S24' Week 13: 7 Days of HCI
Stories of a graduate student in Human-Computer Interaction
Apr 01— Apr 05, 2024
What did I learn this week? It takes a little bit of courage to overcome your ego, essentially removing yourself from the design process, and well, just doing the work. I’ve taken 3 courses this semester: Interaction Design Methods; Meaning & Form; HCI/d Studio Practice.
HCI/d Studio Practice
I’ve realized a couple of things this week. User Interface design isn’t easy, and I may not understand it entirely. I’ve been practicing design for about 6 years now where I’ve explored visual design to convert textual communication to visual communication, and I haven’t faced a lot of problems. However, this week I struggled with converting my idea of an ‘experience’ to an interface. And god, did I fail badly. However, hope is not lost. I’ve been learning from peers who are relatively good at UI design, and I want to continue learning how they convert ideas into visual information.
To continue learning, let’s see what our failures teach us:
- Idea — To implement the freedom of highlighting information while learning:
The idea is relatively simple, but where is the teach-back happening in this process? The freedom of highlighting information is an additional feature to have, but with this feature are we really implementing digital teach back in the process?
- Idea — To increase understanding through hover interaction: Again, a simple idea — the user can interact with transcripts to increase their understanding while a video plays. They can hover over parts of the transcript to learn more about what a particular sentence means. However, where is the teach-back?
- Idea — To use card sorting to categorize information, essentially reinforcing understanding through activity: It’s not that clear in this image, but this is a snippet of my thinking. As messed up as it looks, it has ideas behind it, but they’re not entirely clear about what they want to do. I wanted to use the designer’s activity in the user’s context. I wanted to use card sorting as a user interface, as an activity where the user will be presented with information they just learnt about and will be asked to sort that information into groups. This will encourage the users to bring information from short term memory to long term memory by applying concepts they just learnt about.
I learnt about short-term memory and long-term memory from Instructional Design, and Miller’s principle of instruction.
Interaction Design Methods
I made physical prototypes this week! For our final project, we intend to create a cross-cultural adaptation of Cinderella in a museum exhibit. I went back to my fashion design days where I used to create with paper.
The idea behind this prototype to introduce the users and interact with a device that is inspired by the weddings in Ireland, where they wrap ribbons around the couple to signify union of couple. The prototype is intended to be an educational aspect at the end of the exhibit (where we anticipate placing the Irish version of Cinderella).
I understand some of the concepts will be difficult to follow, to you as a reader but I intend to create stories of each of the projects I talk about in this blog.
The idea behind two of the prototypes is to feel like a princess and be part of the fairytale. One user will interact with the screen as shown in the image above, where they can customize the outfit of Cinderella according to their liking (where they play the role of the fairy godmother) while another user stands behind the skirt. When the user who interacts with the screen is done with customizations, they can give the command to the other prototype that is the skirt. As a finishing touch, the skirt will rotate on its own to give a magical feeling.
This prototype is also inspired by the Irish Cinderlad where Beacon (who is male Cinderella in this version, talk about gender roles!). In this part, Beacon has to fight a dragon to save the princess. The prototype is a spatial concept with a large screen in a room. The screen will have an interactive dragon, with maybe using Wii, where the user can fight the dragon to save the princess, who is projected behind the screen. While this is a gamified experience, the user always wins, for the sake of Happily Ever After.
Meaning & Form
This week I had the opportunity to speak to Don Norman, as he remotely connected with our class on zoom. I wanted to learn more about Humanity-Centered Design. In this learning experience, I picked my ideas from the article — Personalization may end humanity-centered design, and asked the question:
“In an era where personalization and individuality are increasing day by day, how might we, as designers, integrate the principles of humanity-centered design in our design process?”
The answer included forms of design application with long-term thinking but taking advantage of AI in the process. He explained how AI can leverage to improve experiences where personalization is preferred. It got me thinking how privacy would play a role in this area, to which I got a relatively simple answer: it depends on what information you feed AI.
I believe there is more to this idea, and I would like to explore it further. I think there is an overlap between personalized experiences and its application to a wider audience.
