Tag: Lecture notes

Week 6 – User Scenarios

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Notes

  • User scenarios are the stories your personas act out.
  • Can predict how certain users (shown by your persona) will interact with your design.
  • Allow you to test site structure before it fully made and allows you to spot mistakes.
  • Highlights the motivation of the user.

Reflection

During this lecture, I learnt how important user scenarios are in building a product that is suitable for a target audience. I have a deeper understanding of how personas and user scenarios interact with each other to create a more well-rounded and successful design. The user scenarios include information about the user’s motivations, goals, expectations, and their actions and reactions. This information helps to reflect on the way a system is used in the context of a person’s individual life. Combining scenarios and personals we are able to gain context of our product and can create a more solid foundation of our design before we go forward and develop the specific design.

Week 4 – Instructional Design

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Notes

  • How to “do something”, or to explain how something works.
  • Instructions are interacted with daily, etc ticket machines, parking machines or using dishwashers.
  • Poorly designed instructions make the experience infuriating for the user
  • Image design instructions are simple but not as helpful but gets rid of the language barrier.
  • Working memory refers to how we manipulate information stored in our short term memory, is a key executive function. It is limited.
  • Splitting information up will overload the memory and make reading the instructions overwhelming
  • Photography can often have too much detail and information to work well in instructions, it is hard to distinguish what is most important.
  • Simple graphics can highlight the most important details, colour often also helps with this.
Kinds of interaction (screen based experiences)

– instruction – by clicking buttons

– conversation – back and forth dialog

– manipulation – drag and drop elements

– exploration – open, playful, game like

Reflection

I learnt during this lecture that instructions are ingrained more in our life than I had previously thought and how the layout and style of illustration is able to completely change how our brain is able to process and retain the information, this also taught me how working memory works and that the process for designing instructions is much more in-depth and more important than it seems.

Week 3 – Design Patterns

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During this lecture I learned that more and more, designers are being encouraged to begin their web designs with mobile first because it becomes difficult to make a large design for web and then scale it down so it is able to fit the mobile size. Another point I found interesting is how many websites nowadays are beginning to look similar to each other because of how web has evolved and how the viewer now uses the web, these changes end up causing designers to use a common interface pattern to suit the times.

The many type of design patterns include:

  • The hamburger menu: a button made up of three horizontal lines, usually placed at the top of the page.
  • Long/endless scroll: useful for not breaking up information and is better for storytelling.
  • Card layout: condensed webpage with cards showing content to the user that can be clicked on to receive more information. This is a popular design most notably showcased in places such as Instagram and Pinterest.
  • Responsive design: a design that moves with the size of the webpage.