interactive design 1 - med m/512 - fall 2005
Philip van Allen - v a n a l l e n @ a r t c e n t e r . e d u
room 228, wednesday 1:00pm-5:00pm
all materials on this web site © copyright 2005, Philip van Allen
 
week 01a - assignment, midterm project, mdp web basics

assignment : 

due week 02
  • Form a team of 4 people for the midterm project - we'll make sure there is a good distribution of experienced and less experienced web designers on each team.
  • Read the Experience Design, and Art As Experience Design readers

due week 03

  • Read the Productive Interaction article
  • Read pages 1-36 in "Web ReDesign"
  • Define and present the project
    • site description
    • team member roles
    • goals and audience
    • proposed project scope - number of pages, amount of content, anticipated difficulties/challenges
    • stakeholders you plan to interview
    • a set of stakeholder/client questions that will help define the project better
midterm project : 
Your team will design and build a web site. The project provides experience designing an innovative interactive site, working in a team environment, and using a formal methodology for developing an interactive project.

Each team will design and produce a unique version of the Google website. Of course, there is not enough time to build out the complete site. Rather your task is to design and build a working version of the homepage and several interior pages demonstrating what the full site would be like.

Teams must do research and interview stakeholders in the website. You should talk to different kinds of users.

 
project brief : 

A primary goal of this project is to explore interaction by designing innovative interactive approaches in the context of a practical website. Each team's design must include at least one prominent feature that communicates with the audience in an experimental, dynamic way, breaking out of the traditions of mainstream websites. These interactive designs should draw on the course readings, discussions, and the team's own research.

The design should have these specific features:

  • Redesign the Google home page to better communicate their many services (images, local, froogle, maps, etc), perhaps integrating them better. Note the "more" page with all of the google services: www.google.com/intl/en/options/. Google is evolving into a web portal with many services yet their homepage does not yet reflect this. What would the next generation homepage look like?
  • Create a design for presenting search results that's dynamic, and enables the user to manipulate the results in a productive way. This system should address the pitfalls of the current search results, and can assume large/high resolution display screens and Flash or other dynamic interactive platforms.

Note that these features must fit within the goals of the site and cannot be media art for media art's sake. Experimental does not mean unusable or ineffective!

Additional goals include:

  • satisfy the various constituencies that use the site
  • serve the business and communication goals of Google
  • communicate the approach and aspirations of Google

Requirements:

  • You will develop a design document, a prototype, and the final version of the website
  • Build 3 or more web "pages"
    • home page with navigation to the rest of the site
    • at least one page from inside the site (not a search results page)
    • a search results page that demonstrates how your improved search system would work
  • There must be "real" content in the site, including text copy. This content can come from existing materials

Research links:

On-Ground Research

  • go to a physical library - search on your own, search using the help of a librarian
  • analyze a print newspaper
  • analyze a printed yellow pages
  • analyze a print catalog

 

 
clients : 

This is a somewhat unusual project in that the teams won't have a formal client, since we won't have formal access to Google. Instead, each team will use use different Google users and other experts as their clients.

 

  
project schedule : 
  • week 02 - Form Team
  • week 03 - Short presentation of team roles and project direction
  • week 05 - Present Design Document and design concepts
  • week 06 - Present Prototype
  • week 07 - Desk crits with instructor
  • week 08 - Midterm Due

 

  
typical team roles : 
  • Producer - Team leader, task assignments, schedules, design arbiter
  • Art Director - Leads visual design, primary art production
  • Technical Director - Leads technical design, primary technical production (html, JavaScript, page templates, site management)
  • Content Editor - Leads content design, primary content production (information design, navigation, text copy, audio, video, proofing)

 

  
previous projects : 

 

  
interaction discussion : 

The goals of interaction design - Four perspectives

Usability

Make it easy for the user to perform useful tasks. The designer's job is to make the things users want to do as simple as possible. The best approach is to get out of the way and make users as successful as possible. The designer should pay attention to the following:

  • Responsiveness - download times should be minimal and the system should react quickly
  • Perform user testing to see how users actually use your system. Pay attention to paths through your site and eliminate any situations that cause mistakes, hesitation or confusion.
  • Don't violate user's expectations
  • Be as consistent and predictable as possible
  • Users want instant gratification, and the designer should enable the user to go where they want
  • Function is primary
  • Keep learning time to a minimum
Experience Design

Create a great experience that satisfies the user's expectations. The designer does this by building an attraction, engagement, and conclusion that takes into account the following:

  • Wider boundaries than traditional design and striving to create experiences beyond just products or services
  • Viewing a product or service from the entire lifecycle with a customer, from before they perceive the need to when they discard it - considering the entire context and outcome of the work
  • Creating a relationship with individuals, not targeting a mass market
  • Invoking and creating an environment that connects on an emotional or value level to the customer

Experience design emphasizes the need to broaden the designer's view beyond just “the thing” to include the entire context and outcome of the work.

Art As Experience, John Dewey's Perspective - As interpreted by Phil in terms of interaction design

The designer/artist selects, simplifies, clarifies, abridges, and condenses according to her interests and presents this perspective in a way that is open and sustains a certain tension and disturbance. This creates an opportunity for the participant to reflect and create their own experience, recapitulating the designer's process, but not necessarily their conclusions.

  • The benefit of art [and design] come from the interaction of the work and the participant. It is an embodied experience that requires an active participation of the audience.
  • Experiences are made by the one having the experience, and depend on her active participation, prior experiences, interests, and personal perceptions
  • Aesthetic experiences have an emotional aspect to them that comes through the experience of resistance or discord and eventual resolution to stasis. This rhythm is a natural one that people have everyday. In other words, the aesthetic experience is directly related to human's daily survival and existence in the world
  • The aesthetic experience does not have the wholly practical and intellectual character that a scientific conclusion has. It is more felt as a consequence of the integrated experience as a whole.
  • "Life goes on within an environment, not merely in it, but because of it, through interactions with it."
  • "The artist has his problems and thinks as he works. But his thought is more immediately embodied in the object. Because of the comparative remoteness of his end, the scientific worker operates with symbols, words, and mathematical signs. The artist does his thinking in the very qualitative media he works in, and the terms lie so close to the object that he is producing that they merge directly into it." ** see references below for more on the topic of design research
  • "Pleasures may come about through chance contact and stimulation, but happiness and delight are a different sort of thing. They come to be through a fulfillment that reaches to the depths of our whole being with the conditions of existence."
Productive Interaction - Phil's Perspective

Create a system that enables users to create their own meaning through productive interaction. Instead of creating scripted, enveloping experiences, the productive interaction designer frames an exploration of a meaning space, making sure the audience has the affordances to create their own "take". The designer does this by managing the design of:

  • Content: Information, narrative elements, meanings and sensations as communicated in text, image, video, sound, tactile and other modes.
  • Context: The integrated presentation of content in form, decoration, attitude, organization, selection, values, and experiences.
  • Affordance: The handles that enable the audience to work with and manipulate the content and context.
  • Audience: The users as integral elements of the total system, who operate it through the affordances, and who create the final expressions.

In this framework, design is a radically non-linear process of engagement and making, spinning a complex and recursive relationship between the domains of content, context, affordance and audience.  Here, each element influences the design of the other as the designer builds up a full, yet flexible and open work that relies on the user as an active collaborator.

 
 
 

A comparison of the philosophies of Experience Design and Art As Experience, as derived from writing on both topics.

Experience Design
Art As Experience
What is the measure of success?
User satisfaction, consistency, connects on an emotional level, create a positive experience, create a relationship with user, imparting information or feeling, create pleasure, envelop the user. Happiness and delight, new knowledge created by user as part of interaction, perception, on-going affect on user, new view of world/themselves.
What are the means of achieving success?
Understand the user, user research, powerful designed experiences, design the entire life-cycle, rely on familiarity. Provoke and create dissonance, make an open system which does not present fixed conclusions, put some responsibility on user, lead people into new, unfamiliar areas.
What is communication?
The transmission of information, persuasion Establishing a journey that leads to open-ended discovery for the user, sharing dilemmas & questions, creating opportunities for synthesis
What is the journey?
Attraction, engagement, conclusion, extension Discord, reflection, recovery of union, continued effect
Who makes the experience?
The designer The user
Who defines the end-product?
The designer The user

 

  
 
references : 

Usability

Experience Design

John Dewey

Productive Interaction

 

  
 

 

  

all materials on this web site © copyright 2005, Philip van Allen

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