Archive for March, 2010

Design Exercise: Educational Aquarium

Posted
March 30, 2010
Categories
cognitive-science
design
sketches

During my Cognitive Science class today, the class was given a 10-minute design exercise to explain the importance of situated cognition. We were told to design a solution that would teach children about an aquarium. Beyond the time constraint, we were free to design and highlight any aspect of aquatic life.

This is what I came up with:

Design outlining one possible way of creating a 'smart' aquarium

  • Goals
    • Highlight complex relationships, such as the food chain
    • Provide detailed information about the animals, in-place
    • Provide a connection between the animals in the fish tank, to cultural artifacts such as movies or food item
  • Summary
    • Using a touch screen, children would be able to interact with the aquatic environment. For example, when a child touches an area where a fish happens to be swimming, information related to that fish would appear on the surface of the fish tank.
    • I try to visualize complex relationships on the fish tank. An LCD appears to the right of the fish tank, in order to provide more information and/or feedback to the students.

Not bad for 10 minutes. =]

Funny Feedback

Posted
March 25, 2010
Categories
ux

A poor user experience results when an application unexpectedly crashes. A web browser is no different. Recently I noticed something funny and yet elegantly brilliant about how modern web browsers handle crashes from a user experience perspective. To mitigate the frustrating experience of losing the vast number of tabs a user may have open, browsers are employing comedy.

Take a look at some of my screen shots below. Both Chrome and Firefox use a conversational tone, which feels light hearted and attempts to put one at ease. This attention to detail is valuable. Giving users feedback is very important, especially when an application doesn’t work appropriately. Good job.

A web page failed to open in Chrome.

Flash crashed in Chrome.

Fire Fox crashed and was unable to reload all of my open tabs.

Always Observing

Posted
March 17, 2010
Categories
cognitive-science
field-study
observation

A year ago, I took a course on qualitative methods, which has helped my work tremendously. From time to time, I put on my “participant observer hat” and I take in what’s happening around me.

The following are brief notes of what I observed today:

  • Students were scheduled to take pictures for the yearbook on the 5th floor of Georgia Tech Library. Apparently, an email, with the wrong room number, was sent to students, which ended up confusing them.
  • While I was working on something, I noticed a number of students going to R1 (see the diagram below) despite the signs (see image below) highlighting the room change.
  • A person who was in room R1 essentially redirected traffic from room R1 to R2. The photographers in room R2 eventually added a hand-written sign to room R1‘s door

Without fail, all students mistakenly walked to room R1, a computer lab located on the right hand side of the diagram. They were then redirected to room R2.

Layout of where the observation took place; 5th floor of the Georgia Tech library.

The following sign appeared on all of the bookshelves, which was “visible” when a student exited either elevator. However, the placement of this sign worked against its purpose. People normally expect reference numbers on bookshelves; that expectation made the sign virtually invisible. This phenomenon is similar to Ad Blindness.

Sign on the side of a bookshelf.

After 4 hours of watching students going to the wrong room, the following sign was placed on the door of room R1 by the photographers. It’s not elegant, but it did manage to get the job done.

A sign placed outside of the wrong room.