4/10
  • attendance
  • “Everyone's invited to B:Social's end of semester community showcase. Please come and find out what B: Social has been up to this semester. There will be food! And cake! Friday April 26 Community Partner Showcase at 2:30 @ Bronstein”
  • Pinterest sharing

presentations  


project 4 check-in


app design 101

  • take a moment to explore your favorite app. just use it, paying particular attention to what makes it easy or fun to use, or perhaps what you wish was different about the app.  
  • What is easy or fun to use about it?  
  • What problems or sticking points do you encounter?
  • making an app in the real world is usually the task of a team, and it encompasses many skill-sets and cycles. For example:
  • phase 1: strategy
  • phase 2: design
  • phase 3: development 
  • phase 4: marketing
  • phase 5: maintenance

  • For the purpose of this class and project, we are most concerned with phases 1 and 2, which are about designing user experience. What is user experience?

  • Let’s look at what it takes to do user experience work. You have to look at your service from the point of view of someone who knows a lot less than you and see where they’re coming from. You have to imagine the reasons why they want what they want. Seeing that causation, seeing the connection between what someone’s doing now and all the causation that went before it, that’s empathy. 

  • We need to exercise a disciplined empathy. It’s an empathy that includes qualitative thinking, like interviews and watching people use stuff to see where the snags are, and quantitative thinking, like A/B testing and heat maps. The tech industry is not very good at empathy. 

Achieving beautiful design has an impact on the usability of an app:

  • “The aesthetic-usability effect describes a phenomenon in which people perceive more-aesthetic designs as easier to use than less-aesthetic designs—whether they are or not. … Aesthetic designs also foster positive relationships with people, making them more tolerant of problems with a design” (Lidwell, Holden, and Butler 20)

In the strategy phase

  • determine the purpose of the app
  • what does your app do and why?
  • “To start, identify the single task that’s most important to your app (Clark 48).
  • Imagine a use case.
  • A use case is an imagined set of possible interactions between your design and the users in a particular environment and related to a particular goal.
  • research competitors and learn from existing designs
  • don’t design another mousetrap.
  • don’t design a pocketknife.
  • audience research and usage context
  • accessible design is better design -- consider a diverse population of users right from the beginning
  • disability, age, low vision, limited motor skills, non-English speakers, slow data plan, etc.