Design Quotes

1
Design Quotes

• "The two most important tools an architect has
  are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge
  hammer on the construction site."
• Frank Lloyd Wright
• Hemingway rewrote the ending to A Farewell to
  Arms 39 times. When asked about how he achieved
  his great works, he said, "I write 99 pages of
  crap for every one page of masterpiece." He has
  also been quoted as saying "the first draft of
  anything is shit."
• "The physicist's greatest tool is his
  wastebasket."
• Albert Einstein
• "Rewrite and revise. Do not be afraid to seize
  what you have and cut it to ribbons Good
  writing means good revising."
• Strunk and White, Elements of Style

2
User Centered Design

• September 2, 2008

3
Design

• Good design is good because of its
• fitness to a particular user
• fitness to a particular task
• In general, you are not your user!
• Our class will stress user centered design.

4
Design

• Why is it important?

5
Design

• Why is it important?
• Design exists whether you think about it or not.
• When you dont think about design, bad design
  will be the result.

6
The Design Process

• I arrived at the studio room, and found a man
  at a drawing table, sketching out different
  variations of the Walkman he was designing. I
  got close enough to see the large sketchpad and
  saw 30 or 40 different variations that he had
  considered and put down on paper. I introduced
  myself, pleaded ignorance about design, and asked
  him why he needed to make so many sketches. He
  thought for a second, and then said, "I don't
  know what a good idea looks like until I've seen
  the bad ones.
• By Scott Berkun

7
Design

• To choose the best solution, you must have more
  than one solution to choose from.

8
The Historic Waterfall Model

• System feasibility
• Analysis
• Specifying functionality
• Design
• Implementation
• Coding and unit testing
• Integration and testing
• Operation and maintenance

9
User Centered Design Cycle

• Composed of a series of steps like most design
  methodologies.
• Developed to
• give the design team maximum exposure to the
  users
• feature specific measurement of usability.
• Development is essentially iterative and
  self-correcting, and this model supports those
  aspects of design.
• file///Users/reiser/Documents/classes/179/designV
  ideo.html

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From CNNs When good software goes bad By
Jeordan Legon

• Almost one in five computer users surveyed by
  Consumer Reports encountered software problems
  serious enough to contact technical support in
  the past 12 months. The high number of pleas for
  help, suggests the magazine, may be caused by
  frequent and persistent software glitches.
• Software is riddled with errors because of its
  growing complexity, experts say, but also because
  much of the development costs -- as high as 80
  percent by some estimates -- are spent on finding
  and fixing defects in millions of lines of code.

11
Design Cycle
Needs Analysis
User Task Analysis
Functional Analysis
Requirements Analysis
Set Usability Goals
Design
Prototype
Evaluate
12
Northeastern University ACM

• Scott Berkun Why Software Sucks

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Design Cycle
Needs Analysis
User Task Analysis
Functional Analysis
Requirements Analysis
Set Usability Goals
Design
Prototype
Evaluate
14
Design Cycle Needs Analysis

• Thumbnail sketch
• Why is a new system/product needed?
• Describe in one sentence or phrase
• Basic user (audience) description
• Benefit
• Basic systems characteristics/capabilities

15
Design Cycle User and Task Analysis

• Identifies
• Characteristics of the potential user
  population(s), eg. demographics, domain
  knowledge.
• Goals that the user wants to accomplish.
• Tasks that the users perform.
• May identify
• Mental models.
• Familiar metaphors.

16
Design Cycle Functional Analysis

• Who does what?
• Which system functions will accommodate which
  tasks ?
• What part of the task is the human going to do?
• What part of the task is the computer/device
  going to do?
• Will there be manual tasks? Will there be tasks
  that can be solved by an off-the-shelf package?
  Not everything needs to be automated or
  developed from scratch.

17
Design Cycle Technical Requirements Analysis

• Formal technical specs
• Flowchart
• Schematic

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Design Cycle Set Usability Goals

• Metrics
• Determine the quantifiable measures of how good
  is "good enough" e.g. task completion time, error
  rates, user preferences
• Set these goals up front
• Keep refining the system until you meet these
  goals

19
Design Cycle Design

• Where the planning pays off
• Appearance
• Functionality
• Perceived affordance

20
Design Cycle Prototype the Interaction

• Try it out
• Build the prototype
• file///Users/reiser/Documents/classes/179/designV
  ideo.html

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Design Cycle Evaluate

• Get feedback on the prototype
• User-based, testing
• Expert-based
• Quantitative and qualitative measures

22
In Class Assignment

• Divide up into two groups of two and one of
  three.
• Look at http//www.baddesigns.com/examples.html
  or http//www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
• Come up with your own example of poor design.
• Prepare to present this to the class. Include
• The bad design.
• If possible a picture or webpage of the bad
  design, or lacking that, your verbal description
  of the product.
• Why do you think this is poorly designed? Can you
  describe the problem using any of the terms
  discussed in class (perceived affordance, mental
  model, metaphor)
• Can you suggest or improve on the suggested
  remedy for the poor design?

23
Design and Art

• 2D and 3D design
• Animation Making of Finding Nemo

24
Engineering Design

• file///Users/reiser/Documents/classes/179/designV
  ideo.html

25
Homework

• Solidworks assignment Finish the labs in
  Chapters 2 and 3 in the lab Manual Parametric
  Modeling with Solidworks 2008. Email me the part
  models found at the end of each chapter
  Exercises 1-4 on page 2-3233, and 1-2 on page
  3-25.