Interaction Relabelling and Extreme Characters Quotes
“With a correspondingly narrow range of models for usability, interaction tends to be self-similar, mundane, and ultimately boring.”
This quote in the article stood out to me because I couldn’t decide if I agreed or not. The article argued that interaction design should not be thought of separately from aesthetic. When designers are focusing on interaction, they want to make something easy to use, and make usability the most important goal. By doing this, it says, it makes efficiency more important than creatively. This leaves us with models that are called boring in the quote. In a way I agree, sometimes prioritizing the ease of use can make a designer feel limited and feel like they can’t make something unique without giving the user a learning curve. At the same time, I think that a good designer would be able to create something innovative and unique and still design it to be easy to use and intuitive.
“The ‘hands-on’ nature of interaction relabelling enables participants to come up with novel ideas about interaction which are different from those which emerge from market research, literature studies, traditional brainstorming techniques or sketching.”
I’m honestly still really confused about what interaction relabeling is after reading this, I wish that there was another example because I don’t understand what is going on. I understand that point is to connect parts of a mechanical object to a digital that wouldn’t typically be related, but I don’t understand how it helps. Once they gathered all the information from participants on how a toy gun could work as a project manager they didn’t explain how that information can be used when designing the project manager.
“Designing for extreme characters tries to expose those emotions and character traits which remain hidden in scenarios for supposedly real-life characters because they are incorrect or embarrassing.”
As the article confessed, the extreme characters were rather racist and sexist. It was hard to focus on what they were trying to promote because of this. I understand that this was the point of the exercise, and they don’t use stereotypes with every extreme character design but it just seems backwards and not very progressive, which I thought is a big part of UX design. I really liked the concept of extreme characters that have qualities that aren’t favorable, it just makes them seem real. Having real characters would lead to more honest problems and hopefully to more meaningful solutions. This quote reinstates what I’ve learned a lot this semester; You want your characters to be real and it’s your job to do that by in-depth descriptions that go deeper that your prototypical user. Before this semester, I thought that the goal of making a persona was to make them very relatable to the average target audience you are designing for. I didn’t fully understand it, I was creating very surface level personas to include as many users as possible. Now, I think that doing this wasn’t very helpful to my past projects and from now on I’ll be creating extreme characters and see how that helps me with my future projects.
Chapter 13: Combining the Ingredients of a Story
1. “Anyone who has watched a lot of usability tests will recognize this tension between what people say and what they do.”
I picked this out from the reading because I have seen this in my own usability tests, and find it so interesting. When ever I visit my parents in Charleston, my mom will tell me she doesn’t know how to do something on her computer and ask me to teach her. She never learns when I show her how, so I started asking her how she thinks she would solve the problem. She feels more confident with me standing behind her in case she does something she can’t figure out how to undo. She almost always figures out the issue on her own, she just isn’t confident in herself to do it alone. People pensive themselves different from how they actually are and that’s why what they say versus what they think and do can be so different. Using this in a story and creating a character dictio would be a great way to create more depth in a character, and have them grow throughout the story and overcome their issues from the beginning.
“One of the reasons stories are so useful in user experience design is that they add specificity and texture to the one-dimensional views of users that we often see.”
When I first started this class I was honestly confused on how storytelling even related to UX. Since then, with the readings and projects, I’ve just started to understand how beneficial it is. I can see it especially with the users. Creating a user persona, with little pieces of information about the user, and creating the user scenarios have helped me so much with past projects. Writing a story with that user takes it to a whole level of understanding of the user. You can expand on all of the details you wrote on the persona sheet, and actually show their characteristics through their actions.
“When your story is about user experience work, you are a part of the story because you were there to collect it. You have to decide how to include your own perceptions, if at all.”
This text stood out to me because I find it to be very true. You are the one collecting the research, deciding what’s important, what to include, and all elements of the story. The whole story is tainted by your perceptions. Which is why I found the second part of the quote strange— “decide how to include your own perceptions, if at all” I think it is almost impossible not include your own perception in some way. I’m sure that the style of writing will contribute how much of the story is focused on the author, but I think you can still see the authors perceptive through any story.
1. “Everyone has a different expectation of what a prototype is.”
I found this quote very important in this article. When you work on a team with people specializing in all different types of work, there will be different expectations with everything. I have no idea what the stages of designing a dress are, or what a fashion designer's dress prototype would look like. I find that so cool, that there are so many different versions of what a prototype can look and act like. Different kinds of prototypes will offer different things, so you must know what you need to know about your artifact to create the right kind of prototype. Or even matter, make multiple mediums of prototypes to find different insights about them.
2. “Some prototypes are built primarily to answer technical questions about how a future artifact might actually be made to work. They are used to discover methods by which adequate specifications for the final artifact can be achieved—without having to define its look and feel or the role it will play for a user.”
It’s interesting to think about a prototype being made for you and your team rather than for the user and user testing. When I think about prototypes I am always thinking about how it can be used and tested to find ways to make it a better experience. While making the artifact's prototype in the past, it helped with organization and logistics, but I never thought about the purpose of making a prototype for those reasons. In the past, while testing prototypes my users focused on elements that I didn’t want them to focus on. They commented on the lack of pictures or colors, which wasn’t useful to me because I hadn’t made it to that stage of the design.
3. “It is important to recognize that the degree of visual and behavioral refinement of a prototype does not necessarily correspond to the solidity of the design, or to a particular stage in the process”
It’s really hard for me to recognize this. When I see a prototype that doesn’t look and behave like a finished high fidelity artifact I always assume it is in it’s beginning stages, because that’s what it’s been like in my prototype history. I think that testing prototypes that aren’t finished looking can lead to more telling user feedback, because they don’t see the design set in stone or in the way you want them to see it. I need to work on my quickness to judge a prototype based on how finished it looks.
Post Midterm Presentation Reflection
One of our greatest strengths is our research and statistics, it lead us to our target audience, and that shows clearly in our presentation. Our ability to follow what the research has shown us has really made me feel confident in my team. We starting zoning in on application processes and how applicants, specifically single moms, were feeling about them. After interviewing a single mom who recently applied for food stamps gave us the insights on the process, and it was much simpler than we anticipated. Instead of sticking with what we originally were going with, we changed directions based on the interview insights.
I wish that my team and I have the same energy we did when we started this project. We have come to far and learned so much, but because we have a plan now it feels like some of the steam was lost. I feel like we need to get more specific with our audience and “how might we” so we can refocus and bring back the energy we started with.
The next step in the process is prototyping, but before we start that I wonder if we can narrow our scope, to be able to design for the needs of our specific user. Once we make it more specific, it will make prototyping easier because we will have more information on who our user is how to help them. I’m still not entirely sure on how we will test our idea, because it has a lot of pieces. It will take a lot of sorting out with my team on how we will prototype if we need to test on both single moms and their children, and not in person because of the pandemic.
