Reading Reflection: Usability Testing

We read two chapters on usability testing this week. The UX book refers usability testing as rigorous evaluation, while activities such as experts inspection and heuristic evaluation as rapid evaluation. Is the one called rigorous actually more rigorous or effective? This makes me think about Apple again. Sometimes, the experts’ experiences combined with their understanding of the users’ goals, …

MyPurdue “Look Up Classes” Usability Inspection

The web interface of myPurdue has lots of problems, but the one bothers me the most is the course navigation, since I use it quite often to look for courses. When I log in to myPurdue, and click the “Academic” tab, and then click the “Look Up Classes” at the navigation bar on the left, …

Future Interface for Researchers: NUI+BCI

I’m a researcher. I read and write all the time. When I write, I need to cite what I’ve read, in order to identify the holes in what others have written and provide support for my own argument. I read various publications: academic papers, books, reports, magazines, blogs, etc. I read from various media: either …

RAA3: Analyzing #insomnia on Twitter

Jamison-Powell, S., Linehan, C., Daley, L., Garbett, A., & Lawson, S. (2012). “I can’t get no sleep”: Discussing #insomnia on Twitter. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1501–1510). Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2208612 Purpose of the Research:  (1) To explore the role of social media in the discussion of …

Reading Reflection: Information Organization and Prototype

Information Architecture Reading from Brinck, Gergle, & Wood : 1. What is information architecture? Information architecture refers to the structure or organization of the website, especially how each page relates to each other. This involves content analysis and planning. Information architecture is rooted from database design and information retrieval, and strongly influenced by HCI, library science, and …

Engineering and Beauty

We discussed the three paradigms of design in a previous class: the engineering paradigm, the human information processing (HIP) paradigm, and the phenomenological paradigm. The engineering paradigm stresses that things should work, the HIP paradigm stresses that things should be easy to use, while the phenomenological paradigm stresses that things should be pleasant to use. …

Crop vs. Mask

As much as I like the iWork on the Mac especially Keynote compared with Powerpoint and Word in MS Office. I still have not got used to the “mask” function. “Mask” basically does the same thing as “Crop” in MS Office, but it provides more flexibility: both the mask window and the picture can be …

Reflection on iPhone App Design Session

We had a design session to sketch the interface of an iPhone app where students can view their GPA and grades. The following are the flow charts and the sketches from our team. Major take-aways from this session are: 1. It takes great level of familiarity to the elements of the phone from the designer’s …

RAA2: Adaptive Agents Monitor and Increase Students’ Engagement

Szafir, D., & Mutlu, B. (2012). Pay attention!: designing adaptive agents that monitor and improve user engagement. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI  ’12 (pp. 11–20). New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2207676.2207679 Purpose of the Research: The authors of this paper set to answer the question: How to design …

Reading Reflection: Persona, Scenario, Goal-Directed Design

Major take-aways from this week’s reading on persona, scenario, and requirement is goal-directed design: (1) There are three different types of user goals: experience goals, end goals, and life goals. I hope we read these details at the beginning of this semester when we started to talk about goal-oriented design. Until now, I was mostly thinking …