Journal Summary: What I've Learned Through the Course

In this quarter we have discussed a lot of concepts about the usability, which was not only focus on online users, but also the physical things. The previous journal entries are some observations on web sites and everyday things and those assignments are really useful because we actually did some researches and observations. Learning by doing and observing is the main purpose of this class.

It’s hard to forget the second class that we played tones of games and discussed about the trends of game designs, the methodologies of interaction designs and so on. All in all, the design of human interactions is really important in nowadays’ game designs. If the designers failed to insight the target market’s needs, it is hard to be a successful game. That includes the art design, the convention of interaction design and the innovation of game devices. The interesting trend is the interaction between players, which is the game community or some other multi-player games. This trend has become the unavoidable element in game design.

Also, we can see some other designs in the physical world include a lot of interaction between the devices and human or the designers and end-users. In the classes, we learned a lot about the design of everyday devices as well. I took a close look at the Seattle parking meter, Do-It-Yourself furniture and the luggage. These everyday things or any other devices that we might use very often all share a similar design process: problem defining, research, brainstorming solutions, mock-up alternatives solutions, test, refine, prototype, re-evaluations and production. Without these process or ignore some of them might result in failure of the product. The best research is to observe the interaction between users and the existing devices so that designers could insight the problem and make improvement, which is a way to have a better solution.

As for the web site design, we also talked a lot about it in classes. Except for the discussion in classes, I and Sharlen did a lot researches about the web site design for the final project. We observed the current cake web sites to see their merits and flaws as a reference to design a better web site with deliberately designed functionality, usability, and consumer insight. We also read some books about the online business designs, usability principles and online consumer psychology. The final flash file is what we’ve came out with all the researches. We focused on the basic web design principles and tended to make the web site clear and user friendly. However, we might ignore the graphic design and the art design, which are also very important in web design. That is crucial because the customers might feel not really delightful while shopping with the web site. We changed a little bit in the final deliverable and I hope the web site has become more effective to reach our goal of boosting the business.

All in all, the classes were really focused on the course objectives and I think I’ve learned a lot of principles about the interaction design. No matter it’s useful in my future career or not, I think the class opens up another way of thinking in my mind. The skill of observation, the way of thinking and so on are some useful techniques to apply to any kind of works. Although, I might not be a designer in the future, I’ll be more interested in observing every man-made thing and examine them carefully to ponder over why the device is designed like this, the good and the bad things about the design or if I were the designer, what would I do about the design. All of the above statements are what I’ve learned in the class and I feel content about the whole course design.