Journal Reflections on NM4210

It was a great eye opening to learn about how we design product and services that is not just user centric but also having that user experience.
Pleasure, sociological, physiological, and psychological and Ideological Pleasures
I thought that by studying the four types of pleasure, sociological, physiological, and psychological and Ideological allows us to better understand and nail the kind of things that please the users during the process of using the product. By breaking down into needs and appreciation we could strike a balance between providing the required needs and the great experience of having some nice and easy enough to use services (depending on the target audience).

Ethnographic Study

This observational study include a non-intrusive method to observe, listen and watch how the ‘target audience’ dos certain things or react in a certain why. I am sure many have watched the IDEO success video, (although it was believe to be just an act for the sick of production, no one knows how true it is) the IDEOs experts, went into he supermarkets and observe how people in market make their purchase and make use of the baskets and trolleys. I guess it would be a good way to start will evaluating users’ needs and wants. Many of times we take things for granted things that may seem so apparent to us may be neglected and thus ethnographic study serves as an interesting method to sieve out things that may seem unimportant but it is actually a crucial aspect of users’ needs.

Types of Product –Visceral, Reflective and Behavioral

By categorizing these products, it could help us better market and brand them. For example, when selling a DSLR camera, one won’t market it as sleek and light weight held an event at a fashion week with the other entire cameras which are known as a fashion accessory. Likewise, you don’t market 3.2mega pixels sleek like a card camera to a professional photographer (unless he is buying for his sister).

As I apply this portion to my Kumon Interactive Portal, I feel that it is both a visceral and behavioral product. Especially for the younger kids, the visceral element is extremely important it is the first step to attract their attention. Next, the behavioral element applies more for the parents who accompany the children to surf the net. They are quite mindful about the amount of quality functions and education ability.

Berlyne’s model of aesthetics

Berlyne’s model is about achieving design that is simple enough to use yet novel enough to engross the user. It is extremely applicable to today’s trend. Everything is moving towards minimalistic and simple plain colors. Even for interior design simple design with plain colors and just a little touch of ‘complexity’ to show some contrast give the best comfort to the owner of the house. This works the same way, simple yet with a touch of novelty.
For the Kumon Interactive Website, this model is applied to its functions. It has to be simple enough to comprehend and use as the target group are children from age 7-12. These are the group whom most of their IT competency level is lower. However, we also include some new applications which are not so common among children’s website. They are encouraged to explore the novel applications by the aesthetic quality of the design-dynamic icon and colors of the rainbow.

Most Important Thing!

Design for the user not yourself

Reflections on High Fidelity Prototype

At the end of the day, when the user gives you that smile, you know that you have nail it. (The great user experience!) It was a great challenge for able to accurately test the users for this product. It is for children, and some children usually want to agree with you rather than disagree, so they might just say " Yes Yes nice nice" but doesn't really have a comment on that. Therefore, I have to actually go more indepth to ask them what exactly is so nice about this webpage. One key thing to getting great insights from kids is getting ton know them first, their personality and character. If you are talking to an introvert, all you get is nodding of head. I actually speak to their parents to investigate how their responds could have been link to their personality, which could also affect the accurary of the test.

The older kids who are more expose to internet and have surf quite a few websites, beside those required by schools, are able to give better comments or rather more useful comments on the design and the functions.

One design element which we assumed and is proven true, (noone can get this wrong) they love bright colors, or anything that is colorful. They also prefer big text. They like more fancy text. We try to strike a balance between nice fonts and readable fonts. The page with big junk of text, we will cut down as much as possible and use text which are less fancy. The ones that require the child to key in, we allow more fanciful handwritten font, for that little touch of mischief.

We know we nail it, when the child says something like " you mean this is for real? I will love to use it !" or something like " huh .. I still want to play with it..."

Modifications After Reddy's Advice

The old discussion room, we use this thinking that we need a fuctional page, since it appears that the aesthetic quality is more important, we decided to redesign the page and make it sync with our Kumon portal.
The new and refreshing look !
The old ChatRoom which is completely functional.
The new look, which is simple and friendly to use, specially catered to children.

1st Design : After going through gthe high fidelity test, we realise that the design is too cluttered, some find that the text are too small. So we decided to reduce the amout of content according to which is most useful and relevant to the user. This way we could make the text bigger. We also change the color to a more brigher blue instead of this duller one.
2nd Design : This look is more welcoming and refreshing. Users felt that they could navigate better and straight away know which discussion topic to choose as the text are now big enough.

Designing the Content -Improvements to Fit User's Preferences and Needs

Initially, the icons below are made up of only faces with different expressions, users may be unable to identify and recognise the different functions. It is true that the original idea was to let children explore and move their cursors over them. Over we could also improve the design such that remain its interesting design but at the same time give it some hints of what the icons below mean.
For this design, the icons below were redesign to include a personality for each face. Users were able to tell them apart and even remember each of their functions

Summary of High Fidelity Test

High Fidelity User Experience

1. The discussion box should be more simple
2. The text for both discussion box and chat-room can be bigger
3. Girl want more beautiful font like curvy one (but readability problem, actually do they care?) Boy is fine with the font
4. Need an instruction page as Discussion box and chat-room is still quite a novel idea.
5. After taking Mr Reddy’s advice on changing the character of the icons below, they are better able to remember the categories of them.
6. They like the colors and the layout of the website pages.

Observation:

1. Boys and girls react differently to the aesthetic, boys care more about the functions and the overall experience
2. Girls look out for ‘beautiful’ pictures, bright and colorful, want more ‘happy’ element
3. As age increase they tend to be more critical about the overall design before that the younger kids tend to be easily satisfied as everything seems so interesting to them.

High Fidelity User Testing

Girl Pri 4, she feels that the blue color was too dull, Oops children were not use to laptop reflections. After I adjust the screen to make it brighter, she still thinks that the color could be lighter and brighter. We have make that changes.

Discussion room words are now big enough and clearer, she finds it just nice =).
She is paying attention to every single details.
I want to test to make sure, my modification works. (from Mr Reddy's advice we should attach a certain character to each smiley icon so that user could remember what are the functions) After user has went through the entire website, I ask her without moving the cursor over the icon (which will show the title of the icon) to tell me what does each icon represents.... Guess what? She nailed it all. Although she could tell me the exact name for " Tuition Stuff " but at least she was able to tell me that it was relating to studies or test.
The satisfied user smile and happy to visit the website again =)

Girl, pri four, she loves the fact that the face changes from sad to happy =)
She typed in the login name and password without any problem.
She was really reading it attentive..." you mean this is for real?" she asked
'I really like the graphics, very colorful, but I would like the face to be all smiling ..." Ok she is a very cheerful girl, we can't have all smiling face, cos that will be a bit confusing to differentiat between different functions, instead we make sure that all the facial expressions are positive and cute looking.

Boy 12, was just engrossed in the website. " huh wa the face can turn one !!"
Shows him navigating the website. He was aware of what could be directed to another page and what it couldn't (static pictures).
Overall, he loves the colors and the graphics

More Paper Prototype

The pri two girl was really fascinated with the website design
She loves the illustrations. She randomly picked the icons below.
She points at one of the icon, while I have to change the paper prototype manually to the page she wants.
Pri Four girl navigating around the page and tells me how she finds the designa and layout of the webpage
She points to another hyperlink which will take her to the " Academic" section.

Paper Prototype. Low Fidelity Testing

User Testing –Kumon Portal

• User Test Sample:
  

  1. 5 children
  2. Age: 7, 8, 9, 10, 12,
  3. Middle class family
  4. Have been using internet for at least a year
  5. The primary one and two children usually have parental guidance

• The user tend to follow the sequence of the tabs below (because the paper prototyped can’t simulate the experience of scrolling through the tabs)
• Pri Two and below- Don’t understand the meaning of assessment (should change to e-homework?)
• We should use more interesting and simple words- think about their legibility
• Lower primary needs parents guidance
• They want more games
• They like the visuals
• They will actually look through all the pages because they are fascinated with the visuals
  
  Modifications: Changing the name to make children understand the fuctions better
  Assessment – tuition stuff
• Workbin- downloads
  Gradebook- Quiz Scores
  Personal- about me

Paper Prototype Testers

These are the two kind souls who agreed to take photos with me.... Thank you =) Girls, the rest are too shy .. They are holding their favourite page, they love the interesting elements, colors and apples Wow!!! I get it, we have to use images that remind them of their fairtales and children stories....

Paper Prototype Part Two

This is the Academic section, apparently the kids are not too sure what is the meaning of academic, especially those primary two and below (below 8 years old). So we change that to Quiz instead.

The games section, the kids love this a lot, they want more more more ....

I love this 'Make Friends' Section, not only me but the kids.... kids love to make friends. Our idea for this part is that the letter box will open to reveal letters and it will open up into a piece of paper with the text inside.

Paper Prototype

Login page, the head will turn ...

The page will directly enters the Annoncement page, the most important thing they have to see.

Next it is up to the kids to navigate themselves.... As they click on the hyperlinks at the bottom, the head will turn and pop out
This is the ' Personal' page that link to emails and profile of the user..... After the fidelity test, we change it to ' About Me' becasue the kids practically don't know what so 'Personal' it is ... Oops

Help .. quite standard ... for formal layout for easy reading.

Chicken Stetches for Kumon Online Interactive Portal

After researching and looking through the Kumon's marketing strategies and website we decided that we will reinforce the brand but adding more fun element to the Kumon Online Interactive Portal. The target audiences are children from age 7-13 which means that it has to be colorful and simple enough to use. Simple but still including novel elements to 'surprise' the kids so that they will attracted and stick their heads in front of the computers for hrs.

We modified the original Kumon's face ( a sad one,huh?!) into something more cheerful and playful. We are going to use different colors for the five different categories (hyperlinks) so that the children could recognise and familiarise themselves with it.

These are really very very rough sketches (or chicken sketches) so bare with me for a while....

Die Die MUST READ:User Research Smoke & Mirrors (Christopher Fahey, 2006)

Lecture 10: User research smoke and mirror
From Part 2

Using of the eyetracking device use as empirical user interface test. I truly agree with Fahey’s opinion of “an eyetracker can tell you what people are looking at, but not necessarily what they are seeing (or why they are looking at it).” Applying this to our product (Kumon Online Portal for Students), this is especially true and tricky for testing children, because basically children they are fascinated with colors, colors seem to be the key attraction to them. Their attentions are captivated with seemly novel and interactive activity on the interface. But do they really understand what the message intend to deliver is really hard to tell from such eyetracking device. Interviews and surveys come useful in terms of testing whether the message get through to them and whether they find the product useful.

“Secondly, the results generated by an eyetracking study are, to a good UI designer, rarely surprising.” I would agree that that to an experience designer it won’t be surprising but in a sense isn’t he too idealistic to say that because to an experience designer almost everything will seem too simple and too mundane. Design is quite subjective. Especially a challenge when our target audience is the kids. The age gap, the generation gap and their ‘child’ languages are such wide different, not to compare it with our lifestyle and thinking now as an adult but comparing it with our childhood memories is already very different! In the past everything that is digital is like a revolutionized product. Kids go ‘wu and ars’ about it. Now kids are so expose to such interactive media and activities, it is not easy to complete with the giants of the industry!

I agree with Fahey that it is important that we do not misinterpret the results of the test. Because what might have been a great design may be altered or destroyed after we made changes to the so called badly interpreted results. For an example when one spend a long time looking at a online user-guide page, it ‘does not’ mean that it is extremely interesting, it could just mean that the product is extremely complex to use or that user-guide is extremely hard to comprehend.

This is a bad design website, people will spend long hrs staring at it, because of there are practically 4 columns of content.

Dealing with the ‘BOSS’

“So how does a designer or a design manager convince their boss that a good design decision is in fact a good design decision if the boss has no design instincts? What if the site won’t get redesigned at all unless the boss can be convinced that the current design stinks?” Ok for this I would want to agree with him, as a freelance designer I often have to do last minutes changes even at 2am in the morning just because the ‘boss’ thinks the design( may not be even the design, maybe just the content) does not match the one he/she has in mind. Many of times, some organizations think that ‘more’ is better, so they will squeeze (they want us to squeeze) as much info as possible in one page design (for print). When we try to convince them that it is cluttered they just simply say they don’t feel it that way. So they are assuming they are the target audience?

Forrester Persona Rooms

Summary of what is this persona rooms about: “Design personas help companies create a shared understanding of the most important attributes and goals of their most important users, enabling more focused, effective design of interfaces like Web sites and phone systems. Persona rooms recreate the living spaces of personas, providing a new, highly accessible level of insight for all stakeholders on the design team. The result is an environment that aligns everyone, from marketers and programmers to interactive and traditional agencies, behind a deeper understanding of the target customer.”

Firstly creating a persona room does not allow one to be like the person when entering the room. Understanding a persona through the place they live is does not deliver anything that could conclude how a persona uses a particular product or would want to have a particular function in that product. Many of times, a persona’s characteristics do not align with how his or her room would look like. The ability to create the correct persona room is already questionable? How about the experience of it? Does stepping into a brightly glittered and ‘blink blink’ , covered with pink and gold wall papers and life size dog picture handing on the way, with gold plated utensils makes you feel and behave like Paris Hilton? I bet not.

The IDEO Shopping Cart Legend

I have watched the IDEO video in my technopreneurship lecture, it seems almost like an idealistic production, everyone is the company seems so satisfied and passionate about their jobs. However I do not agree with Fahey that researching and all those observational studies are ‘bullshit’. Because personally through the course of this module and others I have done research of my users and targeted audience, and they have proved to be useful. Sometimes it informed us of the things we have not expected. For example the brand Abercrombie and Fitch you would have think that since this brand is already so famous that even the Microsoft word could spot the spelling mistakes once you spelled it incorrectly, it must be due to its successful marketing campaign – sex appeal. I would tell you that it would be in US but not in Singapore, where it still doesn’t have its retail shop here.

Singapore’s demand for A&F products are mainly from the online retail stores and a few stores in Orchard where people buy in bulk and sell it in their shops( although still doubtful about whether they are real, fake or defects). What make A&F really popular here are not the sexy ads, it is the word of mouth and really the ‘counterfeits’ you see in universities bazaars and pasa malam.

I have just attended a talk called the “Digital Light” the speaker Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne mention about how the experience of reading a book a very simple act could be differentiated with the kind of books we are reading, not the content or the author of the book, but the tangible material of the book, the feel of the paper whether recycled or chemically bleached white, the touch of hard cover and the smell of the paper, a juxtaposition of the smell of chemicals, pulp and ink. I always thought that I am the only few minorities who are affected by such things, but as these words came from a professor, it must mean something right?

User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 5: Non-Scientific User Research isn’t a Bad Thing

I like how Fahey uses the analogy with an art (ART vs Web design). A web designer still need to do both qualitative and quantitative research to really teased out the important elements that make the user satisfied and achieve the intended aim. The user interacts directly with the webpage. There is no third party to help navigate the user around a webpage. The only helping might be the site-map, but if the user has to rely on that does it means that the webpage design has failed?

However, on the other hand, the art piece required a curator, many of times what is conveyed out of an art work is not really directly from an artist, (especially since most of them are dead) there is a curator who helps to interpret the art work, whether one like it or not, curator drove the interest to the art piece not the art piece itself. Just look at the Impressionist’s painting, why do people know about it? Because a curator thought that they are rubbish and had insulted the Art.