Design Manifesto

For WPI CS3041: Human-Computer Interaction Fall 2018

This article is the final design manifesto for WPI CS3041 Human-Computer Interaction course in Fall 2018. In this course, people worked on a total of six different design sprints and gained deeper understandings of the relationships between humans and computers and gathered a series of educational experience about how to start an actual design process from scratch. The topics we explored during the course include:
* arguing which are good designs and which are bad designs on WPI’s website
* redesigning an existing site to make it more suitable and user-friendlier for a specific group of users
* visualizing a set of data in two different ways (to be clear and to be persuasive) to provide users an insight of it
* creating a chatbot to tackle a tense topic
* developing a web app that aims to improve users’ emotional well-being
* building a VR project that gives users a chance to explore in another world.
For each of six design sprints, people working as a team need to learn new concepts and techniques, come up with initial ideation and prototype, and finally develop a complete functional project within 7–10 days, which encourages us to keep learning and practicing and the same time.

Although each part of the whole design process seems to be of equal importance and will have significant positive or negative impacts on the final product, from my perspective, the essential part of the design process is brainstorm.

During the brainstorm, team members firstly wrote down several different ideas that met the project’s requirement individually and then put everyone’s thoughts all together to chose the most suitable one. Here, I used the term ‘ the most suitable’ instead of ‘ the best’ since one of the core experience I gained from this course was that in many cases, the best idea did not lead to the most satisfactory final product; even worse, it might ruin your whole design process if it is time-consuming or too idealistic. So, when I was thinking about how we wanted to accomplish the design goal, I tended to estimate time consumption and team members’ actual technical abilities even before starting to come up with any ideas. Under this circumstance, even if sometimes our projects seemed to be simplified at first glance, they were all running perfectly well and meeting all of my design purposes.

Here is one of my project as an example. What do you meme developed by Sam, Grim, Amanda, and I, was a web app that would react based on users’ emotion and was to help improve users’ emotional well-being. All this web app could do was to detect the user’s current emotion and to tell whether the user likes our the meme or not. Though this web app had nothing fascinating with it, it ensured the correctness and speed of response and could decide whether the user liked the meme or not every time.

Differences across different modalities are not only about different technologies and platform, but the core part is that we have to adopt distinct strategies as well. For example, when working on Design for Others and Design for Wellbeing, we cared about users’ feedback more than anything else, yet when it came to Design for Another World and Design for Understanding, I would instead putting my most efforts on exploring different problem-solving methods and polishing details.

When my team and I were creating our chatbot, our main task was to make our chatbot’s speaking style close to a real human being while trying to get a true view of a sensitive topic by the person being interviewed. In this case, knowing how real persons would interact with our chatbot, and based on their feedback to improve, including but not limited to changing the style of the robot to talk and the way to provide information, are the key to success. After all, this chatbot was designed to communicate with people. Only when people felt good about this chatbot would they have the desire to continue using it.

However, in Design for Another World, team members and I spent most time arguing about what our VR scene should look like, what elements should be included, and how we could make it look exactly like what we saw in the real world. So in this design, I usually only asked the testers how the experience of our design and the feelings of the project were in the user testing phrase but did not ask them how they wanted us to improve it. I thought that since this topic was all about VR, the main work was to make our scene as close as possible to the real world scene we could see every day, which was mainly a technical issue.

Throughout this seven-week lecture, working on six design sprints with different groups of people each time, the condition that expectations fail to meet reality is happening all the time. The primary causes of this situation were when we ran out of given time, or we did not communicate with others enough.

Time management was the most critical part. Due to lack of experience, I found it was hard for me to finish my work on time when doing the first several projects. While as continuing, I started to have a clear time organization and know which part should take me how long to finish.

Although I didn’t realize the importance of effective communication at the beginning, after working on several projects, I found that when a group had a person who could control the overall situation and split the work effectively, the whole design process would be much efficiently and the final product would be better. For example, when we were working on my very first project Design for Others, all I did was to design as I wanted to do while not conveying my thoughts clearly to my teammates. So when we tried to put all our work together for the user testing, we realized that almost half of our work was wasted since our design was not cohesive but rather three separate ones. Therefore, our final design did not achieve the desired results in the end.

Generally speaking, the most significant challenge I’ve experienced was to use something new to design something new. One design sprint, in particular, I found difficult was Design for Understanding. None of us had prior experience working with p5 or Vega before, which means we had first to spend time learning our new tools before we get started. Besides, not knowing some techniques also forced us to take technical limitations into account when we were considering how we like to develop our projects. To be specific, we planned to use Vega to build charts for clear communication and use p5js for persuasive communication. However, after 2-day hard-working, we realized p5js was powerful but hard to learn. We did not want to waste too much time teaching ourselves how to master it, so finally, we had to finish the whole design process with Vega. Creating charts with Vega was significantly more comfortable than using p5js, but it could not make creative interpretations of data. Therefore, we had to satisfy a lot when doing the storytelling part. That was such a pain seeing our project failed to meet some requirements solely because we were lack of relevant technical abilities.

This course is the first one I have ever done in WPI that requires us to combine theory with cutting-edge technologies and work with teams to quickly make different projects. Although there was also always some unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons, the course gives me the opportunity to apply the experience of past projects to the next project immediately, so as to make better works. Constantly hands-on, failure, reflection, coming back, summing up experience and using these experiences to make the next attempt more successful, I think this is the essence of what I learned from this course.

Related posts:

A smooth handover payment plan is essential for the successful transfer of goods and services between two parties. It allows one party to pay for the goods and services received from another in an…

Four mistakes I made and what I wish I'd done instead.

How should I start.... How should I say..... When i see you...... Words just stay..... The way..... The ice is..... On the mountains...... The rain in the..... Clouds..... Making them feel..... Like…