Nevan gave us a lecture on Visual Design & Usability.

He discussed the Hierarchy of User needs, going from Functional > Reliable > Usable > Pleasurable. At the baseline, whatever it is that’s being built must be functional, and from there you can refine it to ultimately be pleasurable as well.

“Certainly we all want to eat edible foods with nutritional value, but we also crave flavor.” -Aaron Walter

“Why do we settle for usable when we can make interfaces both usable and pleasurable?” -Aaron Walter

He also discussed the following Usability principles:

1. VISIBILITY - A user’s ability to form a conceptualmodel for a system is vastly improved when the current status and alternative actions are clearly visible.

2. AFFORDANCE SIGN - “[Affordances are the] properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used.” - Don Norman

More Don Norman quotes from the lecture:

“[Although] affordances make sense for interaction with physical objects, they are confusing when dealing with virtual ones.”

“Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible signals of what can be done.”

“Signifiers are of far more importance to designers than are affordances.”

For instance, an affordance of a chair is being able to sit on it. Ideally, there should be signifiers, or visual cues, that let the user know which affordances exist.

3. CONSTRAINT - Constraints are the properties of a system that restrict how it can be used.

4. MAPPING - Mapping is the relationship between the actions that can be performed and the effects they will have.

5. FEEDBACK - Feedback sends information to the user aboutwhat action has actually been performed.

He also talked about a lot more other stuff...

Day 32 we had a snow day so we talked about some of the stuff in a Slack conversation.

Day 28-30

We spent most of the week working on our projects, both in and out of school. My partner and I spent a good amount of time researching the Apple Watch Human Interface Guidelines, as well as watching the unveiling videos, to get an idea of how Apple Watch would work.

Day 26 & Day 27

My partner and I spent a good portion of the long weekend interviewing cyclists, mostly Citi Bikers (I won at rock paper scissors and convinced him that we should do an Apple Watch app for Citi Bike).

On Day 27, we took a field trip to Hook & Loop, which is an internal agency for a company called Infor. They walked us through their work flow for a couple of projects. It was cool to see that there was nothing that they did that was unfamiliar. All the techniques were ones we had become acquainted with through working on projects and course lectures.

Day 25

We were given our partners for Project 4. I had chosen to do a wearable project, and my partner and I were eager to do one on the Apple Watch. We wrote a proposal for the project in the afternoon.

Day 22-24

We worked on our projects. On Day 24 we presented the projects.

This is the Axure prototype from the Trello project: tinyurl.com/TrelloProto

I worked on it some more after the class was done.

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