Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Reading seminar 2 - Anton

This reading seminar involved chapters six to eight which in short were about the stages in the design process where you come up with ideas, refine them and finally concretize them as a prototype.

One of the things I found worthwhile considering brainstorming is that you need to give room to be a little wild and not to criticize any idea that comes up. I found during our own brainstorming sessions that that kind of climate in brainstorming did help us to really dare to approach our problems in new ways. Earlier we kind of had ideas of ways of solving our project, but I found the ideas we came up with during this brainstorm to be superior.

Right now we’re in the process of refining our main idea, so reading about that chapter felt relevant, although I felt much of what was written were not so much about what to do, but rather things to watch out for as to not confuse users. For example you don’t want to two lines of text aligned and looking similar if the texts themselves are not related.

We probably will start to think about prototyping soon so we can get some user input about the small details we most assuredly will miss. I think we have a strong concept so far, but to really make something people will want to use, we’ll have to spend time making the interface understandable for the users. I didn’t feel like I got as much from the eighth chapter as I did for six and seven, but I think I realize how important this step is in the iterative design process. Prototyping can’t be done the last thing you do, because after you let people try your prototype you’ll end up with a long list of things that need to change. It will be longer the longer you wait because a lot of functions often are tied in to each other, so to change one thing you might have to change another.

My question is: Is it better to involve users during the process of refining your idea, or rather to independently work out a version and then develop a prototype to test on the user if you only have the resources for one test study

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