Blog Reflection 9: Visual Storytelling– (yzha7703)

Storyboard:

encounter first love

Angel has been living abroad alone since she gratuated form  University of Sydney. She now has a chance to come back to her hometwon.In the late afternoon,she comes to visit her high school and encounter her first love on the playground.

• How did thinking in terms of shots and scenes influence your approach to communicating your design concept?

From my point of view, I think shots and scenes can well express a person’s emotion with different device. For example, a wide-shot of the playground can give audience a whole background as well as strike a chord.

• What motivated your choice of storyline structure ? Can you think of an exemplar from a film that uses the same structure?

Well, these days I have seem a few films of youth image which makes me remember my high school classmates. I think whoever must have deep feeling of his or her first love especially it happened in one’s high school. Maybe when a person comes across his lover for the first time, he usually cannot get married at last. Anyway, it’s a pity in one’s life.“First Love” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNl-zmIHtbs

• What choice did you make about audience and style? Were they related?

I chose the same-age audience of me because we youth now start to like recalling the past-days. The style is fresh, warm and sweet, which can bring audience comfortable feelings.  People, at the age of 25–30,are likely to enjoy this kind of memory, romance and surprise. So i think the style fits the certain audience.

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Blog Reflection – User evaluation (yzha7703)

What kinds of information and insights did it give you about the usability of the prototype?

 As a user:

I focused on website 1-Sydney Opera house. I was asked to buy tickets to “The magic flute” during December to January 2016. Generally speaking, I found this website was very easy to use. Firstly, the search engine seated on the top of this website is convenient for users to find. Secondly, the content in this website is concise and people could learn to use this website very quickly. Thirdly, multimedia including videos, images are well inserted in this website, which enriches the relevant information. Fourthly, in an offer page, it sets up social icons that could be easier shared in Face book and Twitter.

As an evaluator

By observing people’s expression and behaviors, it is easier to acquire people’s feelings. For example, one of students in our group did the website 3-Sydeny library. I noticed that she was always rubbing her head and keeping so close to the screen, because of the confusion to the topic of Google scholar. At the same time, she even took off her sweater, which showed that it was difficult for her to use Sydney library website.

 What aspects of the technique worked well or were frustrating?

Think aloud

First of all, as a user, I think aloud is very helpful. Different from other modes, I can quickly organize my thoughts, which are relative clear through think aloud. On the other side, as an evaluator, think aloud also makes a great contribution to user evaluation. Because it literally explained users’ experience, it will be helpful to acquire people’s behaviors. Furthermore, by analyzing verbal protocol, we can directly know what are their feelings towards these websites. However, some users show unnatural under this condition. They feel nervous and don’t know what to talk about. Sometimes, they even deliberately hide some expression and behaviors. At the same time, it puts a higher requirement to the recorder. They need to avoid bias.

Recording

I think recording is a great way using in user evaluation research. Firstly, it will be helpful to add some missing information. Secondly it could avoid bias. Evaluators could watch many times to get a great understanding of what users’ feelings. It could be regarded as evidences to keep.

Affordances-Blog Reflection

Choose one of the objects you selected and describe how your initial understanding of its affordances changed over the course of the exercise?

Here I want to talk about toothbrush. Initially we use toothbrush to clean our teeth. Usually people will throw it away after three month and change a new one. Actually old toothbrush could be used in many ways. For example, it can be used as a tool to clean our appliances, like toasters, microwaves, coffee machines. Toothbrush could clean off crumbs stains that fall in those hard to reach spaces. Moreover, some students in our class said that toothbrush can be used as a lash curler to brush our eyebrows. It is very worthy to have a try. Another thing I found very interesting is that some artists reuse toothbrushes to create some different, like toothbrush Bracelet, which is very beautiful and full of creativity.

Source : Pinterest

Given that affordances is a relational property between a person and an object, how did the manipulation of the object and the person’s abilities inform your understanding of the concept? Did it give you inspiration or insight for how to work with affordances as a designer? Discuss this through the specific objects you explored in the exercise.

Firstly I think affordances mean that “how to make users find its function?”. The most direct form is to give users a visual signal, telling them there are things here. This form can be straightforward or implicational. If there is no signal, users can also get the idea from studying, passively finding. For example, the size and the shape of knobs indicate that users need to hold and rotate it. Coffee cup handle tells users that they need to bend their fingers to hold the cup. As a designer, how to design a better production is a big question. The most important thing is to consider what users are thinking when they first see your product and how will they do to use them. Take the valet chair for example. Sometimes, people will unconsciously put our coat on the back of a chair. The original design intention of a chair is to provide the function of “sit” and the back of the chair is to make people comfortable. Hanging our clothes is not the expected function, but it led people to reconsider the affordance of a chair. Additionally, the behaviors of people will still influence our creation. A website, for example, the search engine usually put the front of a page, which will be easier for users to find.

Source: http://www.icollector.com

Research Report Summary

Overview

The community I focus on is Compassion for Migrant Children (CMC) , which is a nonprofit organization founded in early 2006 to help China’s urban migrant children, primarily through offering social and educational programs. According to China Labour Bulletin (2013), there are about 274 million rural migrant workers in China, accounting for one third of the entire working population. Most of their children grow up or born in the city. Because of the household registration (Hukou户口) system, these children have no chance to receive formal school education in cities. So the goal of this community is to give every migrant child a future and a hope through collaborating with organization and individuals.

Questions

About the Proposal

In order to engage more people in this community as well as get more attention from the public, I want to design a game app. The reason could be concluded as two points: firstly compared to other ways of dissemination, like setting up some relevant websites, a game app is more likely to draw public attention. Secondly through this game app, people can have a deep understanding of how difficulty does CMC work and then would like to donate much money to this community.

How did the entertainment function works? / Telling me more about how the game run?

This game app could be regarded as a type of investment. At first the money could be set up as $100,000. Imaging you are the manager of CMC and how would you like to spend the money? For example, you can spend one fifth of the money on advertising and one fifth on improving facilities or holding social activities. Different people may have different ways to operate CMC. The winner of this game app depends on the final achievement (popularity degree) – how many people know CMC and how many people want to participate in CMC in the game. Some students in our class give me a suggestion that this app can connect with Weixin, Weibo(Chinese twitter). Users could compare their results with other competitors, which will be helpful for dissemination.

Have you thought of increase the awareness of this issue world widely? May be allowing people to purchase something on the game for funding raising.

At first, all the money in the game is virtual, in order to attract more people’s attention. If more and more people like to play this game, it could have some improvement. People can use the real money to purchase some goods in the game and the money could be used to help these migrant children. Also, this app would make a combination with Facebook, which may arouse huge people’s attention.

Have you thought that the real rich people usually do not have much time to play games?

Yes, but if there are a lot of people involved in this game app, I believe many companies would like to invest in this game. Also I think that a popular app not just means this app is very interesting to play but also means a lot of our friends engaged in this app. We want to compete with them, being the first in the ranking list. Therefore, if a lot people (their friends) involved in this game app, they would like to have a try.

Blog Reflection 01-yzha7703

1.How did engaging with a real person, testing with a real person, change the direction your prototype took?

Firstly different people have different thoughts. We cannot let other people’s mind follow our mind. By engaging with a real person, we could get some useful feedbacks, which are also conducive to our prototype.

2.What was it like showing unfinished work to another person?

I think this is fine. Firstly they could see what it looks like in general. Secondly, if they want to add something, it is easy to change.

3.as a User, how did you interact with your partner’s level of lowly-resolved prototype; how did the level of resolution impact your experience as a user?

Maybe it could be a little hard to communicate with each other. But I like to talk to different people to share my ideas.

4.Design thinking is an iterative, self-directed process. Based on what you learned, what would you go back and do next? What would you do over again?

First I think that iteration doesn’t mean nothing. Different time thinking could create different ideas. What I do first is to think are there something that I have not completely considered? If possible, I will try another side to think about these things.

5. what principle, what tool would you infuse into the work tomorrow?

Firstly, I think patience plays an important role in design thinking. As the teacher said, design thinking is an iterative, self-directed process. Therefore, we should be patient about everything. Secondly, we need to think more. Keep curious is also very significant.