Why some products are nice and other sucks? Why sometimes everyone realize that a product has tons of lacks except their designers? Is because it was designed by stupids?
One of the things that I’m learning, let’s say, in the background is the significance of the details. The product creation requires lots of small decisions. Every decision is constrained by circumstances that the designer cannot change, you have to live with them. But every single decision will change the final product.
We’re living in a world with millions of high qualified engineers and designers. Not so many are stupid and they capable to do their own job well. A product creation needs one smart sprinkle and a lot of hard work. Everyone can be smart for a second, but is the care in the details what make the difference between a good product an a bad product. Is the the attention that you put in every decision and how to take it, because once you decide you open a new brunch in the “solutions space” and after that is hard to get back.
Here we’re learning several tools or ways to design to help us during the process, involving users, designers, clients… but at the end is the designer who should take the decision.
During the second project, Physical Computing, we visited Unsworn Industries. They are an Interaction Design studio based in Malmö and formed by two previous students from K3. The talk with them was quite inspiring for all of us. If I could choose how I would work in the future I would choose the way they work: The’re a small company, very creative, travelling frequently to cool places and festivals and doing great product in a wide range from interaction design to “new media” art.
In their cool portfolio I think that two works stand out from the rest. The first one is quite arty, but gorgeous.
“Telemegaphone Dale is a seven-metres tall loudspeaker sculpture on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway. Anyone can dial the Telemegaphone’s phone number and have the sound of their voice projected out across the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale.”
“In a big campaign in 2007 the department asked the public for suggestions on how to reduce car traffic in Malmö. In reply, they received over a thousand wise, clever and provocative proposals from the citizens.”
Instead of keeping these ideas in a book the council wanted to create public debate, so they contacted with Unsworn and working together they created the Parascopes. Parascopes are devices which show alternatives visions of Malmö according to citizen suggestions. This is one of these products that make me exclaim “I wish I had invented them! ” Simple and beautiful concept.
Furthermore in the visit they gave us some interesting tips. I think I’ll talk about them in another post.
This (the title of this post) is what a teacher told us when we show him a software prototype in an early stage of the design process.
If we want a good feedback of our product, what should we show to the user during an interview?
What happens if you show a software prototype to an user? A software prototype is something that gives the impression of a “finished product”. So if during an interview you give them a software inside a computer they will only say “It’s nice, It’s cool, I like it” but no any useful information.
A prototype by definition must look unfinished and several kind of mockups could be useful. This means from paper mock-ups to simple boxes.
““In summary mock-ups become useful when
they make sense to the participants in a specific
design language game, not because they mirror
“real things”, but because of the interaction and
reflection they support.”“
I was sceptical about the amount of information that those primitive sketches could provide us. But they revealed as a good tool both to communicate between the team and to test several use qualities without the time-costing process of writing a software. This doesn’t exclude the software prototypes, only postpone them until a later stage.
Another question that I wonder yesterday was: “If I want to get the user attention during participative design, a good way is impress with eye-candy technology”, so “what to do” is never written in a book.
As I said previously, Interaction Design master in K3 is based on projects, so most of the time we are on the studio working together to accomplish the design goals. During the first project, around twice a week we had workshops about a specific topic. The theme for the first project was “mobile computing” but the learning goal wasn’t only Mobile computing interaction but also, and mainly, user centred design.
To be user-centred during the design process, is not enough thinking about “What the user wants?” if you really don’t know who the user is or if you just think about the user as a stereotype. Actually most of the people involved in a product development tend to think that the user is just someone like themselves. To fight against this trend there are several of procedures that a designer can use. One of the most famous is “Personas & Scenarios” and we had a related workshop during the first days.
