Monday, 29 September

Follow Up: 

  From Quora Digest: What methods can be used to describe a designer's ideal range of knowledge and skills? Ryan Singer, Product Manager at Basecamp

"Here are the dimensions I look at:

1. Writing: Can they think and communicate clearly? Writing skills are critical to UI.
2. Interface design: Can they organize elements in 2D space so that the arrangement is meaningful, clear, and instantly understandable? Can they organize elements in time (navigation, flows, steps) in a way that minimizes uncertainty and feels efficient? 
3. Product: Can they appreciate the problems and desires our customers have and turn that understanding into business value? In other words, do they know what matters and what doesn't matter to customers and stakeholders? 
4. Development: Are they able to code their designs in HTML/CSS? Can they go further and integrate their designs into the application source code? Can they talk shop with programmers? 
5. Character: Are they a nice person with a good motivation?

I hope that helps. I think you can tell a lot about a company's culture by seeing how their people look across these dimensions."

Review of Project 1

Review interim work

These are really affordances/signifiers more than mappings per se:

Good and bad constraint examples

Good-ish constraints

 Bad mapping example

 Mapping (bad and good)

Mapping -- bad, bad, and good

Note: mapping involves the extent to which a design (physical or virtual) supports users' mental models. What are you expecting to happen? Does it happen? Describe and, if possible diagram, one's mental model.

From one point of view every interaction involves mapping -- does the object or interface conform to people's mental models or not? Within the interface there are signifiers/affordances to guide you as to what to do and constraints keeping you from doing what you should not be doing.

Reiterate project requirements

Work with group

Homework for Wednesday, 1 October at noon:

• Identify exercise equipment to study, do preliminary analysis
• Read Don’t Make Me Think, “Omit needless words” pp. 48 - 53; answer reading response questions and complete interim assignment; submit through Oncourse assignments. The questions themselves are:

1. What is Krug’s third law of usability?
2. What are the three benefits Krug identifies for eliminating needless words.
3. What is “happy talk” in the web, or broader interface design, context? What is it to be avoided?