1. Income Inequality
2. 99% v. 1%
3. Rich v. Poor
4. Great Depression
5. Recession
6. Trickle Down Economics
7. Housing Crisis
8. Vulture Capitalism
9. Two Americas
10. Republican v. Democrat

Sample Images:

Concept Composite:

Whether people are intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or sub-consciously trying to convey meaning or association through their hairstyles, chances are good that we as observers intentionally or unintentionally apply associations and meaning to people’s hairstyles as a way to entertain ourselves and make sense of the complex world that surrounds us.

For instance, we may think that we look like a stallion with that mane of blonde dreadlocks that we’ve been working on so hard over the years to get just right:

I think I look like a stallion!

But, when others look at us, all they see is a dude that has a mop on his head:

People think I have a mop on my head.

Elements of Design: Triangles

Week 2: Visual Attributes

Visual Attributes: Textures

Week 3: Content

Content: Metal

Camtasia Canvas & Timeline

Camtasia has the right tools for creating professional screen videos… without formal training.  With Camtasia, you can easily generate effective videos that help you train, teach, sell, and more.

Quickly create engaging, high-quality videos. Camtasia for Mac screen recording software is streamlined, intuitive, and makes you look like a pro. Easily capture onscreen activity, add professional polish, and communicate your message visually.

Fire up the application, webpage, or Keynote presentation that you want to appear in your screencast video, and record everything that happens on your screen. Camtasia for Mac’s flexible recording options give you the freedom to capture full screen, window, or region.

Use Camtasia to:

• Record PowerPoint presentations, websites, webcams, and software demos easily
• Edit screencasts to perfection by cutting, splicing, adding transitions, and captions
• Produce your video in many formats, or share to YouTube or Screencast.com

Sample Usability Testing Video

Task Description:

Find the class description for WEB200 in the Spring 2012 quarter.

Required to Perform:

• From the homepage, click on the Courses & Programs tab in the main menu
• From the drop-down menu choose “Class Schedule”
• From the list of programs, choose “Web/Information Technology (WEB)
• Click on the “item number” to find the class description

This usability testing project is designed to improve our understanding of how students at Seattle Central Community College (SCCC) actually use the college’s website and where they feel like the website is not meeting their intended needs.

The main usability issues that we will be addressing with this usability testing project will be the success or failure of the information architecture and navigational user pathways of the SCCC website. This project will be designed as to determine whether students at SCCC will be able to easily access basic pieces of information necessary to their educational experience at the college when using the college’s website.

Through our study, we hope to address the question(s) of whether users feel that:

• information is organized into meaningful groups of information—broken down into logical categories and subcategories
• the main navigational links and sub-navigational link labels are clear and logical
• the website hierarchy and pathways are devised as a sequence that best suits the users’ needs—user pathways fit the users mental model
• information contained within the site answer the user’s questions

Target Audience

In order to fulfill our understanding of whether the information architecture and navigational user pathways either succeed or fail, we will be focusing our attention on newly registered and/or first quarter students at SCCC to participate in this study that fit within the diversity in student population demographics.

To recruit these participants, we will be advertising for participants via the college website and flyers posted on campus.

Methods

The primary method involved in this test plan will be to conduct individual usabililty testing sessions. We will need to run at an average of eight sessions that will consist of a set of tasks to be performed by the participant using the think aloud protocol followed up by a post task interview and questionnaire.

Logistics

Each session will take place in a single-room set up as described by Rubin and Chisnel (2008) at SCCC. The participant will be asked to sit at a table with a computer while the test moderator sits off to the side. The observers and note takers will be seated behind the participant while viewing the session on another monitor.

Tasks & Task List

Each individual session will consist of a set of tasks and an interview/questionnaire for the participants to complete. A test moderater will read aloud a script of tasks to be performed by the participant.

Academic Calendars + Class Schedules

•  Find when the registration deadline is for the next quarter.
• You want to know when the tuition payment deadline is.
• What are the start and end dates for the following quarter?
• When is Spring Break 2012?

Registration, Tuition & Fees

• Find out how much tuition is for one specific class.

Class Outlines + Curriculum

•  Download the syllabus for one specific class.

Programs + Faculty Profiles

•  Find a specific program’s homepage.
• Find a specific faculty’s profile.

** Task lists (with details about starting states, successful completion conditions, etc.) **

Data Collection & Evaluation

Data will be collected through video, think aloud protocol, observation and a post task interview survey.

• The percentage of participants who finished each task successfully
• The number of cases in which the participants were not able to complete a task due to an error from which they could not recover

Observations and comments.  The evaluation monitor notes when participants have difficulty, when an unusual behavior occurs, or when a cause of error becomes obvious.
Non-critical error.  A participant makes a mistake but is able to recover during the task in the allotted time.
Critical error.  A participant makes a mistake and is unable to recover and complete the task on time.  The participant may or may not realize a mistake has been made.
The number of indications of frustration or joy from the participant
The number of subjective opinions of the usability and aesthetics of the product expressed by the participants

Reporting

At the completion of the usability evaluation, a formal analysis will be performed.  A final evaluation report and a highlight tape will be provided, which will detail the significant problems and observations detected during the usability evaluation, and recommendations to address the findings, will be delivered to the customer.

Currently, the SCCC website is viewed as outdated by students and faculty alike. Much of the structure and organization of content on the SCCC website is based around the internal organization of the college and as an institution rather than from a user’s perspective. Content is very wordy, filled with hard to understand jargon and written from too many different perspectives.

The lack of logical structure and organization of the website has resulted in the website not being able to scale well over the years. As new information has needed to be added to the site, it has been hard to find a logical place to put each chunk of information. This has resulted in much of the information that is important to the user audience being extremely hard to find as it seems to be placed in a haphazard manner around the site.

Therefore, the SCCC Public Information Office (PIO), which includes the office of the President, has decided to make a redesign of the SCCC website a top priority starting in January of 2012. Our contact and acting sponsor for this project will be the Web Manager of SCCC.

Some of SCCC’s intended goals of the redesign project include but are not limited to:

• Redesign information architecture, navigation scheme, content layout and visual asthetics
• Rewrite all content
• Implement a Content Management System (CMS)
• Integrate and display information from external data sources

The SCCC website user audience consists mainly of students, faculty and overall community. We will be focusing our attention on the target user group of male and female students that range in ages from running start to the retired and come from communities all around the world .

We can also split this student group into two distinct sub-groups of:

1. Current Students: need to find important information that will have a direct impact on decision making regarding their: classes, grades, registration, schedules, financial status, etc.

2. Potential Students: are looking for information that will help in the enrollment process including information on: programs, registration, community, advising, transfers, amenities, etc.

Currently, the lack of intuitive structure, organization and hierarchy of information and poor navigational pathways ultimately results in a poor user experience. Therefore, the main usability issue that we will be addressing with this site will be the information architecture and navigational user pathways to get to basic pieces of information that a potential, newly registered or first quarter student will be looking for.

According to the responses from our initial survey of students, we have found that it will be important to focus on tasks that include finding these basic pieces of information:

• Academic Calendar & Class Schedules
• Registration, Tuition & Fees
• Class Outlines & Curriculum
• Programs & Faculty Profiles

We hope that we can make a significant positive impact in addressing this poor user experience with our usability testing and redesign recommendations.

Brown states that since products and services are at risk to be copied and exploited, it is innovation that will give one the competitive advantage. And only by design thinking will one be able to be innovative. According to Brown, we must get beneath the surface and create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs and desires rather than merely dress up a product to be attractive. He argues that within the objective to be innovative, we must now also consider process, service and entertainment and not just limit ourselves to physical products.

So who exactly is a good candidate to be a design thinker? Brown states that he believes many people outside of professional design have a natural aptitude for design thinking.  He goes on to profile a design thinker as having empathy and optimism and having the good sense to experiment and collaborate on their ideas and see things from multiple views.

As my studies in Human-Centered Design & Engineering evolve and grow, I am continuously encouraged to look at the definition of design and who exactly is a designer in a new and expanded fashion. It seems so simple that if you want to design a new system, you might have actors in the old system collaborate with you and each other to solve the design problems in the system as in the Kaiser example from Brown’s article. In this fashion, as in participatory design, many of the people who might be users will then also become designers (Redström, 2006).

Since many of us seem to be a design team of one on many projects, I would also argue that a design thinker also needs to able to satisfy the needs of our user base that may vary from the first-timer to an expert. As this may be incredibly hard to do, I wonder to myself is it always possible to accommodate everyone in the design? If I leave someone behind is the design still successful?

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Our team chose Heuristic Evaluation as our second research activity to improve our understanding of User-Centered Design for the file sharing application SugarSync. Heuristic evaluation is another discount usability engineering method that is perfect for quick, cheap, and easy evaluation of a user interface design. It involves having a small set of expert evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles (Nielsen, 2005).

Heuristic Evaluation was also a complimentary choice as a usability inspection method to our first brainstorming activity, a Wants & Needs Analysis. Now that we had a clearer picture of what our users want and need out of an ideal file sharing system, we could use this systematic inspection method to find any usability problems in the areas that were most important to the users of SugarSync.

Conducting a Heuristic Evaluation, we also felt, would allow our team to then have a clearer understanding of what design recommendations to make and why.

Procedure

To guide us through this phase of our research, we used Thompson & Kemp’s (2009) and Nielsen’s (1994) work on heuristic evaluation as our model.

We found that in order to conduct the evaluation, we needed to have a small set of expert evaluators examine the user interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles. Since Nielsen (1994) recommends to use 3 to 5 evaluators, we decided that all 5 of our team members would evaluate the user interface.

To do so, we wrote up a User Scenario and two User Tasks based on features that were rated the highest priority by our users in our Wants & Needs analysis:

User Scenario:

User is internet savvy, uses file sharing system, wants online sharing, 3GB or more sharing space and no software installation. User also likes to organize files and folders for ease of access to data. Also likes the ability to have control over what and how they want to organize files.

User Task 1:

1. Go to https://www.sugarsync.com/.
2. Sign-up for the account using the above information.

User Task 2:

1. Go to https://www.sugarsync.com/.
2. Log into the account you created in user task list 1.
3. Personalize your folder list by creating new folder(s) when you log into Sugar Sync for the first time.
4. Personalize it further by renaming folder(s).
5. Share a file and track where in Sugar Sync this file was saved so you can share it again.

All 5 of our team members then performed these tasks according to the criteria stated in the scenario. A few of our team members also took screenshots and notes on the related heuristics as they were performing these tasks^[1].

Once the tasks were completed, all of our team members then filled out a Heuristic Checklist^[2]. To create a Usability Heuristic Evaluation Checklist that would be appropriate for our evaluation, we used Thompson & Kemp (2009) and Nielson (1990) based heuristics to research, identify and define the usability principles to compile in our Usability Heuristic Evaluation.

Results

When we had all 5 individual check lists complete, we conducted a debriefing session where we compiled the checklists into our Heuristics Summary^[3]. We then separated the problem areas out by category and compiled our detailed findings and listed what each of us thought was the severity of each of the problem issues^[4]. There were several instances where all evaluators agreed upon problem areas, like the “hidden” free option. Such findings will provide a focal point for our next research activity. We also found general areas, such as language and error handling, that may not need to be considered heavily in our redesign because the overall evaluation was that these areas were “good.”

As a result, we feel that we have a better understanding of the features that users of SugarSync would appreciate and that we can incorporate into our redesign recommendation.

For Discussion

Overall, we found this exercise to be a fun and interesting learning experience. However, as with any learning experience, there are things that we would do differently the next time around, like:

• Ensure everyone is clear on which tasks should be evaluated—we had to exclude one task because not everyone evaluated it.
• It is important to be clear about whether the evaluation should be a summary of all tasks, or if an evaluation should be done for each task.

References:

• Web 2.0: Extending the Framework for Heuristic Evaluation, by Ashleigh-Jane Thompson & Elizabeth A Kemp (2009)
• Usability Inspection Methods Chapter 2: Heuristic Evaluation, by Jakob Nielsen (1994)

Appendix:

1. http://www.masters.mikesinkula.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/task-one-notes.pdf
2. http://www.masters.mikesinkula.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/task-one-checklist.pdf
3. http://www.masters.mikesinkula.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/heuristics-summary.pdf
4. http://www.masters.mikesinkula.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/heuristic-checklist-compiled.pdf

Our group chose to conduct a Wants & Needs Analysis for our first activity to improve our understanding of User-Centered design for the file sharing application SugarSync. We chose the Wants & Needs Analysis as our first activity because it is an extremely quick and relatively inexpensive brainstorming method to gather data about user needs from multiple users simultaneously (Courage & Baxter, 2005).

We decided that this methodology would be best to help us to identify user interface objectives, system requirements and feature requirements. It also seemed to be a good choice due to being a fast, easy and low-cost solution to clarify user needs, thus helping us to avoid feature-creep during the next phase of our research, Heuristic Evaluation.

Ultimately, we felt that this exercise would help us to focus on and prioritize what features should be required, what features should be removed and possibly which features could be charged for in our redesign recommendation for SugarSync.

Procedure

In order to conduct a Wants & Needs Analysis, we needed to recruit between eight and twelve participants that fit into the primary user profile of SugarSync. According to SugarSync’s website, their users tend to be lovers of technology that are able to use multiple devices on multiple platforms without any trouble. They also tend to be educated young professionals with busy lifestyles and hectic schedules that are in need of a file sharing solution to make their working lives easier as they are constantly on the move.

To conduct this study, we recruited participants via an online ad that targeted the primary user audience. Since these lovers of technology also love pizza, we offered to host a fully catered session in exchange for their participation. We also asked that these participants download and install SugarSync prior to participating on Friday, October 21st from 4:30-6:00pm in room BE3176 at Seattle Central Community College.

At the beginning of the session, participants were welcomed in and introduced to the facilitator and observers. They were then offered something to eat and drink, given a name tag and asked to read and sign a research consent form and a confidentiality agreement. Once the participants settled in and made themselves comfortable, they were asked to introduce themselves to the group and given an approximate schedule of the event.

Our facilitator of the session then kicked things off by explaining the study to the group of ten participants:

We are currently re-designing the experience for sharing files using SugarSync and we would like to understand what you want and need from and ideal file sharing system. This will help us understand and prioritize the needs of users when redesigning SugarSync. This session will have two parts. In the first part we will have you brainstorm about your ideal file sharing system. In the second part of the activity we will have you individually prioritize the items that you have brainstormed as a group.

As the session moved on, we found ourselves enjoying the activity and getting some quality insight into what these users would ideally like from a file sharing application such as SugarSync. At the end of part two of the session we collected 90+ pages of data and thanked our participants for their efforts and time.

Results

The results from the session were collected via Wants & Needs Booklets as described by Courage & Baxter (2005):

Example Page from the Wants & Needs Booklet

In these booklets, we asked our participants to list out their top ten types of information they would look for, tasks that they would like to perform and characteristics that would appeal to them.

Once we had our raw data set from our session, we were then able to sort and prioritize the data using sticky notes that we also used to create an Affinity Diagram:

Affinity Diagram from our Wants & Needs Analysis

Our data that we had recorded was then interpreted as a Wants & Needs Category Summary:

Wants & Needs Analysis Data

Based on the participants’ priorities, we will focus on these top 5 areas when doing future activities and will incorporate them into or redesign recommendation:

1. History and Backup
2. Easy setup experience
3. File management
4. Registered users sharing w/ non-registered users
5. Hardware & Software

For Discussion

As our team started to interpret and discuss the data we collected from the Wants & Needs Analysis, we found ourselves pleased with the results of the session. As a result, we feel that we have a better understanding of the features that users of SugarSync would appreciate and that we can incorporate into our redesign recommendation. We were also pleased that our participants described features of interest that we had not initially thought of as obvious to focus on (i.e., a history back-up of files). We also felt that allowing participants to describe tasks, characteristics and information gave us a good breadth and number of responses.

Overall, we found this exercise to be a fun and interesting learning experience. However, as with any learning experience, there are things that we would do differently the next time around, like:

• Have name tags for facilitator and participants rather than name placards placed on the desk
• Make sure to sign all agreement forms before session begins
• Create booklets with user identifiers pre-filled out
• Have booklets with single idea per page (we had 2 per page and had to cut them)
• Reduce our expectation that everyone will be able to fill out all 10 items
• Understand that not all participants will know what the items are on the board (interpretation)
• As stated by Minna Isomursu et al (2007), it is difficult for the participants to recollect their experience unless its captured right at that moment—we too observed that participants in our study found it hard recollect their actions while filling out the booklet
• Hand out pens and paper at the beginning (we forgot until later and had to scramble)
• Not tell participants to download a particular application, like SugarSync, beforehand—participants had a tendency to focus on SugarSync rather than the “ideal” system