Interacting With Designs

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.