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Organized Projects

by: Binding Designs, LLC

In order to successfully organize a project, there are steps to be taken. Getting the most done in one step is not the best way for the long run. It is better to organize in the beginning than to have a mess in the end. A project that was written as quickly as possible is typically impossible to work with afterwards. It is sometimes easier to rewrite a piece of software, than to work on an existing piece of software that was not organized properly.

There are many considerations to be taken while organizing a project. For example, creating a large website with LAMP will take some thought. It is not a good idea to mix the HTML/CSS/PHP/JavaScript/MySQL all into one stew. They should all be separated from each other as much as possible. There should be a HTML template to inject the data into. The Database layer should be separated from the non-Database library. The JavaScript should not be mixed with PHP and HTML. The CSS styles should not be inline with the HTML. The CSS should be separated out in and the HTML tags should be given classes.

They should all be separated or a huge mess will arise and it will be impossible to work on the code later on. Doing research and properly planning will save a ton of time in the end. Follow a few basic design guidelines and it will make the project go much more smoothly.

Facebook

by: Binding Designs, LLC

Facebook is a social networking utility that is very good at what it does. It is a 60 Million user website that allows people to find their friends & family and meet new people. It is similar to MySpace, but in my opinion is much more advanced. The user interface is not so "childish" and ads are not polluting the web pages as MySpace does. There is one ad that shows about 2/3's of the time and is hidden over on the left side of the page. It does not cause any friction in the user experience. I can't say the same about MySpace. The ads are everywhere. I don't understand how MySpace is as succesful as it is with all the Ads everywhere.

MySpace is not the only competitor that Facebook has. Their are many new Social Networking sites spawning all the time. Bebo is one that is similar. Bebo's Developer's tools are so similar to Facebook's developer tools. MySpace, however, uses Google's OpenSocial platform. It is much different and is based on JavaScript and rests on the Client-side. Facebook's developer tools must be written in a Server-side language such as PHP. Facebook has FBScript which is JavaScript with a Facebook "coat" over it.

Cooper Response - Part V

by: Binding Designs, LLC

Part V of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, “Getting Back in to the Driver’s Seat”, consisted of three chapters: “Desperately Seeking Usability,” “A Managed Process,” and “Power and Pleasure.”

In Chapter 12, Cooper brings up an interesting point of how the programmers have more power than the designers. He is saying that the common seat-at-the-table solution does not address putting design in front of programming. It makes sense to have a sketched-out design that the developers of a system should follow. The designers, however, don’t always realize the restrictions of programming. If there were no timelines that programmers had to follow, then any design could be made. Usually programmers make software a certain way because it is the easiest way. This could obviously affect the usability of a system. Besides just not making a system more user-friendly to take the easy way out, sometimes it is the only way to get a goal accomplished. For example, developing software for a BlackBerry, a designer could make a perfect application on paper. But, the tools allowed would not possibly allow to be done what is specified to be done in the design. Software will not have the most effective user interface because of the limitations. Designers usually do not have the limitations that programmers do. Back to the BlackBerry example, a designer could, to improve the user-friendliness, say: “just put the menu up there at the top.” A programmer has the BlackBerry development kit and should say: “there is no code in there to: ‘just put the menu up there at the top.’” It would be a huge programming project (task) to complete a simple design (goal). A multi-disciplinary team would eventually make a system come out better. A lot more new struggles would arise from integrating other disciplines into the team. If all members were properly aware of all the aspects, then it would make it easier for everyone. A programmer might not understand that the designer does not understand what the programmer is doing or vice-versa. If a carpenter wants to design a system and then have the programmers implement it, then the carpenters might not know exactly what the software/hardware can do.

In Chapter 13, “A Managed Process,” again, discusses about the ‘designers vs. programmers’ on the issues of usable systems. Also, he brings others into the equation such as sales, management, and marketing. Cooper starts going off about the interaction designers getting more into the work or to “put themselves in harm’s way.” Typical designers usually are way out of the system and only draw up plans that might not work. Interaction designers would be closer to the code and know what is actually going on behind the scenes. Cooper states for the interaction designers to document the design to get it built. It should be documented in very great detail and examples set up to demonstrate exactly how the system would behave. It should be described “in detail to give the developers confidence that the solution is robust enough to survive implementation.” He emphasizes how design is like a written battle-plan. Another point brought up is that designers come in after the underlying functionality is built. A better way to approach is to have the designers put the design on paper before implementation. The designers should be at a lower level designing the code and implementation, not just the very high level layer of graphical designs and user interface. Basically, it seems as though there should be the high-level designers, low-level designers, and the implementationalists. Cooper states that the designers specify the inside of the system from the outside of the system. This can’t always hold because in some situations the designers outside of the system need to know how the inside of the system works or they are going to be designing who knows what. Any pattern of pixels can be displayed on a monitor; the designers could specify exactly how the pictures (including letters) should display and behave. Figuring that the designers knew that much, than maybe the designers would not need to know how the system works from the inside. They should just know that it does work.

Human Computer Interaction - Cooper

by: Binding Designs, LLC

Part IV of Cooper’s book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, is “Interaction Design Is Good Business.” This part emphasizes on some more aspects of the importance of designing the user interface. There are three categories or chapters in Part IV. These chapters are titled: “Designing for Pleasure”, “Designing for Power”, and “Designing for People.” Overall, he is emphasizing “designing” taking these three important factors into consideration: “Pleasure”, “Power”, & “People.”

Chapter 9, “Designing for Pleasure” is about designing for different types of users. He suggests that the only way to please the users is to design with a persona in mind. A persona is a particular type of user. It is a general person that many people follow the behavior of and have the same traits. One example used is the idea of designing one automobile for a husky carpenter, a soccer mom, & a business geek all at the same time. This would not be desirable. A disturbing looking picture of a vehicle should come to mind that fits all three of these people. Instead, a solution offered by Cooper, design three types of vehicles: one for each of the three categories or persona. Designing for a single user is inadequate because the “user” does not behave like an “elastic.” There should be particular users taken into mind. Actual people are used to represent categories of users. Four personas used in the book for a flight computer console were Clevis McCloud, a not to computer savvy fellow; and the three computer savvy users that know computers better but do not like the same materials that would be displayed by the console. The system should be designed to satisfy all these personas: easy to use for the beginners, yet have all the features the others would want to use.

Chapter 10, “Designing for Power” is about defining goals as a method to solve problems and its’ about designing polite software. A goal is a purpose, Cooper states. It is not the same as a task. The goal is the end condition while the task is the process of achieving it. An example used is getting across the country is the goal and the task of traveling is means to achieve the goal (ends). The means and ends theory. Programmers are more like task-oriented designers instead of goal-oriented designers. Cooper states that interaction designers must be goal-oriented instead of task-oriented designers. One example used in the book was about a Television News. The goal was not to have a static news show, but a dynamic, ever-changing to stay good, news show. A method used to remedy a clip that may not be used in a show is to have a strategy to allocate the time for the missing clip to the rest of the broadcasting. This will not disrupt the timing of the show. There are two types of goals: “personal” and “practical” goals. All goals should be able to be lumped into one of these two categories. Practical goals should be able to be met without violating the personal goals. Allowing Ted, a TV consumer, to operate a TV is used as an example. An obvious goal he is trying to achieve is to watch TV. Other goals he is trying to accomplish by buying a TV are: not to feel stupid, not be humiliated, not make mistakes, not make mistakes, feel accomplished (sooner the better), and have some fun. These goals Ted is trying achieve will be met with the task or process of “getting” a TV. The way the TV was designed was not satisfying Ted’s goals. The TV was too complicated for all of this. It had so many features that were hard to learn. He would enjoy these features after many hours of practice or learning. But, he does not want to spend all this time right away. Instead, he would rather just simply take the TV out of the box and watch it. The TV should accommodate both the beginning users and the advanced users. All stages of a beginning user turning into an advanced user should be accommodated also. Another type of goal is a “corporate goal.” This would include increasing profit & market share, eliminating competition, expanding, and going public, etc… “False goals” are another type of goal which is described more as tasks than goals. “False goals” are means to ends instead of ends themselves. “Computers Are Humans, Too” is a statement portraying the behavior of people when around computers. They act more like they are in the presence of another person instead of a dead object like a rock. Designing for politeness is about trying to get computers to behave politely by making them more like a person; but not to mimic the bad traits of humans like being error-prone. Some traits of politeness are for the software to be interested, deferential, forthcoming, etc… to the users.

“Designing for People,” Chapter 11 of the book is a scenario based approach of designing the human-interactive interfaces of computers. A scenario is a certain sequence of events that either are frequent, necessary, or neither. Neither is defined as an edge-case scenario. Frequent is defined as a daily-use scenario. Necessary is defined as a necessary-use scenario. These are three categories that different sequences of events could be classified as. They are all self descriptive upon their terms or name of definition. Removing function makes a UI easier to use. However, sometimes the functionality is desired by some of the personas. “Perpetual Intermediates” are the users that do not fall into the beginner or expert user classes. These guys are the intermediate users. Perpetuated by Cooper is the fact that most users are not beginners or experts, but are intermediates. Marketers want it to be designed for the beginner while the programmers design it for the experts. The curve is a paradox. Most of the users are intermediate users, but the ease of use is high for the beginners and experts. The gray space that represents what the application was designed for and no users fall in is large. The black space where the software was not designed for but all the users fall in is large. The key would be to make these two spaces as small as possible. The upside down bell curve created by the programmers and marketers ease of use paradigm should be flipped to downside up. Or, the classes of users’ bell curve needs to be flipped to upside down. So, either the users all need to be changed to be beginners or experts; or the ease of use should be changed to satisfy the intermediate users. Or, the two curves could be fit to each other with high precision and design the user interface 10% for the beginners, 80% for the intermediate users, and 10% for the experts. This will about match up the two lines on the graph of page 184 of Coopers’ book and get rid of the paradoxical curve. Setting up an appropriate vocabulary is an important phase in developing the interactive user interface. Different members of the team may portray the same words, sentences, paragraphs, and other material differently. There should be clearly defined terms used in discussion and all other stages. The term design phase might be interpreted differently by two different members of the team. The design phase could be interpreted as “building a prototype” by one person and “building a prototype” could be thrown into the class of implementation

Human Computer Interaction

by: Binding Designs, LLC

Summary of the most important factors in HCI:

1. Our jobs as interaction designers relates to the "substitution myth" by the fact that we are designing the interactive systems that are getting "substituted" for people.

2. We must summarize the software's role and the human's role in their interaction. We must think of the changes that software systems or people will make to eachother. What responsibilities are people better at and what responsibilities are computers better at and what are the consequences. The process of predicting is a dynamic one. Two dynamic systems interacting with each other could be difficult to manage perfectly.

3. All of the technology overloaded people in the Desert Storm. It overwhelmed them with tasks to have to maange. This result does not surprise me because the soldiers had to think about all the factors they would in any historical war and they would have to think about all the new factors that are brought by technology. I think the original position papers would say that the technologies might not make the situation safer.

4. This is emphasizing the fact that when a new system is created, it will be used to the extreme and create a lot of activity in some field. There will be a reaction to the activity from a new system.

5. Individuals should meet this challenge by realizing that interactive systems are here to stay. There may be evolutionary changes to humans.

Designers will have control of people's actions while they use the systems. A hypothesis should be created and there should be an experiment to support the hypothesis. Or, data about people/organizations and their interactions with the interactive systems from the last 50 years could be studied and cosidered in the design for the interactive systems for the next 50 years.

"This means that designers also function as experimenters—the adaptive response of people and organizations to new systems tests the hypotheses about what would be useful embodied by those particular prototypes or products."

6. The authors suggest using prototype systems to model the activity using the newly created design.

7. A paradigm is a pattern of behavior or traits. A paradigm shift is a change in the pattern.

8. Monitoring the effects of creating new systems and incorporating them in to other systems is very important. Unleashing software systems to humans work and other environments to relieve work on humans is good, but it may have other not so good effects. For example, it would seem giving all these technologies to soldiers in combat would be good, but it might overwhelm the soldier in combat and cause death or injury. I guess the best way would be to quantitively add up all the consequences and measure the good vs. bad to figure out the best amount of technology to use for each situation. For the big picture,this should be measured for long and short term consequences and all should be factored in to the decision of what systems get deployed.

Ethnography

by: Binding Designs, LLC

Ethnography Summary

Ethnography is, basically, the study of human behavior in their natural environment. “The Role of Ethnography in Interactive Systems Design” is an article that focuses on ethnography in the realm of designing interactive systems. Studies on humans, in their natural habitat, offer deeper information than in a mock environment. Societies, or organizations, should be used as a basis for design because societies and organizations are not always the same as one another. An interface should consider the different aspects of different classifications of users. The layered approach is used to allow people with more knowledge to control more advanced features allowing beginners to use the system. The professional can access places that the beginner can not. Different cultures should have different interfaces with access to the same features on the same levels just having the interface mold to the different characteristics of that culture. Each culture, or different classification of users, should, based on their experience, have access to all layers of a system equally. The only aspect in a system that should be changed is the interface which should be bent to fit around the characteristics of the class of users. That is, the pieces of a system that interact with pieces of other systems (the masking interface) should be the only pieces subject to change. The non-interactive pieces (the underlying functionality) of the system should not change.

The key to design with respect to ethnography is to make the situation focus on how it is in the “real world” disregarding made up environments. It is used to realize the best way to make a system highly successful in interaction. System is not specifically used to refer to computers in this context. It is more general focusing on systems as any structure that follows the laws of physics. Applied to human-computer interaction, it is the design of computers that interact with humans in their natural environment. All of the human factors would have to be taken into consideration and these factors can be better obtained while studying humans (just another system) acting in their natural environment. Since humans create computers, it is just one system (humans) interacting with another system (computers). Computers are designed to match “our world” and the way humans would interact the best, would be an environment that is most like our world. Or, an environment created better than “this world”. “This world” is referred to as humans interacting with everyday non-computer objects or “our world.” It is not exactly clear what the difference between a machine and computer is, but machines were created much before computers. Humans have adapted, in the human evolutionary sense, to using machines. This is referred to as early as cavemen and their primitive tools as being machines. Humans evolved, physically changed, to a species that uses tools, machines and computers.

“Naturalistic observation is the act of observing humans in their natural environment while they are unaware of being watched. In a way, this could be tied into ethnography because both processes involve the observation of subjects (in this sense, humans) while in their natural atmosphere. Psychologists use this technique when other methods of experimentation are not feasible. For example, naturalistic observation is used when a study on preschool children and how they interact with each other is being done. The children will not act naturally if known they are being observed. The same could be said for the science of ethnography. Humans, and any other mammals, will always act differently if they are aware of being observed. This is called, in psychology, the role of being the ‘good’ or ‘faithful’ subject. The ‘good’ subject will answer, or act, in ways that he/she thinks will be pleasing to the experimenter; or in this case, observer” (Baker 2006).

MDI vs IDI

by: Binding Designs, LLC

First impressions last a lifetime: effect of interface type on disorientation and cognitive load

This article is about the results of a scientific research on the results of two interfaces: menu driven (MDI) and icon driven (IDI) interfaces. The paper focuses on disorientation and cognitive load as the two primary cognitive conditions in respect to the research. Users suffer from learning and memorizing information presented on a computer screen. In this paper, the interaction between IT and humans is studied. Consumer reaction and widespread adoption are two factors to measure in this study. Consistency is one theory of ease of use. This may be true. Just because a feature’s interface is consistent with other feature’s interfaces, does not make it easier to use. It may be familiar which makes it easy, but not the most optimal method of interfacing with this feature. ” Disorientation can be defined as the tendency to lose one’s sense of location in a software interface.” Disorientation is common on the web because it is so easy for so many different people to create navigation systems. There is a lack of consistency and a lot of navigations are developed poorly. A poorly developed inconsistent navigation may be the worst. The two navigation methods that will be compared can be defined as follows: “Structured menus may be clear to some but a means to disorientation for others. Icons on the other hand may be very representative to some but very confusing to others. Structured menus may be clear to some but a means to disorientation for others. Icons on the other hand may be very representative to some but very confusing to others.” Cognitive load is the amount of cognitive information to be processed by the user. Good screen design is the key to making a user be able to use the system with less frustration. Some traits of the screen are: “layout, consistency (Grudin, 1989), color, spatial display, and organizational display.” Two elements are considered: perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEU). A set of tasks were asked to be completed by 59 subjects and half were assigned IDI and the other half MDI. It was set to be unbiased and the results recorded through timing and a PE/PEU based questionnaire. The tasks done in IBI took participants much longer to complete than the tasks done in MDI. This may be biased because all users were used to using software that was MDI. It may take time for the user to adjust to the new “mental model” of IBI. There is disorientation for a subject to use an unfamiliar interface. The disorientation may be the deciding factor that makes it seem like the MDI is faster to complete. If the subjects were to use both of them equally, before the experiment, then the results would not have been so biased. The PU is higher for the IBI as is concluded by the report. An emphasis on the importance of this study is granted by the new technologies such as Mobile Phones, PDAs, Navigation systems, etc… A situation that could be made up is that it is easier to use a PDA that has IDI, but during first studies, the subjects may use the MDI faster. This would probably be because they are familiar with the MDI. But, studies could show that later, the IDI has faster times. This would be because the subject is learning the IDI. If a subject had exactly the same experience with both IDIs and MDIs, then the first study might show that the IDIs are easier to use.

Mobile Site - Pocket Social

Binding Designs, LLC is now launching a Social Networking site for mobile phones. The site is located at Pocket Social. (http://pocketsocial.mobi) This site will specializing in connecting people with their mobile device. It will not specialize in any category like Dating or Business, but it will be more general and have groups for each. There is a Beta up and running now.