Design research exercise

November 26th, 2009

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Thanks to the student who snapped this masterpiece I sketched while explaining the design research exercise today (her accompanying tweet: ‘What a prodigy, hey hey…’). As silly as my little joke sketches are, that’s as serious as our design research exercises are in class. Today’s session was good – they had to do a short, straightforward interview, being respondent and interviewer by turns. As an introduction, I showed them part of Brenda Laurel’s talk about her research into girls’ games in the nineties. Also explained a bit about the research I’m engaged in at the moment for clients.

For most of them, this exercise turned out to be difficult. After laconic, general responses from a respondent, they just stop, unable to get any further. At each team, my colleague and I stop, and demonstrate how we would ‘push through’ with new and more detailed questions, until we’ve gotten a fuller picture of the respondent’s experiences and emotions.

A few students just gave up anyway and indifferently scrawled brief responses – I gave them hell, because they have to develop a sense of urgency. And they have to understand that only results count – turning in crap is not an option. If they’re not motivated to achieve even a basic goal like this, well, maybe they’ll find some kind of job or school that’s more suited to their mentality. A design professional they will never be. At least, not the kind we train.

In general, however, we’re beginning to see some progress and have a positive impression of the students. At the end of class, they gave some good advice to help us improve the lesson, and feedback which indicates that they understand the importance of research skills.

Read the results of their interviews of each other in the train – very interesting. Will review their work on the first take-home assignment this weekend. Saw a few other tweets: “That guy is scary…” “Crap this, crap that…” Students, realize one thing – I’m not scary, DESIGN is scary. Design is no different than dance, or sports, or acting or filmmaking. You have to bust your a** to get even one pixel, one word, one shot really RIGHT. Have patience – just get your minds on the work, and you’ll be amazed at what we achieve this year.

Adjusted first lesson activity – much better result!

November 19th, 2009
Student explaining an interface idea for a ticket machine.

Student explaining an interface idea for a ticket machine.

Great lesson today! Adjusted the form of the activity, and immediately the level of the discussion and of the results got very, very interesting. Asked them to imagine ‘logical’ and ‘illogical’ locations for a ticket machine, and then to create an interface sketch for the machine in a school (hypothetically: students here usually get free transportation). The sketches and discussion focused minds exactly on the topic: context of use. Here, a student is showing a sketch I found intriguing: a large ’start’ button is in the center, and a constellation of several large cities in the region appears around it. Clicking one of the large cities as a start destination gives a list of the closest regional stations. The idea is that a student almost always lives in a town or city fairly close to the school, or at least, not across the country from it. Other suggestions included allowing a student ID number to be typed in (personalization), and downplaying first-class tickets (students almost never buy them).

Also interesting: almost every team included some ‘illogical’ locations for the machine, which they then re-considered and found logical. In fact, almost any location is logical to buy a ticket, as long as it’s somewhere on a person’s travel path. Playground? Sure, the parents will pick up the kid, and it’s much easier to buy a ticket there than at the crowded station with bags, kids, etc. weighing one down. Obviously, mobile and near-field scenarios would dominate the ideal solutions.

But for the moment, this is a good way of focusing on our learning goal: understanding the relationship of context of use to design.

Too bad I didn’t figure out this approach for the first two classes – but their lesson was nonetheless reasonably good. The many hours we put into designing the curriculum are paying off: we can rely on our lesson plan for a well-organized, structured lesson in which all learning objectives are dealt with.

School year 2009 – 2010

November 18th, 2009
The new teacher team of the Foundation Course in Interaction Design.

The new teacher team of the Foundation Course in Interaction Design.

Meet the new teaching team for Interaction Design 101 – the foundation course at Rotterdam University!

First week of first lessons – first two didn’t go too badly, but not as well as they should. Too much of me talking and them listening instead of discussion, clumsiness in presenting with the Smartboard.

This year, everything’s different. The organization has changed, leaving me and two colleagues in charge of creation of a new first-year interaction design course. The first half is almost finished and ready to launch – lesson plans with teachers’ instructions down to the minute, fantastically designed presentations (both of my colleagues are visual designers with experience in print media). Put all the 300 hours of study last year in the teacher training course into the design of this.

This course will be one of the best of its kind anywhere. The fact alone that it deals with content strategy as well as technology and visual/interactive design puts it in a class by itself among first-year design courses.

The new assignments are tougher because they require the students to put fairly broad theory into action in the first assignments. This is tougher than giving them a more concrete task to accomplish – but it’s also a more valid way of developing design skills. The first semester is devoted to design research: learning about users and analysing interaction, while learning basic laws.

We have the ‘tools’ now to rigorously track students’ progress, evaluate the results for all types of learning goals, including regulatory and emotional goals. Spent the summer integrating this knowledge from the teacher training course into the lessons. At the end of this 9-lesson period, we should have a profile of each individual student that goes a long way towards answering the most critical question of first year: is this the right profession and education for you to be in? Why? Or why not?

Very important that students who are in the wrong educational course – who can’t be design professionals at this point in their lives – stop the course before the end of first year. If they don’t, they wind up dropping out anyway later, after wasting much more of everyone’s time and money. And they disrupt the work of the student teams, which form a big part of second-year work.

Hard to know what’s better now about teaching, than 3 years ago when I began. Then, my enthusiasm and ability to tame vast and chaotic information flows carried the day. But because the school lacked any interaction design curriculum, and having to always improvise, I didn’t have the tools to evaluate students securely. I often had to give some of the bad ones the benefit of the doubt. Or overwork to determine what their exact achievement was, thus wasting effort that could have been better spent.

We’re now ready to get twice the performance out of students with half the effort.

The input of the colleagues is great – we always come up with great ideas for the lessons. It will take some interations, though – hopefully, the students will give us enough feedback to sharpen and refine the lessons.

Check out our site at www.interactiondesign101.com – it’s still all in Dutch, but I’ll be translating it soon for the English version.

Snapshot – discussion of online forms

August 1st, 2009

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The assignment to design an online form produced some interesting work and discussions. It’s really the perfect combination of content development, visual organisation and interaction design skills. Here a student explains a screen designed to allow volunteers to fill in their available hours.

End of the year, 3rd year of teaching

July 22nd, 2009

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Last classes, empty building, loose ends… a few late-graduating students left for the end of August. It went by in a flash. A year of mainly conflict, annoyance and hassle is over.

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Sketching widgets with sound

May 31st, 2009

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If the Smartboard wasn’t such an utterly stupid, badly designed and ineffective product, I might even like it a bit at times like this. With second-year students, we went through a number of scenarios for the use of sound in a widget which feeds updates from an online travel diary. The ideas and features created in this brief discussion were actually quite good, and gave a good impression of the ‘rules of the game’ when it comes to using sound, which is one of the most potentially annoying interaction design elements. This kind of collective discussion and revision works particularly well for the ‘widget’ assignment.

Talking to Amazon: online form with packaging feedback

May 31st, 2009

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A simple case: Amazon sent the box set of three little books by Jim Krause in a box that was too small. This caused the book box to break. Was their packaging feedback form able to contain this simple story? Not really.

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The form contains a rating, followed by a list control (radio buttons) about the size of the Amazon package. This is the right topic, but the options ‘Too small’ and ‘Way too small’ are not included! The only options are: ‘about right’, ‘too big’, and ‘way too big’. So I leave it blank, thus leaving out the most important feedback. The rest of the form works pretty well – good scannability, path to completion is clear, responsive enabling and disclosure makes uploading the photo and indicating its relevance easy. And the success message leads me into checking and eventually revising the form.

Visually, the form is well-organized. The highlighting of the three topics with pale blue bars and large font size, the clear vertical scan line, the color deviation of the success message, all minimize eye movement and create a clear visual hierarchy and flow.

New old drawing table – a beauty!

March 15th, 2009

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It’s here – a perfectly preserved and slightly restored Unic drawing table, ready to use. Even the original toolkit and manual! Will I succeed in making interesting work on it? We’ll see…

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Beautiful book designs

February 22nd, 2009
Typographic ornament from book of Willem de Merode's poetry.

Found some beautifully designed old books at a sale. The typographic ornament above is from the title page of a 1936 edition of Willem de Merode’s poetry. It’s 4 centimeters in diameter.

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Improvised input devices: plastic card for touchscreen

January 11th, 2009

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Saw an interesting example of ‘folk’ input devices at Dudok cafe – rather than fingers, almost all the waiting staff use their ID cards as input devices. This works well, especially because the touch screen contains elements too small to comfortably select with fingertips. The following two photos show the starting screen of the interface, and a total view of the user. A nice example for the first-year students becoming acquainted with the use of ethnographic research techniques in design. Observations like this can result in new input devices.

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