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Presentation Notes and more readings

First, the (very brief) notes on the final presentations:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wpGipaGykfRU2QKx3wcb4gGFEP9APwE5-x15mabM0ms/edit?usp=sharing

I didn't upload the final readings notes. Here are my impressions:

Responsive Web Design Articles

Not much to say here. Really, this seems like software engineering practices as usual. For layouts, I'm somewhat surprised that this was an issue at all if it's just a question of aspect ratio and resolution. Input devices are, of course, another matter, and one that doesn't seem to be "solved" by these articles.

Funnily enough, I needed to scroll back and forth a lot on johnpolacek.github.io to make sure I didn't miss things. I don't think that's a good quality for an infographic site...

Visual Hierarchy

Like many things in UX, this is one of those subjects that isn't thought about because it seems so obvious to everyone. But then people don't think about it, put information down, and suddenly it looks like blob. Or, it looks like something is in a different scope from other info when it shouldn't be. I like the parts of these articles that recommend methods of classifying and fixing visual hierarchies.

The Responsive Grid

Grids within grids is what makes the most sense to me as someone who has worked with other design software. Often I will plan a design at a certain scale, and when I add a later level of detail then my units of measurement are too granular. But subdivision of the units solves that quite handily. Good to see this in action on the Medium article.

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A style guide for my FK Productions Proposal

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UX Reading Marathon

Final Thoughts on "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug

There's only so much I can do to summarize this book, so here are some highlights for me:

- This was made before CSS was adopted by everyone. The fact that this is true while I found the advice helpful means the advice does seem timeless to me.

- It's very honest and practical. There's a design and an intention, and there's what actually happens. Small changes can make significant differences and big changes can be completely ignored. I had hoped to see more on layout in other readings.

- Testing as a solution to designers. Unfortunate that we aren't going to do that.

- The book takes all of its own advice. No needless words, clear purpose, organization, and so on.

- Conventions and good will are important. I think this is relevant to FK Productions. You want a unique and well designed experience, but there needs to be some sort of minimal requirements. If expectations aren't met, it will reduce good will. And the story about trying to find news on an airline website and failing applies to the entire FK Productions site.

Complete Beginner’s Guide to Interaction Design -UXBooth

The first sections of this article seem like notes for a quiz, instead of a directed reading. It's a list of what it calls different methodologies, but they seem to be fairly distinct in purpose. After seeing "goal-driven design" I was prepared to see some other-driven design. But the next was Usability [Heuristics], then "The Five Dimensions" (way of organizing online experiences into 5 categories), and Cognitive Psychology (an entirely distinct field!)

But it does seem to be a good hub for other resources-- important figures, books, tools etc.

User Experience and Experience Design -Interaction Design Foundation

I like this article a lot because it offers a fresh and clear perspective on user experience. This is a subject which is feels self-evident to everyone, but rarely thought about, and in this writing the 'why' of 'why is experience design important' suddenly doesn't feel like a tautology.

I have only one point of disagreement - the very last sentence of the article states that "We should definitely shift attention (and resources) from the development of new technologies to the conscious design of resulting experiences, from technology-driven innovations to human-driven innovations." The example given is a 3D television, but this seems like constructing a nonexistent zero-sum game, a false dichotomy. There are people who can develop new technology but not experiences and vice-versa. Technology-driven innovation is not competition to human-driven; technological advances will expand the range of possible experiences. Instead, the article should say that new technology as a product made without an experience in mind is useless.

UX, UI, IA? 7 Confusing Digital Design Terms Defined -Upwork

This material is more or less covered in lecture. These fields have a lot of overlap and I assume that someone hired for one will have to at times work in the domain of a few others.

Customer Journey Map -Service Design Tools

This is a set of three examples of User Journeys. It's good to have the visual references, and to see how dissimilar they all are. As long as the purpose of the visualization is clear, it's fine.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map -UXMastery

This is a text summary of the video we watched during lectures. Many steps. Very thorough. I do wonder what each step looked like in the Customer Journey Map examples, if they were used at all.

The Value of Customer Journey Maps: A UX Designer’s Personal Journey -UXMatters

My God, there are a lot of UX sites. Having a story / implementation of people using User Journeys is important. Focusing on the more painful points of contact between the company and the person seems to be a good idea. (I actually thought that identifying these was the main concern, but it seems that might not be the whole story) But after this reading I wish that I could interview actual customers of FK. There's only so much I can do with the personas.

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Progress on FK Productions Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WSQamodPh8xDbzh9G_1zMEMPsFgCuMFYnCSfBY3Aw0c/edit?usp=sharing

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More User Personas

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Project 2: Initial Discussion Questions for FK Productions

What is the meaning behind the name FK Productions? Is this something that you can relate to your customers? Is there a way to make your company's purpose more evident in the name?

What kind of clients have you had? What were their primary purposes (advertising, architecture, fine arts, etc)? Which kind of companies did you expect to work with? Has your work matched those expectations?

Do you think there are any exemplars in your portfolio that best represent your company or your company's purpose? If so, what are they?

How do you want to represent your own work? How much of your work is done in house, and how much is delegated to other companies? Is your work ever done in collaboration with other companies, and if so, how often?

Who would you describe as your biggest competitors?  Why them?

Of the clients you've had, which gave the best experience?

Is there any kind of work that you would explicitly not want to do? Are there any projects you have already done that you would not want to do again?

How do people usually find out about your company?

Who is your intended audience for your website: people who do not know about your company but need a problem solved, or people who are deciding whether to hire your company?

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Project 2: Initial Research

It is far too difficult to pin down the market for FK Productions. I suppose that the first IA type of initiative should be making their role and market clear.

From their Facebook about section: "We are a group of artists, engineers, dreamers & designers who specialize in creating unique and unusual spaces that tell stories and focus on the human experience. Lighting, sound, large scale art, event production, anything that brings people together is what drives us. We can make anything out of any material no matter what size."

Their main goal is "Experiential event production" Their products are listed as "anything."

Given their description and photographs on their website, it seems that FK Productions wishes to plan, design, and fabricate public spaces in novel and artistic ways. "Experiential events" seems to be more on the scale of mini-golf and outdoor seated areas rather than exhibitions. I cannot determine if there is a single company that can be a direct competitor in this broad sense, because there are specific companies that handle construction of, say, mini-golf, and other projects could be handled by individual artists, or collaborations of designers and contractors. I think it's fair to say that means everything in these categories can be called a "competitor," even if they lack the trait of being encapsulated in one company.

The Center for Architecture and Design, philadelphiacfa.org, does have one listed project: "Fear no Kitchen Swell." It's a series of suspended ice sculptures that contain "seed bombs" that visitors can take to plant elsewhere. Three members of the team are from FK Productions. This article has one picture of three developers, a close up of an ice block, and a development / proposal rendering of the installation.

Other information on this company is scarce. There are close to no search results for projects that have been completed by FK Productions. Nothing demonstrates what their unique and unusual spaces are. The two resources they use to represent themselves, their Facebook page and company website, neither show nor tell what they do, including the sculpture described earlier.

But other searches, and websites where FK Productions does not choose how they are represented, are not illuminating either.

Google lists FK productions as an advertising agency, yet phillyadclub.com does not have them listed anywhere, among hundreds of agencies. I must assume that they do not want to be listed as an advertising agency, because if they did then they have failed on every conceivable level.

Meanwhile, they ARE listed on BuildZoom.com among other contractors. On this website, their only listed service is "Electrical," with a single listed permit for altering an existing structure. The three recommended similar companies are Easy Glide Home Improvements, Generation 3 Electric, and SVD Construction, which feature reviews and more detailed contact information.

I think this encapsulates what the possible competition might be. Since the stated goal is so interdisciplinary, they have to deal with competition dedicated to each discipline. This alone is daunting but they don’t seem to represent their work or purpose in an accessible way either.

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Reading: IA explained and Facebook AI

Facebook AI

There were a few notable parts of the article that caught my eye. One was the frequent mention of oversight needed for automated algorithms. It seems like Zuckerberg and the company wanted to reduce this as much as possible. Intuitively I see the need for oversight, but when Zuckerberg mentions some of the ideas for content management, such as tracking whether someone has spent time reading articles they are sharing, their goals seem much more plausible.

This is really tangential to our subject but I was pretty delighted at the mention of neural nets working off of phone apps. I don't think it's explicitly stated but the implication is that it runs off the hardware, as opposed to a server, which is pretty shocking. I was unaware that could be done in real time on a phone.

IA / UX Guides

The simple IA guide is instantly bookmarked. It's great to have such a concise but thorough resource for the rest of the semester, with concrete examples. I'm sure I will be consulting it quite a lot.

I'm not so solid on the infographic blog. If I could boil it down, IA is the research and organization while UX is the presentation and implementation. What seems funny to me is the chart of associations seems like odd value judgments on the type of work both roles do.

The Interaction-Design reading is very brief and the content is more or less covered by the first reading. I found it interesting that they made recommendations for the expected backgrounds of IA workers.

After these readings I'm getting the feeling that we won't be dipping much into UX in comparison to IA, but I am hoping we'll see some of it.

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Web 2.0 and Giant Data Aggregators

Reading Response:

There was a lot of overlap in the HowStuffWorks readings so I think I will address them together.

As purely technical articles, there wasn't much here that was super new to me. It's good that I have some more explicit definitions, as opposed to the intuitions I had from doing IT work around the house. Having the router act as a filter for unneeded information was someting I didn't know before. I also wasn't clear on the specifics on the translation of low level and high level information, like DNS to IP address to binary.

The Web 2.0 Article was much more fun. And it's super optimistic, and very obvious that it was written before very few media companies became especially dominant through pushing info to consumers. It is fun to see the web as something that is constructed as a global community. And it is also fun to see the juxtaposition of companies that fail after only catering to other big companies, vs adopting informal relationships with the common users.

What seems to happen a lot now is there is a massive amount of 1.0 sites (such as personal websites) that are aggregated by web 2.0 sites, and virtually all modern websites where text is a feature have messaging or social media integration. Personally, I never use this sort of integration, so it is interesting watching it take over. It is making websites converge on this particular experience, and reinforcing the dominance of these media aggregators.

Website usage:

I rarely ever use Facebook, and I do not hold other typical social media accounts (Instagram, Twitter, etc.) so I do not have much to say about it. What I do know is it is a very convenient organization and messaging tool, and every time I view Facebook proper I do not leave feeling that I have spent my time well. I would think that someone who relies on Facebook only for their news should not be considered informed. There is a very notable fusion of politics, entertainment, and social associations that has put everyone into intellectual ghettoes. And a huge amount of the news that makes it onto feeds either draws radical conclusions for the reader or is entirely fake. The catch is, one side of the US political spectrum found a lot of their feed validated, and now we're stuck with it.

Google has been super essential for daily life. I cannot remember the last school weekday that I did not use the search engine. I think that before using Google, I just learned of websites through word of mouth, or friends at school. So my library of websites was based off of games or products I had owned, such as Legos. But one thing that needs to be emphasized about Google as a search engine is that its algorithm makes it absurdly intuitive. If you don't know the name of what you are searching for, simply describing it can usually find your result. And intellectually, it is alarming that a vast number of services are all reliant on Google, but the other competition simply doesn’t have the resources, design, or data to compete.

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Project 1 Progress

So I believe I’m committed to the hokey heavy-handed quote about being blamed for keeping your eyes open when you could have just shut them. With that as a starting point, I’m able to better map out my ideas:

Here is the new thematic mind map. A lot of this corresponds to the quotes I have in my other attempt, but here I’m just strictly looking at higher level themes. The theme I’m rolling with for this whole project is suspicion. For the branches I have ways to reduce suspicion, by either confronting or retreating, a branch for how it might be represented or manifested, and different ways suspicion might be accrued. For that I have a dystopian perspective, of somebody trying to keep you from something, or a possibility of YOU being the bad guy, and earning suspicion through doing bad things.

Right now this is the best plan I have for the layout. As you go down the page, the text becomes more representative of higher levels of suspicion. At first, you have the option to “bow out” and retreat, leading to a simple ending. In the next section, you can “apologize” only once and go back to the first section. But if you continue to the third section, there are no more choices. Whoever the text represents is onto you, and there’s no getting out.

The pages will be fairly simple. There will be text excerpts and you can move through them by clicking on certain parts to explore. Each click might be accompanied by a reaction, followed by switching to the appropriate stage of suspicion. There also needs to be some indication of how suspicious the text is:

And what way to indicate this heavy-handed theme than with an eye icon? With this plan I’ve also associated each level of suspicion with a color scheme that will become more and more severe.

This is an alternative plan but I’m not exactly sure how feasible it is. There would be some sort of looping structure with a situation and multiple choices, and each choice would add or subtract to some level of suspicion. Part of this feasibility issue is I’m not entirely certain what the limitations of the medium are. But I would also like your options to change with your level of suspicion or how you have acted previously; e.g. if you’re always compliant you will inevitably keep complying. So now there’s a real direction for the project. Hopefully the thinking is much more clear than before.

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Further Reading Reactions

Hypertext 2.0, continued:

It’s interesting to see this circle back to the memex we encountered earlier readings. It’s also interesting that one of the main benefits of the memex that the paper is arguing for is the recording of a user history -- something that shows what the user was thinking and how they navigated their ideas.

It then transitions into an explanation of hypertext as it impacts data retrieval and editing, which is obviously extremely important. Aside from granting nonlinear ways of examining material, it has really given a great means of evaluating, revisiting, and parsing material. The writers pose an odd idea afterward: words on an electronic or virtual space are not the same as “the original text” by virtue of not being a literal depiction of memory, or memory at that exact moment. I’m not entirely sure I understand the passage. Truthfully, if I’m understanding this correctly, I have a hard time seeing what difference it makes when this is compared with existing questions of linguistics. Physical text, images of words, words which are associated with meaning or concepts or physical objects and sight and sound, already have so many layers of construction and social / arbitrary interpretation, that I have a hard time wondering why the fact that those same images also have electrical representations affects their value or meaning outside of convenience. I am a programmer, but I wonder what a computer engineer - someone responsible for the hardware - would think of this. We make computers and software such that sequences of binary can be represented as characters. The distinction doesn’t matter; it’s the same data represented differently so different things can understand it.

Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story:

This seems like a nod towards the work on our current assignment. Making a nonlinear narrative is really difficult.

It’s good to have a modern look back at these ideas of hypertext. They aren’t bad, it’s just difficult to make hypertext narrative media in a way that matches those ideals. Having to account for, say, introducing characters or concepts in any number of chapters, is both a challenge and one that may be annoying to readers. But there might be a cool concept where you can follow a character and his actions through multiple chapters only to get a clear introduction or background later, or to find the background first and let that color your perceptions of the character.

But describing the amount of these stories as “a rounding error of a rounding error” is pretty sober, especially in juxtaposition with the other readings we have done.

Designwriting:

I’m wondering how I might think of this differently if I read it before the other articles instead of after.

There’s a question posed here that I think is important: “Do the emergent forms of database technology replace narration, supplement narration, or reinvent narration?”

I don’t think that it’s possible to argue that hypertext won’t let you reinvent a narrative structure. But as the previous article explained, and what should be immediately obvious, that’s terribly difficult. As this one says, so much needs to be accounted for to say that a new hypertext narrative is holistically complete. Authors may not want to take on this many levels of abstraction, in some cases due to the challenge but probably because it just isn’t the story they are interested in telling.

Hypertext does pretty easily supplement narrative. Whether it’s the equivalent of footnotes, or the allowance of data retrieval and searching (especially in ways analogous to the previously existing methods mentioned in Hypertext 2.0), hypertext can very easily improve existing narrative.

But I think we cannot argue that hypertext structures replaced narration, purely on observation. It was tested with time and interest and it simply did not happen. When it is used to subvert narrative, it’s worth studying, it sometimes catches attention, but that is hardly mainstream.

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Attempt at Mind Map

This is my attempt at making a mindmap from the readings, tying themes together. I’m unsure if this is what is supposed to be going on, and my partner dropped the class before we could work on it together.

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Interesting Websites

1.  http://nicolasparies.com/. (from CSS galleries) This website is to show you that this artist can dance around you in circles using CSS. There is one absolutely massive downside to this website: the resource load is very intense, especially with many other tabs open. The website is a portfolio, with a convenient corner menu of his previous works, but you are also able to scroll down the page to find them. Doing so reveals that scrolling acts as a frame control for an ongoing, intricate animation. The design work is consistent and incredibly detailed. Unfortunately the sheer weight of it mars much of the experience if you’re only looking for portfolio excerpts. He should provide an alternative lightweight view.

2. https://www.shadertoy.com/ This website has some of my favorite content on it but is atrocious to use. First, all of the webgl previews running simultaneously are difficult on a computer. Second, the browsing mode is weak. There are thousands of different pieces on here, why not include categories? Third, there does not seem to be much thought put into the design. The site does need to be simple and neutral to avoid conflicting with users’ uploaded work, but the faint noise in the background doesn’t seem to match anything else, and elements seem to be placed wherever.

3. http://luca.restaurant/ (from CSS galleries) This seems to be the quintessential modern restaurant site. The only things that would be considered bells and whistles are the effort put into the graphics and photography. You can naturally scroll through each section, or jump to it using the menu in the upper right corner, as expected. Nothing to get confused about here, and the site runs smoothly too.

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Reading 2 Response Part 2

Human Factors of Hypertext

(https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwzsj7cd3MslejA2WHRlSE1Dd00/view) This paper is interesting in that it is written in 1990 and argues against the replacement of text with hypertext. In some ways this doesn’t seem to make much sense now (for example, the insistence that the mouse is not supreme to keyboard shortcuts, which only a small portion of people, such as vim programmers, might agree with). But one of the core concepts here seems to mesh with what I was saying at the end of my previous post: it really is crucial to understand what innovations of hypertext are appropriate to apply and when. In the last post, I agreed that a feature-complete hypertext would be a good thing to try applying to a novel like Ulysses, but not something with a more traditional narrative structure. I suppose I should temper that with this idea, which is I should be allowed to pick and choose hypertext features that allow me to shape the structure of the data in a way that is most convenient. One book I’ve read recently is Frank Herbert’s Dune. This narrative has a linear structure in time (barring the fictional biography excerpts at the beginning of each chapter), even if it jumps locations, but this would be an appropriate book for the classic collapsible-note hypertext. There is a large dictionary of terms at the beginning of the book completely invented for this universe. What if, instead, every time the phrases “ornithopter,” “Lisan Al-Gaib,” “little maker” etc. popped up, they had an indication that you could tap them to show / hide a hovering box with their respective definitions? On an only tangentially related note, there is room for something as simple as collapsible notes to add to a narrative experience. A game I played recently, Obsidian Entertainment’s “Tyranny”, is a mostly text-based RPG that used the definition-hypertext I described a lot, indicated by the words being written in orange text. But there was a specific character, a magician and torturer with a green flame motif, who used this in a specific way: a descriptive phrase such as “he lazily swirls the scepter in his hand” will be bright green hypertext, and instead of a definition it links to a message he is silently beaming into your character’s head! How cool is that?