Chapter 6 - Ideation and design
principles
I like the thought of the ideation
process having the goal of creating as many different concepts as possible. It
is easy to believe that you as a designer should be able to intuitively come up
with the most optimal design in the first try but I think that just letting
your mind flow freely lets you come up with unconventional and unexpected
things that can be turned into something great later.
This is improved further by the rule
that “there are no bad ideas”. It is important to have an open attitude
so that everyone feels invited to bring his or her potentially spontaneous
ideas forward. In our sessions, that felt difficult in the beginning and might
come with experience and a group that has worked together for longer.
It also seems like a good idea to stay
focused, but not spending too much time on a single idea. When
brainstorming we tended to experiment with a central concept during most of the
session, but I now realize how that might only take you along what can be
thought of like a “desire path”. If you spend too much time on an idea, you
might get comfortable with it and not want to stray too far.
The idea of “method design” is
appealing to me, and I think we tried to do that unconsciously since we are
designing a product for a target group we are not part of. Since we had clearly
designed personas, this felt like it came naturally.
Chapter 7 – Refinement
I found this chapter to be the most
interesting one yet. The previous chapters have been build-up for the refinement
part, where your initial criteria, research and brainstorming come together to
start forming the final product. In a way, it finally makes the product feel
“real”. This is also the point where you take constraints and “laws”
into account and have to make trade-offs and prioritizations.
Most of the constraints feel like common
sense, but I wouldn’t have thought of all of them if I were asked before
reading the chapter. Time, money and technology, for example, were
always in the back of our minds, but tools and teams are not really
relevant to our current project (since they are unknown) and so we hadn’t
considered them.
The principles of direct and indirect
manipulation are useful and were something we had considered earlier. Since
our main target group is kids, we felt we needed something that they could
touch and interact with directly rather than through indirect manipulation with
menus and buttons. Since our product is digital, all manipulations are
technically indirect but as the book mentions, when designing a technical
product the terms can be redefined slightly.
One thing that really stood out to me
was that “sketches are inherently unfinished”. It is easy to see the benefits
of pen and paper compared to digital tools in how quickly they allow you to put
your thoughts into pictures, but the fact that sketches look unfinished and how
that makes it easier to discuss their flaws was something that I hadn’t thought
of.
Chapter 8 - Prototyping, testing and
development
The eighth chapter pieced together and
summarized things I have come across on the web before and gives a good
overview. It is easy to get carried away with all the technical possibilities
and leave out focusing on making users understand the interface. It is easy to
provide instructional text to try to compensate for bad design, but as the book
says, instructional text is rarely read. You are supposed to have an interface
that makes it clear to the user what is expected of them.
I also remember the concept of digital
versions of analog technology not necessarily having to resemble the original
product from the movie “Objectified” and find it to be very interesting.
However, I agree with the argument that while making a new version free of many
of the old constraints can be interesting and open up new possibilities,
keeping the design in line with the analog version reveals intent and will make
the product accessible to users of the existing technology.
I also particularly like the emphasis on
giving items on screen a visual weight based on its importance and will try to
keep that in mind when designing our product. The rest of the chapter provides
useful feedback for our work with the high-fidelity prototype and testing.
The question I would like to raise at
the seminar is how to best improve the openness of the ideation process in a
setting that is not inherently business-like (such as ours). Rewards and the
like might work fine in a more conventional design setting, but is there
anything concrete that you can do in a more study-oriented setting?
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