IA and Prototyping Links

All,

Here are a few of the resources that I mentioned in today’s class …

Boxes and Arrows, a journal “devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design”:
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/

“Pencils Before Pixels: A primer in hand-generated sketching” - a great article from the current issues of Interactions:
http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1081
(You’ll need to view after logging in to the IUB VPN or using your Interactions subscription id)

Another great resource is the book The Elements of User Experience, by Jesse James Garrett. It’s a little old and web-centric, but it’s great for the basics of IA:
http://tinyurl.com/38dzu7

I’d be interested to learn of other resources that you might have. Please contribute …

Regards,

Bob

mix tapes vs. digital playlists (mediation, meaningful objects and sign values)

Last week, I conducted some user studies to learn about music libraries. One of the participants commented on how cool mix tapes were yet how rarely he creates playlists in iTunes.

I started to wonder about the differences between old and new music media formats. In particular, I was interested in the differences between mix tapes (cassette tapes created by the user from other cassettes or CDs) and digital music playlists (lists of current or saved songs in digital music players like iTunes or Windows media player). I found various theoretical concepts helpful in thinking more precisely about these differences and how we might improve the design of digital music technologies.

A speculation on personas & scenarios

In the wake of our discussion on Representation and Speculation approaches in HCI, I thought I would write a short post to pose a question. Granted that these categories aren’t exclusive, where do techniques such as personas and scenarios lie on this continuum? Personas are a common technique used in user-centered design and indeed do “speculate” on how certain groups or members of particular demographics go about their daily lives (or work contexts). Ultimately, the aim of personas is to help designers empathize with their target group and create a design that appropriately fits in their lives. While personas have a speculative quality, they are staunchly grounded in representation. User research (or sometimes just market research) techniques are used to synthesize accounts of human experience into one (or a small set) of primary and secondary “users” that objectively represent wide–and oftentimes diverse–populations of people. That’s not to say this approach is bad, rather this example simply illustrates it’s rationalist underpinnings.

So where do scenarios lie? The puzzle becomes more complicated for me. Similar to personas, scenario task descriptions emerged early in the development of user-centered design. Essentially, a scenario describes human activities or tasks in a story that creates a space for exploration of contexts, needs, and requirements. Scenarios are intended to capture personalized user perspectives relating to their activities, potentially leading to the development of new requirements.

During task scenario sessions, users reflect on hypothetical circumstances to generate the best assumption of how they might react in the given situation. These reflective descriptions are then synthesized into objectively reproducible design constraints. In contrast, approaches such as experience prototyping directly engage users in simulations, stimulating the physical and sensorial (as well as intellectual) nature of interacting with an artifact, system, or environment. Via simulation, experience prototyping engages participants directly in their own meaning making processes and designers aim to interpret these rich understandings (based on their own designerly ways of knowing) and incorporate them within specific design situations. It’s debatable exactly where experience prototyping lies on the continuum (I vote mostly speculation), however, in light of this example, scenarios fall strongly within representation. …but do they always?

Along with the growing movement toward human-centered design, new techniques and perspectives are being proposed to take into account the broader effects and unintended consequences design may produce on the world’s environments and inhabitants. Specifically, value-scenarios have been proposed as a method to support critical, systemic thinking throughout the design process about the ramifications of  introducing new technological designs into the world. In this case, value-scenarios represent a speculative extension of an approach rooted in representation (i.e. scenario-based design). I think this example is interesting in that it illustrates the boundaries between categories we construct can be quite fluid and mutually inform each other. That’s not to say these categories aren’t good or useful, but rather critical examination of particular practices could lead to future productive synergies.