Week 10: Physical Design - Getting Concrete

Design is about making choices and decisions
Physical interface of interactive product should not conflict with the user's cognitive process involved in achieving the task = DO NOT make user confuse and remember a long list. Instead, there should be a list of options for users to choose from.

Designing for different culture - Guidelines to help with International Design

• Be careful about using images that depict hand gestures or people ('thumbs-up', 'moutza', 'A-Ok', the 'Corna')
• Use generic icon (Folder, Lock and Floppy Disc for Save)
• Choose colour that are not associated with national flags or political movements.
• Ensure that the product supports different calendars, date formats and time formats.
• Ensure that the product supports different number formats, currencies, weights and measurement systems.
• Ensure that the product supports international paper sizes, envelope sizes and address format.
• Avoid integrating text in graphics as they cannot be translated easily.
• Allow for text expansion when translated from English.

Example: Coca-Cola VS Pepsi
Company can decide whether - produce 1 site that appeals across all cultures OR tailor to each country's website to the local culture?

Using scenarios in Design

• Scenarios can be used to explicate existing work situation but are more commonly used for expressing proposed or imagined situations to help in conceptual design.
• Four roles for scenarios:

1. i. A basis for the overall design
2. ii. For technical implementation
3. iii. As a mean of cooperation with design r
4. iv. As a mean of cooperation across professional boundaries - in a multidisciplinary team.

• Used for the notion of plus and minus scenarios
• Attempt to capture the most positive and the most negative consequences of a particular proposed design solution.
• Helping designers to gain

Using Prototypes in Design
Generating Storyboards from Scenarios

• A storyboard represents a sequence of actions or events that the user and the system go through to achieve a task.
• A scenario is one story about how a product may be used to achieve a task.
• How? - Break the scenario into a series of steps which focus on interaction. Then create one scene in the storyboard for each step.