Reading Seminar 1 - The Return of the Sick One (a.k.a. Adam Nyberg)

Having read the chapters about interaction design; everything from how to start working to how to decide on a prototype, I can safely say that creating a smooth design can be a difficult task and something that can be achieved in a number of ways.

The reading in the book starts by explaining four common approaches to working with design which are: user-centered design (UCD) where you always keep in touch with the users throught development, activity-based design where you focus on the task that your design needs to achieve, systems design where a functional system is the end goal and the users will need to adapt if they wish to use it effectively, and finally genius design a work form that is highly controversial since it heavily relies on the designers intuition and knowledge of “what users want” rather than asking them.

When doing research for your design you need to, in general, decide upon what your end goal is and what you need to research to get there (a.k.a your hunt statement) and then decide what method of research you want to conduct; qualitative research (a subjective choice of a small group of research candidates) or quantitative research (a more objective method since you use a much larger amount research candidates). After that it is important to consider how you choose your research candidates, what questions to ask or what activities you want them to perform.

Having collected a sufficient amount data you now need to make more choices, this time on how to analyze your data, and what you can do with that data. In short you need to organize your data into structures, search for patterns and work step by step until you know what elements need to be incorporated into your design and what your ideal user looks like.

The texts on ISO-standards for ergonomics regarding visual display terminals and human-centered design for interactive systems gives a great insight into what attributes to focus on when designing using vague data. Lastly the text on UCSD (user-centered system design) felt like a great complement to working with classic UCD since the user focus remains until the systems life cycle ends. Though UCSD can be a chore to follow there is potential in using it. Something I would like to discuss more is genius design, does it really work is it a fluke?