Design Quotes

"The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site."

—Frank Lloyd Wright

Hemingway rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms 39 times. When asked about how he achieved his great works, he said, "I write 99 pages of crap for every one page of masterpiece." He has also been quoted as saying "the first draft of anything is shit."

"The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket." —Albert Einstein

"Rewrite and revise. Do not be afraid to seize what you have and cut it to ribbons … Good writing means good revising."

—Strunk and White, Elements of Style

User Centered Design

January 23, 2007

Design

Good design is good because of its fitness to a particular user fitness to a particular task

In general, you are not your user! Our class will stress user centered

design.

Design

Why is it important?

Design

Why is it important? Design exists whether you think

about it or not. When you don’t think about design,

bad design will be the result.

The Design Process

… I arrived at the studio room, and found a man at a drawing table, sketching out different variations of the Walkman® he was designing. I got close enough to see the large sketchpad and saw 30 or 40 different variations that he had considered and put down on paper. I introduced myself, pleaded ignorance about design, and asked him why he needed to make so many sketches. He thought for a second, and then said, "I don't know what a good idea looks like until I've seen the bad ones.“

By Scott Berkun

Design

To choose the best solution, you must have more than one solution to choose from.

The Historic Waterfall Model

System feasibility Analysis

Specifying functionality Design Implementation

Coding and unit testing Integration and testing

Operation and maintenance

User Centered Design Cycle

Composed of a series of steps like most design methodologies.

Developed to give the design team maximum exposure to

the users feature specific measurement of usability.

Development is essentially iterative and self-correcting, and this model supports those aspects of design.

From CNN’s When good software goes bad By Jeordan Legon

Almost one in five computer users surveyed by Consumer Reports encountered software problems serious enough to contact technical support in the past 12 months. The high number of pleas for help, suggests the magazine, may be caused by frequent and persistent software glitches.

Software is riddled with errors because of its growing complexity, experts say, but also because much of the development costs -- as high as 80 percent by some estimates -- are spent on finding and fixing defects in millions of lines of code.

Design Cycle

NeedsAnalysis

User & TaskAnalysis

FunctionalAnalysis

Requirements Analysis

Set Usability Goals

Design

Prototype Evaluate

Northeastern University ACM

Scott Berkun: Why Software Sucks

Design Cycle

NeedsAnalysis

User & TaskAnalysis

FunctionalAnalysis

Requirements Analysis

Set Usability Goals

Design

Prototype Evaluate

Design Cycle Needs Analysis

Thumbnail sketch Why is a new system/product

needed?

Describe in one sentence or phrase Basic user (audience) description Benefit Basic systems

characteristics/capabilities

Design Cycle User and Task Analysis

Identifies Characteristics of the potential user

population(s), eg. demographics, domain knowledge.

Goals that the user wants to accomplish. Tasks that the users perform.

May identify Mental models. Familiar metaphors.

Design Cycle Functional Analysis

Who does what? Which system functions will accommodate

which tasks ? What part of the task is the human going to

do? What part of the task is the computer/device

going to do? Will there be manual tasks? Will there be tasks

that can be solved by an off-the-shelf package? [Not everything needs to be automated or developed from scratch.]

Design Cycle Technical Requirements Analysis

Formal technical specs Flowchart Schematic

Design Cycle Set Usability Goals

Metrics Determine the quantifiable measures of how

good is "good enough" e.g. task completion time, error rates, user preferences

Set these goals up front Keep refining the system until you meet these

goals

Design Cycle Design

Where the planning pays off… Appearance Functionality

Perceived affordance

Design Cycle Prototype the Interaction

Try it out Build the prototype

Design Cycle Evaluate

Get feedback on the prototype User-based, testing Expert-based Quantitative and qualitative measures

In Class Assignment

Divide up into two groups of two and one of three. Look at http://www.baddesigns.com/examples.html

or http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ Select one bad design you would like to present to

the class or come up with your own example. Prepare to present this to the class. Include:

The bad design. The URL of the bad design. Why do you think this is poorly designed? Can you

describe the problem using any of the terms discussed in class (perceived affordance, mental model, metaphor)

Can you suggest or improve on the suggested remedy for the poor design?

Design and Art

2D and 3D design Animation – Making of Finding Nemo

Homework

Free Writing due 01/28 - Compare and contrast the animation, engineering and software design processes described in class last week and today.