Designing%20New%20Media

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Designing New Media
IS146 Foundations of New Media

• Prof. Marc Davis, Prof. Peter Lyman, and danah
  boyd
• UC Berkeley SIMS
• Tuesday and Thursday 200 pm 330 pm
• Spring 2005
• http//www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is1
  46/s05/

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Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check In
• Assignment 3 Documenting Artifact Usage
• Review of Last Time
• New Media On The Go and In The Home
• Today
• Designing New Media
• Preview of Next Time
• Speech and Audio as Media

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Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check In
• Assignment 3 Documenting Artifact Usage
• Review of Last Time
• New Media On The Go and In The Home
• Today
• Designing New Media
• Preview of Next Time
• Speech and Audio as Media

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Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check In
• Assignment 3 Documenting Artifact Usage
• Review of Last Time
• New Media On The Go and In The Home
• Today
• Designing New Media
• Preview of Next Time
• Speech and Audio as Media

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Questions for Today

• How do theories of culture help us do
  ethnography?
• How does ethnography help us do design?

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Review of Culture

• Culture is a description of a particular way of
  life which expresses certain meanings and values
  not only in art and learning but also in
  institutions and ordinary behavior
• Meanings and practices
• Encoding and decoding, interpretation

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Goal of Ethnography

• Ethnographers seek to understand culture,
  identity, and social practices
• Similar to advertisers?
• Why do people do what they do, think how they
  think and how does this connect to culture?
• Theory helps us ground observations

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Challenges for Ethnographers

• Access
• Ability to see and gain trust
• Interpretation
• Bias and reflexivity
• Moral imperative
• Ethnographers care about the people they study
• Inexactitude of method
• Thick description
• They arent just stories

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Ethnography for Design

• Understand people, culture, practices, technology
  and the interconnections
• Think from the subjects perspective
• Challenge technological determinism
• Show that technology is not on a path towards
  progress, but culturally situated
• Situate design in users worldview, not designers

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Design for People

• Who are you designing for?
• Why does that population matter?
• What is the culture of that population?
• How will the design affect that culture?
• How are these people (un)like you?
• How are their needs different?

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Design for Flexibility

• Create flexible cultural artifacts
• Allow different interpretations for different
  people in different situations
• Expect the unexpected
• Iterative ethnography

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Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check In
• Assignment 3 Documenting Artifact Usage
• Review of Last Time
• New Media On The Go and In The Home
• Today
• Designing New Media
• Preview of Next Time
• Speech and Audio as Media

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Why Design Matters

• Shapes the artifacts that people use
• Builds your skills for
• Creativity
• Problem solving
• Teamwork
• Analysis
• Communication
• Enables you to be part of shaping the material
  culture you live in

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Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

• Human
• The end-users of a program
• The others in the organization
• The designers of the program
• Computer
• The machines the programs run on
• Interaction
• The users tell the computers what they want
• The computers communicate results
• The computer may also tell users what the
  computer wants them to do

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Who Builds UIs?

• A team of specialists (ideally)
• Graphic designers
• Interaction / interface designers
• Technical writers
• Marketers
• Test engineers
• Software engineers
• Enthnographers
• Cognitive psychologists

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User Differences

• Abilities, preferences, predilections
• Spatial ability
• Memory
• Reasoning abilities
• Verbal aptitudes
• Personality differences
• Age, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality,
  culture, education
• Modalilty preferences/restrictions
• Vision, audition, speech, gesture, haptics,
  locomotion

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Interfaces For Expert And Novice Users

• Simplicity vs. power tradeoffs
• Scaffolded user interface
• How much information to show the user?
• Number and complexity of user operations
• Variants of operations
• Inner workings of system itself
• System history
• Example
• Television remote control

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How to Design and Build UIs
Iterate at every stage!
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Design Process

• Design
• Observe peoples practice
• Brainstorm and develop personas, artifact
  concepts, and scenarios
• Communicate designs (usually visually)
• Prototype
• Build working examples of the artifact concepts
  in varying levels of implementation (from low-fi
  to hi-fi)
• Evaluate
• Observe, test, and analyze people using prototypes

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Mountford on Interface Design

• Borrow insights and methods from prior design
  disciplines
• Film
• Animation
• Theater
• Architecture
• Industrial Design
• Information Display

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Vertelney on Design Process

• User Interface Industrial Design
  Whole-Product User Interface
• Whole-Product User Interface design process
• Product definition
• Research
• Brainstorm
• Generate design solutions
• Analyze
• Repeat

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Design Techniques

• Observe users practice
• Brainstorm and develop personas
• Brainstorm artifact concepts
• Brainstorm and develop scenarios of personas
  using artifact
• Brainstorm and develop storyboards for scenarios

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Personas, Scenarios, Storyboards

• Persona
• Description of a person intended to represent the
  prototypical demographics and psychographics
  (values, goals, and intentions) of a particular
  population
• Scenario
• Description of a situation (where, when, and how)
  the personas use the artifact
• Storyboard
• A graphical and textual depiction of the scenario

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Brainstorming

• IDEO Rules of Brainstorming
• Defer Judgment
• Encourage Wild Ideas
• Build on the Ideas of Others
• Stay Focused on Topic
• One Conversation at a Time
• Be Visual
• Go for Quantity
• (IDEO is a famous design firm with several
  offices in the Bay Area and worldwide
  http//www.ideo.com)

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Brainstorming

• Joy Mountfords Techniques for Generating New
  Ideas
• New Uses for the Object
• Adapt the Object to be like Something Else
• Modify the Object for a New Purpose
• MagnifyAdd to the Object
• MinimizeSubtract from the Object
• Substitute Something Similar
• Rearrange the Data
• Reverse of Transpose the Information
• Combine the Data into an Ensemble

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Developing Personas

• Be specific
• Represent user population
• Demographics
• Psychographics
• Memorable

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Developing Scenarios

• Tell the story of the interaction among your
  personas and artifact
• Act them out

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Storyboarding

• A storyboard provides you with a pictorial
  script of important events
• It sketches a scenario of a possible interaction
  between your persona and your (redesigned)
  artifact
• It leaves out the details and concentrates on the
  important interaction and events
• A technique called performance-based design might
  be really helpful in creating your storyboards
• Literally take on one of your personas and act
  out what might happen if this user interacts with
  your re-designed artifact

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Storyboarding

• Suggested media for creating your storyboard
• Paper and pencil are the easiest tools to sketch
  your storyboardsimply scan your results
• Use a whiteboard and take a digital picture of
  the outcome
• You can use applications like PowerPoint, Adobe
  Illustrator, Visio, or any other graphical
  program to draw your scenario
• Take photographs in which you act out the use
  scenario to create the images in your storyboard

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Rapid Prototyping

• Build a mock-up of design
• Low fidelity techniques
• Paper sketches
• Cut, copy, paste
• Video segments
• Interactive prototyping tools
• Visual Basic, HyperCard, Director, etc.
• UI builders
• NeXT, etc.

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Prototyping Techniques

• Low-fi prototyping tools
• Paper and pens
• Drawing programs (e.g., PhotoShop)
• Video
• Interactive prototyping tools
• Director
• Flash
• PowerPoint
• Visual Basic
• HyperCard

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Evaluation Techniques

• Qualitative vs. quantitative methods
• Qualitative (non-numeric, discursive,
  ethnographic)
• Focus groups
• Interviews
• Surveys
• User observation
• Participatory design sessions
• Quantitative (numeric, statistical, empirical)
• User testing
• System testing
• Surveys
• Usage logs

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Assignment 4 Logo in LOGO

• As a group make a working logo-drawing program
• Structure your program into multiple
  sub-routines, with at least 1 sub-routine per
  group member
• Follow good coding practice by using parameters
  or control flow to avoid redundant code
• Reuse a single procedure to draw shapes of
  various sizes
• Use a loop rather than simply repeat code

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Assignment 4 Process

• Use your interviews and experience to define your
  target audience
• Develop 1-2 personas that you want to focus on
• Brainstorm artifact redesign ideas for those
  personas
• Evaluate your ideas and agree on one to pursue
• Come up with a scenario for your redesign
• Draw a storyboard with explanatory text
• Document the results of your brainstorming

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Assignment 4 Deliverables

• Persona description (1-2 pages)
• List all brainstorming ideas and reasons for
  selecting or rejecting each
• Brief description of the redesign idea you
  selected (1-3 paragraphs)
• Scenario description (1 page max)
• Annotated storyboard
• A write-up (2-4 pages)

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Assignment 4 Write-Up Questions

• What does more programmable mean to your
  artifact?
• How does your redesign make your artifact more
  programmable?
• Describe your intended population, including
  their social practices, culture, and demographics
  as relevant to the redesign.
• How do you anticipate your redesign will affect
  that population?
• What biases do you have in choosing this redesign
  and population?
• What limitations does your redesign have?

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Norman on Why Interfaces Dont Work

• Because
• We still think of using the interface
• We still talk of designing the interface
• We still talk of improving the interface
• We need to aid the task, not the interface to
  the task.
• The computer of the future should be invisible.

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Norman on Design Process

• The user
• What does that person really need to have
  accomplished?
• The task
• Analyze the task
• How best can the job be done? taking into account
  the whole setting in which it is embedded,
  including the other tasks to be accomplished, the
  social setting, the people, and the organization?
• As much as possible, make the task dominate and
  make the tools invisible
• Then, get the interaction right...

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Stacy Anker on Norman

• Norman states that by specializing, a computer
  can do its intended job better and more
  efficiently than can more powerful,
  general-purpose machines, at least from the
  viewpoint of the user.  However, different users
  will inevitably have different viewpoints.  What
  are some of the arguments that people might make
  in favor of generality and power over
  specialization and ease of use?

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Stacy Anker on Norman

• I am not a very computer literate person, so upon
  first reading this article I didnt actually know
  what an interface was.  But then I came across
  Normans definition that an interface is an
  obstacle that stands between a person and the
  system being used.  However, the less biased
  dictionary defines it as, the connection
  between the display-keyboard combination and the
  user.  Is an obstacle or a connection more
  of an appropriate interface definition?

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Stacy Anker on Norman

• Donald A. Norman shows two comparisons, one
  between playing a game on Nintendo and playing
  the same game on the Apple IIGS Computer and the
  other between organizing activities with the
  Day-Timer Pocket Organizer or with Focal Point on
  the Macintosh.  Norman seems to come to the
  conclusion that both Nintendo and the Day-Timer
  Pocket Organizer (a.k.a. the two products that
  are non computer related) are more user-friendly.
   However, Norman then goes on to say, with
  regards to the computer-based products, that he
  likes the fact that he can type legibly rather
  than scrawl illegiblyhe likes the fact he
  can search for things Why does it seem that
  Norman cant fully commit to either one side or
  the other (i.e., what are some of the
  similarities and differences between these
  products)? Does Norman seem to believe that the
  pros of computer-based products outweigh the
  cons? Do you, yourself, believe the pros make up
  for the cons?

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David Hsiao on Mountford

• In Mountford's "Tools and Techniques for Creative
  Design" he stated "Some people believe that new
  ideas are almost always the result of
  collisionsjuxtaposition or recombination of
  ideas." Is this true? And Where does "good ideas"
  come from? and what makes them "good.

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David Hsiao on Mountford

• Thinking from a computer user's perspective, what
  is the most important/critical part of interface
  design? What makes an interface "good?"

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Nicole Schwartz on Vertelney
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Lecture Overview

• Assignment Check In
• Assignment 3 Documenting Artifact Usage
• Review of Last Time
• New Media On The Go and In The Home
• Today
• Designing New Media
• Preview of Next Time
• Speech and Audio as Media

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Readings for Next Time

• Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy The
  Technologizing of the Word, London Methuen,
  1982, p. 31-77.
• Discussion Questions
• Nate Bennett
• Amanda Hsueh