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SM3511 Interface Design Week 4 Reflection

Siu Wing Yi Zaberina (54807520)

According to Hugh Beyer and Karen Holzblatt’s book Conceptual Design, it unifies design, marketing, delivery, and support in a coherent response to the customer. This kind of design has a specific flow which was designed to compromise between the user’s demand and the design itself for the cross-functional team. It consists of a few main steps like contextual inquiry, work modelling and consolidation... I feel like this process is really intricate and helpful for both users and designers. 

During today’s lecture, I know the importance of using the correct text in interface design. Suitable design texts should be used to convey the right messages. For example in Google Mail, the ‘New Message’ button is highlighted with a white background with a gigantic plus sign besides it to signify its importance. While the mail on the main screen would use ‘Bold’ to signify that the mail has not been read. Words with ‘Bold’ helps the user to easily locate its location as it is more eye-catching. The details in different interface’s design helped us to easily navigate between pages and information.

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SM3511 Interface Design Week 3 Reflection

Siu Wing Yi Zaberina (54807520)

“Heuristic evaluation is an informal method of usability analysis where a number of evaluators are presented with an interface design and asked to comment on it.” Although many people and companies refuse to conduct heuristic evaluation because of their over narrow set of judgement, lack of solution and being considered as a form of ‘discount’ usability study, we cannot disregard this method’s advantages. It is cheap, simple and effective. 3 - 5 Trained professionals are required to review and inspect the design with reference to a set of heuristic (e.g. Nielson’s Heuristics) independently and summarize the problem afterwards. This process can help to identify a variety of different flaws in the design as each individual have their own particular mindset during this process. 

I am still surprised that not many companies apply the heuristic evaluation in their designs with their unique advantages like being applicable in early stages of development and not requiring advance learning. In the future, I may try to imply the principle of heuristic evaluation method for other design related projects.

For the other part of the lesson, I think that internalization is a important part in interface design. Especially when the apple iOS update is here, I would choose not to update as many functions changed their location. As I have internalized the places of the functions, it would be hard for me to pick it up again.

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SM3511 Interface Design Week 2 Reflection

Siu Wing Yi Zaberina (54807520)

“Affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used.” I found it interesting that the affordances in objects are implanted and hidden in our minds even though we access them in everyday life. For example, postboxes in Hong Kong have a slit for us to insert our mails. This slit indicates that we have to put things inside, but it also limits the size of the mail. In this process there are no label or instructions required. This may be simple, yet effective for the users to understand what they are suppose to do. I found the tiny details that utilized the principle of designs inside every products implanted by the designer very fascinating.