more articles |
Sketching User Experiences (1)- Bill Buxton
In "Interacting with Paper," Bill Buxton proposes paper prototyping which he calls 'paper interfaces' as an alternative and a better solution to testing user experiences before starting the design process. The author suggests that paper holds powerful affordances that represent systems of control that users respond to and experience, both in terms of a sketch's control over users' actions (control commands) as well as its faculty to lead users to focus on the 'experience' and 'usability' of an interface rather than on its aesthetic feel or design.
Armando Guiller
Armando Guiller is a mechanical engineer by training, and a growing artist by passion, and has won numerous honorary awards. His sculptural work has the ability to communicate with scientists, engineers and artists, as it involves craft, mathematical precision, and highly conceptual and philosophical investigations into spatial and perspectival associations. He uses both industrial (metal) and natural (wood) materials, which he treats himself with heavy machinery.
The Simplicity Shift – Scott Jenson
Scott Jenson defines 'feature blindness' as users being blinded by a feature list. He identifies the bottom-up approach of creating a user persona and a task scenario as more efficient than the top-down approach, in terms of organizing a commonsensical hierarchy of a product's features. The ideal visualization would be to 'tame' the feature list and prioritize features in accordance to a set of usage requirements and subsequent usage frequency.
TSL230R Light to Frequency Converter
This is a first try at using TSL230R to measure HRV (Heart Rate Variability) levels. It will be used as part of a larger project to collect users' heart rates and translate this data onto a mobile (potentially wearable) screen as a non-verbal messaging system that reveals a somewhat hidden state of 'being'.
“Defining Goals and Concerns” and “Deciding Who Should Be Participants” – Joseph Dumas & Janice Redish
Before you begin testing it is important to set your primary evaluation goals and concerns. Once those have been defined, it will be possible to plan a usability test accordingly. Dumas & Redish raise the following processes: making choices among goals and concerns; moving from general concerns to specific ones; and understanding sources of goals and concerns.